The Ghost of Mies

Beatriz Colomina, Manifesto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies, Berlin, Sternberg Press, 2014, pp. 110, €15.00.

An essential part of the architect’s education is in representation. We are taught that our materials must speak, that we need to be able to convey our ideas clearly and concisely. While formats such as drawing models or texts are often posited as privileged sites for architectural discourse, the forum where this intervention takes place is rarely investigated with the same rigor. In the third installment of the Critical Spatial Practice book series, Beatriz Colomina narrates an alternative history of modern architecture that doesn’t focus on what was proposed, but instead where, how, and even at times why modern architecture was formulated as a project.

The gaze deployed here may seem familiar for those already acquainted with Colomina’s work on the relation between media and modernity. Yet nevertheless, this shift away from the history of “what” and towards the history of “how” affords a series of rather polemical statements that Colomina supports with evidence. By tracing the formative period of the early twentieth century avant-garde, we find that the written word, and more particularly the manifesto, not only preceded but actually engendered what we typically think of as modern architecture. Citing the work of Le Corbusier, Futurism, Adolf Loos, Mies, and later on Robert Venturi and Rem Koolhaas, this does indeed seem to be the case. While we often think this to be the case with Le Corbusier and Koolhaas, Colomina focuses on the particular character of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe who, despite being known as a man of few words, employed mass media and manifestos to the same extent and in uncannily similar ways as Le Corbusier.

Despite starting their careers quite conventionally with classical building practices, both Le Corbusier and Mies used equal parts writing and drawing to launch their careers. Indeed, Mies ultimately become who he did by filling the pages of journals such as G and Merz. Furthermore, Mies not only invented a pseudonym but also negated his previous body of work for the sake of crafting his public stature. And while Mies’s “paper architecture” certainly preceded his modern buildings, when given the opportunity to realize his progressive ideas in built form, once in 1923 and again in 1924, “Mies blew it.” It was only in exhibition forums such as the Weißenhofsiedlung and the 1929 World Exposition in Barcelona that Mies was first able to build his vision of modern architecture.

Drawing from the observation that a large part of the modern architecture canon is composed of temporary buildings, Colomina questions whether the format of the pavilion is itself an architectural manifesto. The answer is both yes and yes: the pavilion as a type of building is indeed a manifesto, just as little magazines were as a publishing format in the avant-garde, and a specific pavilion, such as Mies’s 1929 Barcelona Pavilion, can become itself a manifesto. Drawing from OMA’s Casa Palestra and SANAA’s 2008 installation in the pavilion itself, in addition to other re-interpretive works such as Reyner Banham’s article “Zoom Wave Hits Architecture,” the manifesto as a discursive object is itself declared to be a result of appropriating and reinterpreting previous manifestos.

Colomina begins the book with a five-point manifesto of her own, a manifesto of manifestos. “4. Every manifesto reworks previous manifestos.” Yet this formulation is problematic, as the acts of reinterpretation being used as evidence to support this claim stand in contradistinction to the manifestos they are reinterpreting. Whereas OMA, SANAA, and Banham reinterpreted a pavilion, a text, Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion and Marinetti’s 1912 poem Zang Tumb Tuuum do not so much reinterpret but translate. While this may seem like a minor quibble that stands in contrast to contemporary trends of thinking architecture in “post-medium” terms, the text is haunted with the questions what is a manifesto? what does a manifesto manifest? “1. The manifesto is media.” If Mies’s pavilion manifested “a new way of looking”, the later reinterpretations by contemporary architects seem only to reinterpret that way of looking; OMA makes it “sweat,” and SANAA “[allows] it to breathe.”

Colomina presents the ethos’s of both OMA and SANAA wonderfully through a single lens of the Barcelona Pavilion, but while we can call them all manifestos, the feeling remains that Mies did something radically different and it’s not clear exactly what. The book concludes with a properly post-modern gesture when Colomina calls out “the ghost of modern architecture” and identifies the medium itself, “print and pavilions”, as that which “preserves rather than transforms” it. The conclusion is optimistic, pointing towards “electronic media” as the site of “new forms of manifesto” and “a new age of manifesto architecture.”

If this feels a bit empty, it could be because we’ve been submerged in digital milieu for years, yet, Colomina states, “we might… Not yet be able to recognize the manifestos of today.” It is not easy to recognize something if we don’t know what we’re looking for, and while this short text does raise questions that point in its direction, we are left not knowing what it is that made the Barcelona Pavilion make history. We are offered glimpses, such as “the Miesian effect, the theatrical illusion of modern architecture, the veil of transparency,” yet we still don’t know how to do anything other than repeat it.

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