The Open Plan in the Thought and Work of Mies van der Rohe and Louis Kahn

I am finding that I really enjoy reading architectural theory; this is a dangerous thing when it comes to writing an analysis of one or another architect’s work or development of a particular idea.  I, at least, cannot assimilate years of research and philosophizing overnight.  I enjoy getting glimpses of a broad swath of history and the responses of each architect to the forces at work around them; synthesizing and articulating the insight I gain from those glimpses is difficult.  But I will try to process out loud what I have gathered in my few readings about Mies van der Rohe and Louis Kahn in relation to the concept of the open plan.

Mies, it seems, approached architecture in true modernist spirit, posing a purposeful critique of past and existing modes of building and design and advancing the development of current architectural thought through his works.  Hartoonian emphasizes the role that technology played in Mies’s thought and career.  Mies saw technology as an important force throughout architectural history, a key factor in the forms architecture has taken and continues to take.  Inevitably new technology and materials will give rise to new experiments, new forms.  Mies’s works exemplify this process of experimentation and formulation over the course of his career from more conservative explorations as in his earlier houses to more extreme examples as in the Farnsworth House and the Barcelona Pavilion.

One of Mies’s earlier houses is the neoclassical Riehl House in Berlin, built in 1907.  Compared to his later works, it feels basic, almost pedestrian.  Its most distinguishing feature is a loggia of sorts integrated with a retaining wall on the side of the house furthest (and not visible) from the street.  It seems awkward to me, unexpected and oversized.  In plan, rooms are arranged around a central space and the walls are heavy boundaries between them.  It is an exploration of the traditional role of walls and columns, clearly load bearing, unambiguous.

Riehl House, Berlin (1907), Mies van der Rohe

Plan, Riehl House

Colquhoun highlights Mies’s progression away from the traditional by providing a series of unbuilt house plans from sixteen to seventeen years later in his career.  These show an increasing fragmentation culminating in the much referenced Brick Country House design with its De Stijl-style abstraction of walls as sliding planes.  Hartoonian digs into this progression in much greater detail by examining the role of the column in relation to the increasingly fragmented wall.  He clarifies the critique that is taking place—that Mies is breaking down the traditional role of the wall, which he had explored earlier, instead examining it in light of the technology that now freed the wall from its load bearing role.  This critique is most clearly evident in the Tugendhat House in the Czech Republic (1928-30) and in the Barcelona Pavilion (1929) where he places columns adjacent to free-standing partition walls.  Whereas before the wall played a clear enclosing, load bearing role, it now has an ambiguous role—is the column bearing the load or the wall?  Which space does it enclose?  The role of the column is no less ambiguous.

Plans (unbuilt); Concrete Country House, Lessing House, Brick Country House; Mies van der Rohe

Barcelona Pavilion (1929), Mies van der Rohe

Taken to its furthest extreme, Mies’s exploration resulted in the practical elimination of the wall altogether in the Farnsworth House and his proposed 50x50 House.  He questions whether the wall is necessary at all, whether it can be usurped by the column entirely.  Hartoonian talks about how this ardent exploration led Mies to a conception that left behind culture and the concept of dwelling.  Indeed, this is proved by the anxiety experienced by Dr. Farnsworth as she attempted to live in the glass box Mies built for her. 

Louis Kahn’s career also plays out a progression of thought in regard to the open plan, but he starts his work much later, with the work of Mies and Le Corbusier already well established.  He was born at the time Mies was building his earliest houses and did not receive an independent commission for a house, the Oser House near Philadelphia, until 1940.  Saito discusses how at this stage Kahn’s approach to the plan was in typical modernist vein, subdividing a single volume of space with thin interior walls, but from the get-go he is conscious of the whole picture, how the individual room integrates with the other spaces in the house.

It does not take long for Kahn to start moving away from the single, subdivided volume toward a more room-oriented approach that emphasizes the individuality of each, though he sticks with familiar definitions of those spaces.  The plan of the Weiss House (1947-50) makes this shift clear, separating programmatic zones into distinct volumes connected via a narrower entryway/passageway.  In a way, this period for Kahn is analogous to Mies’ early period, a similar exploration of established forms.

Plan, Weiss House (1947-50), Louis Kahn

Subsequently Kahn began a higher level inquiry, abstracting the concepts of the room and the house, looking for an order that would allow the components of the whole to fall into place in a logical fashion.  His use of controlling geometries in projects such as the Trenton Bathhouse (1955) and the Adler House (1954-55; unbuilt) are the beginning of his critique of the modernist approach to date in the way that they elevate the room to a defining design element.

Plan, Adler House (1954-55; unbuilt), Louis Kahn

Goldhagen quotes Kahn from the same time period: “Space made by a dome then divided by walls is not the same space…. A room should be a constructed entity or—an ordered segment of a construction system.  Rooms divided off from a single larger space must read as a completed space.”   She goes on to say that to Kahn “the important elements enclosing a space must be immediately apprehensible, from structure to surface.  For this the open plan was inadequate because partitions, which were customarily used to mark off spaces, masked a concentrated perception of the building as a ‘constructed entity’” (Goldhagen 108).

In this Kahn’s development again parallels that of Mies, though they subsequently went in different directions.  Where Mies developed a theory of architecture around the centrality of construction in terms of technology and its advance (in constant motion), Kahn developed an architecture around the relationship of construction to the observer in his place (a static perception).  Like other architects of his time, Kahn was responding to the lack of authenticity he perceived in many aspects of modernism, which Mies’ work in its ambiguity exemplified.

Kahn’s emphasis on authenticity becomes evident in later works as he experiments with different types of buildings and the way they relate to the user.  The Salk Institute (1962) combines the monumental expression of the main structures with his very human scale moves for the offices that connect to them.  At the Kimbell Art Museum (1966-69) Kahn employs vaulted ceilings resting on load bearing walls, using columns only where the program needs open space.  The open plan is absent, broken up by the bays of the ceiling—and yet it is kept light and airy, indeed human, through his innovative toplighting.

Kimbell Art Museum (1966-69), Louis Kahn

It is interesting to see the progression not only of the individual architects examined here, but also the progression in modernist thinking.  Kahn is able to pick up the pieces of Mies’s deconstruction of construction and make something human out of it.  Perhaps Mies saw a shift coming—Hartoonian notes the presence of “poetics of place” in  Mies’ mid-career houses, houses from which Kahn may well have taken important cues.

References

Colquhoun, A. (2002). Modern architecture: Oxford University Press.

Goldhagen, S. W. K. L. I. (2001). Louis Kahn's situated modernism: Yale University Press.

Hartoonian, G. (1989). Mies van der Rohe: the genealogy of column and wall. Journal Of Architectural Education, 42(2), 43-50.

Saito, Y. (2004). Louis I. Kahn houses (Shohan. ed.). Tokyo, Japan: TOTO Shuppan.