Mies Van Der Rohe 1931 Exhibition Home in Berlin
By 1931, the spatial and structural experiments of architect Mies van der Rohe, including the unbuilt Brick Country House as well as the 1929 Barcelona Pavilion, had generated significant acclaim.
Enough to earn the young Modernist a platform at that year’s German Building Exposition in Berlin.
There he organized a vast show of German architecture called “Die Wohnung unserer Zeit (the apartment of our times)”
Mies’ work broke down walls, or at least reimagined their structure and form, but the process of stripping down and simplifying followed a series of gradual steps.
As he himself would proclaim, ‘The home for our age has not yet been created. But changes in living conditions will ensure that this new home will indeed be created.’
Visit the Exhibition Home 3D model
His 1931 Exhibition Home, a full-scale model assembled for the exposition, showcased his increasingly fluid conception of boundaries between indoor and outdoor space, offering another evolutionary step towards later masterpieces such as the Farnsworth House and Crown Hall.
A flat, rectilinear structure supported on a series of steel columns arrayed in a grid — covered in both chrome and white paint — the experimental design featured glass walls and open partitions, creating a flowing, open-plan interior furnished with furniture of his own design.
It was a big hit in Berlin, and owing to the increasingly repressive Nazi regime, one of a dwindling number of commissions and projects he would complete before emigrating to the United States.
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