I have long wondered what Mies van der Rohe’s Brick Country House might look like in actual three dimensions, wanting to make a model I could walk around and view from all angles, then see where that took me.

It exists only as a perspective drawing

and a ground floor plan, both made a century ago, both often presented together, both of which tell us little about the second floor, beyond what we see.

I thought if I analyzed the plan carefully enough, long enough, I might come up with an inspiration that would provide a central concept that, once applied, would reveal the structure of the rest, unseen. I discovered the opposite, that there is no central concept. Rather the design, as much of it as we are given, depends upon being active and unpredictable. Order is a point of departure. I also studied his other houses of the time to get ideas—the Concrete Country House, the Dexel House, the Eliat House, the Krefeld Villas, the Tugendhat House, still more, all in varying degrees of completion and conception—all of them similar only in how different they all are. Mies is experimenting with different sites, different programs, different ideas. The only conclusion I could make is that the closer he came to a final, built version, the more compromises he had to make. That is not a problem with this house, which was never built. Mies had complete freedom.

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