Mies van der Rohe: Modern City criticized from the boundaries of Architecture

Unlike other masters in Modern Architecture (Le Corbusier, Wright, Kahn), Mies van der Rohe never tried to outline his own idea about the City in any urban model. On the contrary, his urban approaches always are restricted and determined by formalistic and architectonic layouts. His underlying critic to the City may be seen in his disciplined, rigorous pieces of Architecture: either it may concern the validity of historical town centers (questioned in his non-built projects for the Glass Skyscraper for the Friedrichstrasse or the Alexanderplatz urban renewal, both in Berlin); or it may be addressed to new residential developments in modern city suburbs (such as the Stuttgart Weissenhofsiedlung or the theoretical proposal for court-houses row housings); or even in a high quality and autonomous urban areas, arranged on the sidelines of the complexity of the existing city (as it happens with the planning of the I.I.T. campus in Chicago or the Lafayette Park in Detroit). Taking these hypothesis into account, further research may be tracking the limits of Architecture as a discipline as Mies showed in his bests projects. Unusual tools (very modern in his time) will be considered in upcoming analysis, as Mies himself would do in his program for architectural education set up at the I.I.T. in Chicago: visual training analysis, collages and photomontages would become keystones in order to achieve the right proportions for spaces and volumes that finally appeared fragmentary in his projects trying to provide some kind of rational, urban order to the City. Only by inductive reasoning (based on relevant case studies) one may work out a more universal concept about the City that Mies would keep in mind. Thanks to comparative method, and considering the 'Visual Training' and the 'Urban Planning' courses (respectively leaded by Walter Peterhans and Ludwig Hilberseimer at the I.I.T, continuing their previous teaching at the Bauhaus along with Mies), precise ideas about urban phenomena in Mies may be observed. In fact, his final skepticism about the City ("the urban jungle" as he defines it after the Second World War) will be reflected in his isolated interventions in urban context such as the Seagram's Building in Manhattan or the National Gallery in Berlin.