January 27, 2005

• Crystal Night

  From artbook.com:

  Mies van der Rohe:
  Mies in Berlin

  
  
  Winner of
  The Society of Architectural Historians
  2002 Philip Johnson Award
  for Excellence

  Exhibition Catalog

  “Published to accompany
  a
  groundbreaking 2001 exhibition at
  The Museum of Modern Art, New York.”

  From Mies and the Mastodon,
  by Martin Filler, The New Republic,
  issue dated Aug. 6, 2001:

  “It would have been wiser for the new MoMA catalog… to have
  addressed the issue of his politics…. By ignoring such a central
  subject… the show gives off a mild stench of cover-up…. Only the
  German-born Rosemarie Haag Bletter (full disclosure: she is my wife)
  alludes to the verboten topic
  in her [catalog] essay on Mies’s flirtation with crystal imagery, drawing a sharp
  parallel between the architect’s extensive use of Kristallglas
  (plate glass) and the ensuing devastation of Kristallnacht, which
  erupted just three months after he left for the States.”

  Also from Filler’s essay:

  “Mies’s rigorously simplified structures, typified by grids of steel and
  glass and an absence of applied ornament, represented the Platonic ideal
  of modernism for many people.”

  For more on history, politics, and
  Mies’s disciple Philip Johnson,
  who died Tuesday evening, see

  “We Cannot Not Know History.”

  For more on aesthetics, see the
  Log24.net entry of Tuesday noon,

  Diamonds Are Forever.

  For more on a Platonic ideal of sorts,
  see the following figure in two versions:

  Version A, from Plato’s Meno and
  Diamond Theory,

  

  and Version B,

  
  

  from the date of Johnson’s death
  at his “famous crystalline box.”

  Was less more?

  • 2:29 am
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