Mies van der Rohe: Ornament and Modernism

It is undeniable that Mies van der Rohe is one of the most famous modernist architects o the era.  His ultimate speech, “less is more” inspires a great number of architects and students to produce projects that modernized the world.  “Less is more”…a short phrase that explains the concept of the man himself; reducing everything to only the needed features, the working class’s “form follows function”.

But did he really make it?  Did he really design a simple, undecorated “glass box”?

It is very ironic, but as Mies gained his fame, his client became those rich guys, and his non-bourgeois cubes became houses for the bourgeois themselves.  Even Adolf Hitler asked Mies to design an office for the Nazis, which he put it in his own style (but it ended up being a university building, not a Nazi office, and it was in America).  The side effect of this is; it took more time for him to perfect his small details, making it looked flawless.  For example, his Seagram Building.  Mies believed in making an “honest” structure, a structure that reveals itself, a beauty in its truthfulness, so he put I-beams, more specifically, bronze I-beams, in front of the reinforced concrete columns, just to say that he have these beams inside.  His “Farnsworth House” also has I-beams glued to the side of the concrete slab, making the visible replica of the structure.

And what is the function of these beams?  Nothing.  They have no function apart from showing the structure inside (which is not needed).  Then is it considered and ornament, something that Mies himself tried to avoid?

Personally, I think it is also an ornament, but a modernized one.  As time changes, the styles of art and architecture also change.  To me, this is kind of like a fluted-shaft columns of the Greek times, which, again, is not to be considered as a ‘crime’.  Mies just put the ornament up in his style, and even though it made him swallow his own words, it is innovative and inspiring.