The Future of Mies
Sean Keller, Professor, IIT

What was the future for Mies? Did he even have one? This talk explores the conception of time constructed by the buildings, writings, and drawings of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. As we look back to the founding of the Bauhaus a century ago, it seems appropriate to ask about the conceptions of time held by the school’s key figures, such as Mies. If the Bauhaus was a “laboratory of the future,” what did the future even mean to its participants? Was it static or dynamic? How was all of the Bauhaus’s formal and material invention meant to play out in time?

This question is especially pressing in the case of Mies, whose mature career and teaching were explicitly focused around an effort to create an architecture appropriate to a “new time.” Yet this understanding of a new time seems to be defined almost entirely by its relationship to the past. What then can we say about how, if at all, Mies understood the future? Working from the evidence of the buildings themselves, what can we say about how Mies’s famous spaces were meant to exist in time?