We know Mies van der Rohe’s project the Brick Country House, 1924, only through photographs of a perspective drawing and a ground floor plan, often paired together, and a few other drawings based on them that followed. Despite appearances they don’t align and the perspective drawing is based on a substantially different plan than the one given, as I explain in Mies van der Rohe: Meditations on a Plan. There I argue both, despite their differences, are complete and compelling in their own ways, providing two different takes of what Mies might have had in mind. In Mies van der Rohe: The Brick Country House Revisited/Revised I attempted a model that matched the perspective drawing, using a revised plan I guessed at.

Here I attempt one that sticks to the original plan. And I think I will finally give my project a rest. It has perplexed me for years, as it has others, and I can’t go further. Some problems—many?—most?—are better left open, unresolved.

Dietrich Neumann, in Mies van der Rohe: An Architect in His Time, pairs two drawings Mies made for students around 1933, one a rough floor plan of his Kroller-Muller House project in Wassenaar, Netherlands, first designed 1911-12, a traditional house in transition to modern, not built, and, on its back, an abstract, simplified sketch of the floor plan, scarcely a plan at all, of the radical Brick Country House some nine years before, also not built. Mies thought of them together, and what they have in common is their open and dynamic floor plans. The simplified Brick House drawing, in fact, was altered to resemble the Kroller-Muller in axial arrangement. Neuman comments:

In 1927, [Mies] told Paul Westheim that one could easily “get rid of” the traditional, Schinkel-style façade at the Wassenaar project, “and then we would have a building just like we do it today. In other words, a building where the way of life is not determined by the arrangement of the house, but the house follows the process of dwelling.”

In both drawings there is the sense that life is an active, continuous process, and the plans encourage movement throughout without closure. In the Brick Country House the plan breaks axial symmetry and the process extends to the exterior. Life within depends on, is related to life without, and there is no definite separation of one from the other.

The thought is attractive, but how well either plan might serve us needs empirical proof over time—studies of people actually living there—and I am skeptical. Our lives cannot be so simply expressed, even in a scheme as complex as this. At times we need separation, and closure. And actual construction would have led to compromises anyway. Really, the original plan is highly abstract itself, as are Mies’s thoughts, and it might better serve as a visual manifesto, a figure of some sort that prompts larger thought about life, about our place in society, in the world, as I explore in my essay.

The drawing I place at the top, however, is not the drawing on the back of the Kroller-Muller plan but my rational reconstruction, reversed. Mies’s sketch is quick, free, and spontaneous, like a Zen brush painting, and perhaps better shows the spirit of what he wanted to express.

My model is close to the plan, though openings are somewhat off. The windows on the second floor are probably a bit too tall, but they look too short in the drawing. I didn’t add the roof overhang because I would have exaggerated it, and it might be exaggerated in the drawing as well. (Also I don’t like it—it distracts from the clean edges of the volumes).

In the plan only the lines for stairs in the main room tell us there is a second floor. From the perspective drawing I only took the two sides of the second floor we see and their basic configuration, though changed their size and placement, in keeping with the plan. Other placements and dimensions throughout reflect those in the plan. Whatever is behind those walls on the second floor is unknown—I’m on my own here.

There is some question, even, whether Mies drew the perspective, but surely he supervised the work and approved it—and repeated showing it in journals and exhibitions.

The advantage to a making a model is that I get to experience construction slowly, piece by piece, and watch the overall form gradually take shape, which encourages prolonged reflection and questioning. When it is completed I can walk around and see a building from all angles, and do so over time, allowing revision to my thoughts. What the experience of building and looking at the Brick Country House most reinforces is how much I wonder about the decisions Mies made—or rather don’t understand them—how different the house looks as I circle, how much it plays with variations of glass and brick, with stacked masses of varying size, in varying relationships. One side does not anticipate the next, and each turn leads to fresh discovery. Variety and surprise may be what most express the vitality of the spirit of life Mies wanted to capture. What I can’t do well is inspect the house from ground level, where much is blocked by the garden walls. Doing so would provide an entirely different experience, different perception, one more uncertain, more inconclusive.

What isn’t apparent in either drawing, what still surprises me, is how much this side, with all its glass, opens up to the world. Perhaps it is the dominant face, the most essential in the process of living: it lets in the most light and allows the widest view. And, on the side, partly hidden by the mass of the chimney, it is not only privileged but also protected.

From this angle you can see how much the plan varies from the perspective drawing.

Note the size and location of the smaller chimney, the different proportions and locations elsewhere. Most significantly, the small service area on the right is moved forward, close to the line of the front room, not set back approximately at some middle axis, as in the plan.

This side reinforces the horizontal character of the design, especially when viewed in context of the extended garden walls, not modeled. The sudden termination of the horizontal line from wall and house is dramatic, even startling, yet somehow necessary. Maybe.

Here I venture into the unknown. Mies gave no sense of program and I have to guess—likely two bedrooms flanking a sitting area. Really there isn’t much to do, just add a couple of walls to complete the second floor, but this side has always perplexed me, and the plan offers few guidelines. In other efforts, I made the floor more complex at the back, in keeping with the rest of the design.

But my additions felt gratuitous, so in this version I decided to keep it simple. One possibility to consider is that as complex as the house is, Mies wanted to keep it as simple as he could. He was not pursuing complexity for the sake of complexity. I opted for a long, narrow block with a few steps. Its length reinforces the garden wall at top and, crossing over the other wall, suggests an axial arrangement that determines overall layout, but only approximately and eccentrically. Nothing in the plan is fixed or settled, determined by symmetry.

I kept the left side all brick since there is full glass before the two rooms on the other side, but the room at right needs a window. In the service area, forward, the plan suggests these windows are not floor to ceiling, so I raised them.

I always doubt myself as I approach the rear

and find this side unsatisfactory. It feels too abrupt yet static. Then again it is different, surprising in a different way. But Mies, as in preliminary drawings for other projects, might have had no interest in working this side out. The two drawings he gave us were as far as we wanted to go, saying all he wanted to say.

Or there is a simple solution that still escapes me.

—the house follows the process of dwelling

A casual conclusion might be that the exterior design is merely incidental, at any rate the interior takes priority over what we see from the outside. That cannot be true, but we are given an unusual house, one that works against expectations that have been passed down for centuries, engrained in our conception of what it means to live in a house, to live, that might encourage us, at least in schema, to think differently about ourselves, about life itself. Nor does the exterior reflect the full complexity within, which remains hidden. Perhaps a larger suggestion is hinted about the value of interior life kept secret. 

There is another drawing of the floor plan, based on the original, made by Werner Blaser under Mies’s supervision much later in his life, 1965, at a different phase of his career, used for the cover of Blaser’s book, which details the placement of each brick—and adds a hearth to the large chimney but not the smaller. As Blaser states,

. . . the ground plan of the brick house is a good example of the manner in which Mies van der Rohe developed the art of the structure from the very beginning. The structure of a brick wall begins already with the smallest divisible unit: the brick.

Cited by Kent Kleinman and Leslie Van Duzer in Mies van der Rohe: The Krefeld Villas. The brick placement and rendering, however, bear no relationship to the original drawing, where the bricks are longer, more loosely sketched, departing from individual origins, from precision. And this drawing is still made without consideration for full, actual construction. As the authors point out, such a claim cannot be true, not about the project as first conceived. Rather, Blaser’s drawing served as a statement of Mies’s method at this stage of his career related to work of that time, where exactitude and proportion reigned. According to them, referencing Dan Hoffman, discussing other brick houses Mies actually built:

Mies has consequently been credited with coaxing a machined precision out of the handiwork of bricklaying to the point where the masonry units and mortar joints merged to form an overall texture of such regularity that it approached the appearance of an industrialized surface. Craft was pushed to a degree of such perfection that it disappeared.

Perfection presents another kind of mystery we won’t be able to locate or resolve, absolutely transparent, unutterably opaque, a paradox of precision. We feel life has left us, or we have ascended to a rarefied plane.

That is not where we exist when we see another perspective sketch used for the catalog of the Berlin Art Exhibition, 1924, where the rendering is quick, brief, the suggestion of a house in which to live is fleeting, yet energetic, yet always, everywhere present. . . .

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