Franz Schulze: Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (1985/1989) [Italian]

Schulze’s acclaimed biography is the first full treatment of the master German-American modern architect. Schulze traces Mies’s European career in its progression to avant-garde modernism—where his work was materially rich but of modest scale—to his second maturity and world renown in the United States, where he invented a new architectural language of “objective” structural expression. Among the authors’ most exciting new discoveries is the massive transcript of the early-1950s Farnsworth House court case, which discloses for the first time the facts about Mies’s epic battle with his client Edith Farnsworth. The book reveals new information about his relationships with women, including the nature and breakup of his marriage to the wealthy Ada Bruhn, his close professional and personal ties to the gifted designer Lilly Reich, and new details from a series of illuminating interviews with his American companion, Lora Marx. This edition also gives voice to dozens of architects who knew and worked with (and sometimes against) Mies—many of them from the unique oral history collection of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Architecture.

This comprehensive biography tells the compelling story of how Mies and his students and followers created some of the most significant buildings of the twentieth century.

Originally published by University Of Chicago Press, in association with the Mies van der Rohe Archive of the Museum of Modern Art, 1985
Translated to Italian by Mara De Benedetti, published as Mies van der Rohe by Editorial Jaca Book spa, Milan, April 1989, ISBN 8816600888, 344 pages.

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Margret Kentgens-Craig: The Bauhaus and America: First Contacts, 1919-1936 (1999)

The Bauhaus school was founded in Weimar in 1919 by the German architect Walter Gropius, moved to Dessau in 1925 and to Berlin in 1932, and was dissolved in 1933 by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe under political duress. Although it existed for a mere fourteen years and boasted fewer than 1,300 students, its influence is felt throughout the world in numerous buildings, artworks, objects, concepts, and curricula.

After the Bauhaus’s closing in 1933, many of its protagonists moved to the United States, where their acceptance had to be cultivated. The key to understanding the American reception of the Bauhaus is to be found not in the émigré success stories or the famous 1938 Bauhaus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, but in the course of America’s early contact with the Bauhaus. In this book Margret Kentgens-Craig shows that the fame of the Bauhaus in America was the result not only of the inherent qualities of its concepts and products, but also of a unique congruence of cultural supply and demand, of a consistent flow of information, and of fine-tuned marketing. Thus the history of the American reception of the Bauhaus in the 1920s and 1930s foreshadows the patterns of fame-making that became typical of the post-World War II art world. The transfer of artistic, intellectual, and pedagogical concepts from one cultural context to another is a process of transformation and integration. In presenting a case study of this process, the book also provides fresh insights into the German-American cultural history of the period from 1919 to 1936.

Publisher MIT Press, 1999
ISBN 026211237X, 9780262112376
283 pages

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Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model (2009)

The Bauhaus—founded inWeimar in 1919, located in Dessau beginning in 1925, and closed in Berlin in 1933—continues to be the most effective and successful export article of twentieth-century German culture. Even more than seventy years after it was closed, this interdisciplinary school for art, architecture, design, and theater has not lost any of its currentness.

On the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus, this profusely illustrated, comprehensive publication with over three hundred color illustrations reexamines and reevaluates the art school’s history and influence. In this collaborative project by the three leading institutes at the former sites of the Bauhaus’s activities—the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, and the Bauhaus-Museum der Klassik Stiftung Weimar—the historic Bauhaus and the trail of its reception are closely examined and analyzed based on sixty-eight selected highlights, including the hitherto neglected aspects of the Bauhaus during the period of National Socialism as well as its international propagation and commercialization.

Texts by Barry Bergdoll, Klaus von Beyme, Regina Bittner, Gerda Breuer, Magdalena Droste, Peter Hahn, Christine Hopfengart, Christoph Ingenhoven, Michael Siebenbrodt, Klaus Weber.

Edited by Bauhaus-Archiv Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin / Museum für Gestaltung, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau
With an introduction by Annemarie Jaeggi
Publisher Hatje Cantz Verlag, Germany, 2009
ISBN 978-3-7757-2414-2
376 pages

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