Phantom Architecture by Philip Wilkinson

Author:Philip Wilkinson [Wilkinson, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

The stark contrast between the shimmering form of Mies’s glass skyscraper and the surrounding nineteenth-century Berlin architecture is made clear in this montage of photograph and architect’s drawing.

Mies worked out a way of letting more light into the building while also making use of the entire site, to maximize the floor area. He did this with a unique plan consisting of three wedge-like shapes, linked at the centre of the plan but divided by light wells at the edges. As well as being an ingenious way of letting in more natural light, this was also one of the features that gave the tower its distinctive, crystalline form. No other building had such sharply pointed corners, or presented such a dramatic combination of planes and spaces to its street facade.

However, the thing that really set Mies’s skyscraper apart was the fact that it has no conventional walls. Its steel framework is clad entirely, from top to bottom, in glass. No one had ever designed a building like this before. The skyscrapers of Chicago and New York, which inspired the German architects who entered the Berlin competition, had steel frames hidden by a cladding of masonry. Some had large windows, but these were always set in a substantial surrounding framework. They also had features such as stone plinths at pavement level, grand doorways set in decorative stone frames, and ornament in a historical style such as Classical or Gothic. Mies did away with all of this at a stroke.

Mies probably got the idea of this crystalline glass cladding from looking at photographs of skyscrapers under construction. He clearly admired the appearance of their steel frames, as well as their engineering. Mies contrasted the character of the framework with the sham decoration of the masonry of conventional skyscrapers: ‘Only in the course of their construction do skyscrapers show their bold, structural character, and then the impression made by their soaring skeletal frames is overwhelming. On the other hand, when the facades are later covered with masonry this impression is destroyed…’ What was left when a skyscraper’s structure was hidden away behind meaningless decoration was, according to Mies, ‘a senseless and trivial chaos of forms’.

The architect could also justify his design in terms of functionalism – the architectural doctrine that a building’s form should be determined by the needs of its users. From a functionalist point of view, the glass walls and crystalline shape were justified by the need to get lots of natural light into the building, while keeping the floor space as large as possible. The design certainly succeeded in these terms. Even allowing for the fact that Mies’s building has an unusually large floor-to-ceiling height (to let in yet more light, while reducing the possible number of storeys), he crammed more square footage onto the site than his competitors. Revolutionary in form, stunning to look at and functionally sound, the tower should have been a triumph.

The architect’s variant design has curved walls and is taller than the Friedrichstrasse original, but uses the same glass ‘skin’ and the same interplay of indentations and protrusions.

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