In 1954, Mies Van der Rohe, with former student and architect Daniel Brenner, designed a fraternity house on the campus of University of Indiana. These plans were not used, but were kept by Sidney Eskenazi, a member of the fraternity and current benefactor of the school. They are now being used as the basis for the design of a new building for the Eskanazi School of Art, Architecture, and Design, set to be completed in Summer 2021. Another set of drawings can be seen above.

Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe (1886 - 1969) was a pioneer of modernist architecture. He began his career working directly with designers in Aachen, Germany, his birthplace, and then Berlin. Following the first world war, people looked to dispel the old order that led to the war, searching for new ways to embrace the modern era. He joined these progressive efforts in creating and defining a new style of architecture. He was the last director of the Bauhaus, leaving Germany at the close of the school and the rise of Nazism. He emigrated to Chicago to become the head of the architecture school at Illinois Institute of Technology. His designs are iconic for their simplicity, restraint, and openness. He aspired to create the iconic style of his era, which he in many ways did.

Daniel Brenner (1917 - 1977) worked in Mies’ studio on the original designs. After graduating with his bachelors, he worked for Alfred Easton Poor in New York City. Inspired by people he met in his travels, he moved to Chicago to study under Mies at the IIT, where he would later teach. He worked in various firms throughout the city. In addition Brenner worked at the Art Institute of Chicago, designing exhibitions for permanent and touring shows. His drawings are now a part of the permanent collection. 

Sidney and Lois Eskenazi met at Indiana University as students, where Sidney also went on to study law. After graduating, Sidney began Sandor Development Co. and Lois worked as a medical and lab technician. The couple have made major gifts to the university and beyond, including to the Eskenazi Health System which was renamed for them, establishing a scholarship fund, and most recently their major gift to the school of art, architecture, and design.

The design of the building resembles Mies’ other works with its glass and steel construction, most notably the Farnsworth House outside Chicago or Crown Hall on IIT’s campus. They have long, linear forms, comprised entirely of large planes of glass broken by the steel structure, and are mostly one level. The interiors are vaguely defined, if at all, creating wide open, adaptable spaces. The simplicity of Mies’ designs are notable, especially for the time, for their minimalist restraint and lack of ornamentation. This design was commissioned by a fraternity at the university but was never used. Another copy of these drawings exists in the Museum of Modern Art. This design was adapted and built by Thomas Phifer and Partners of New York. The building will be opened for use by students and staff in the fall of 2021.

This month we are happy to showcase new and treasured pieces at the gallery. New pieces by Finn Juhl and Warren Platner and works by Michael Lotenero and Mies van der Rohe are highlighted this month. We are available, as always, by appointment. Please reach out and we would be happy to set up a time to show these pieces.

FINN JUHL FOR BAKER FURNITURE CABINET

This cabinet was designed by Finn Juhl for Baker Furniture as part of the Baker Modern line. It is made of freshly restored teak and maple. Finn Juhl was an iconic Danish designer known primarily for his furniture and is credited with introducing this style to America. He studied architecture and began his career as a student working on interiors. He was brought to the American design market by being spotted by a MoMA curator and then being picked up to design a line for Baker. This piece’s design celebrates the materiality of the wood; the grain and texture becomes the star. The contrasting wood species highlight each other and the streamlined design is simple yet beautiful.

WARREN PLATNER FOR KNOLL SIDE TABLES

These side tables are emblematic of Platner’s designs, featuring the curving metal legs he is known so well for. The marble tops come in their original boxes from the 1980s; original glass tops are also available. The combination of materials in conjunction with the lines evokes the modern elegance of mid century design, utilizing classic materials with experimental forms. The marble tops almost hover, support by many spindly legs rather than any substantial forms. This adds to the modern flair: a heavy piece of marble almost floating.

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"DREAMSCAPE II"

Michael Lotenero creates evocative and dramatic abstract works. This large scale piece is oil on canvas, with bold and gestural marks against a black field. The majority of the forms rest within the middle linear portion of the piece, carefully evading the upper and lower portions. These contrasting marks seem to float in the black field, this dark container clearly behind the forms but also sheerly shrouding some. The artist clearly uses a variety of methods to create, with clear brush strokes slashing across the canvas, smaller messier fields, and long, almost scratch like lines that move across.

CROWN HALL: A-10

Crown Hall is one of the jewels of Illinois Institute of Technology’s campus. With long planes of glass held by black, steel beams, the space almost floats, with light pouring in from all sides. The building was designed in 1954 and is part of a collection of iconic early modern architecture on the school’s campus. It is the home of the College of Architecture and was finished in 1956. The space is almost entirely open, free from beams or structural walls, allowing it be changed and adapted to whatever is needed of it. This drawing comes from Mies’s office and comes from a set of technical working drawings.

The Windy City's Matthew Rachman Gallery takes a deep dive into the designer's practice.

by Thomas Connors | April 28, 2019

1stdibs: Introspective Magazine

Less is more,” that inescapable quote attributed to Mies van der Rohe, has long been modernism’s tagline. But when it comes to this year’s observances of the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, where Mies was the final director, more is more. Two new museums are opening in Germany dedicated to the history and legacy of the forward-looking art and design institution. And special exhibitions are popping up from São Paolo to Tel Aviv that shine a spotlight on its faculty and students, who broke the barriers between artist and artisan, articulated a new partnership of form and function and reshaped the built environment. Of particular note is “Mies van der Rohe: Chicago Blues and Beyond,” running through July 21 at the Matthew Rachman Gallery in Chicago, where the designer settled after leaving Germany.

The Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, but Mies soldiered on in Berlin for another five years before emigrating to the U.S., where, in 1938, he became director of the school of architecture at Chicago’s Armour Institute, now the Illinois Institute of Technology, or IIT. From this academic perch, he profoundly influenced the course of architectural practice internationally. And from his own drafting table, he changed the look of his adopted city, completing such now-iconic projects as the 860-880 Lake Shore Drive apartment towers, the Chicago Federal Center and One IBM Plaza, as well as the IIT campus.

The show includes a Barcelona chair with a prototype cushion that Mies designed for his towers at 860–880 Lake Shore Drive. The chair, as well as never-before-seen ephemera, is on loan from T. Paul Young, an architect who worked in Mies’s studio.

Rachman — who last year mounted a show of works by Charlotte Perriand focused on Les Arcs, the ski resort she designed in the French Alps — has previously hosted two benefits in support of Mies’s Farnsworth House. (The “Chicago Blues and Beyond” opening, with architect Dirk Lohan, Mies’s grandson, on hand, was also a fundraiser for the Farnsworth House, which has been a house museum owned and operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation since 2003.) With the Bauhaus anniversary approaching, he decided to build an exhibition around a cache of the designer’s blueprints he acquired several years ago. Now for sale, the blueprints are actual working documents used by junior and senior architects in Mies’s office. Some have never before been seen publicly.

A dozen clipboards hold working documents and correspondence related to the studio’s projects.

Among the plans, examples of which measure as large as 48 by 32 inches, is one for the Barcelona chair, done for the Wells Furniture Company, which manufactured the piece in the 1930s before Knoll began production. There are also drawings for architectural projects, including One Charles Center and the Highfield House condominium, both in Baltimore; 111 E. Wacker Drive, in Chicago, now home to the Chicago Architecture Center; and IIT’s Crown Hall, whose massive, column-free span epitomizes Mies’s embrace of utterly adaptable, universal space. It was built to house the Department of Architecture and Institute of Design.

These projects represented a leap forward in the architect’s career, an opportunity to build at a scale he had only imagined before the war. Advances in technology, access to materials and the willingness of American developers and corporations to get on board with modern design propelled him to a period of great creativity and success.

Rachman has taken a contextual approach to his installation of the blueprints on offer, interspersing the display with furniture and ephemera, much of it on loan from architect T. Paul Young, who at 17 became an office boy in Mies’s firm. “I’d pick up his cigars at Dunhill, organize files, things like that,” recalls Young, who advanced through the ranks to work on structures like the unrealized Mansion House Square, in London (his last project at the firm). “The office had a studio atmosphere, and there were long racks of blueprints of all of Mies’s projects. All the architects in the office would use those as reference. If they were designing louvers or a curtain-wall detail, they would be able to look at other buildings to see what was done and make it even better.”

Mies used these textile samples when designing the interiors of the Arts Club of Chicago in the early 1950s.

Among the materials from Young’s archive in the show are fabric swatches from the Farnsworth House and Mies’s sole interior-only project, the Arts Club of Chicago (razed in 1995); a rare bronze-frame version of the Brno chair manufactured by Brueton; a sales brochure for the 860-880 residences (“Mutual Ownership Offering Stability at the Lowest Possible Cost”); construction documents; and images produced by Hedrich-Blessing Photographers, the renowned architectural photography firm founded in Chicago in 1929. In addition, Rachman has on display and for sale two key pieces of furniture: an MR chaise longue, circa 1970, reupholstered in Brazilian cowhide but retaining the original strapping; and a Barcelona couch.  “We want people to see the different materials Mies used and to better understand these pieces — which they have seen many times in various settings — within the bigger picture of Mies’s work,” says Rachman.

Although later, less artful interpretations of the architect’s aesthetic contributed to the perception of modernism as manipulative and soulless (a critique initially applied to the master’s own work), he remains a giant in the history of the built environment, a man whose philosophy is, perhaps, as significant as the structures he designed. “In 1939, Mies gave a lecture to students in which he discussed designing a house,” notes Young, who serves as executive director of the Bauhaus Chicago Foundation. “He said that coming to the house, the front door, was the most important thing to consider. And as he concluded, he said, ‘The house is really the shell, and the life lived therein, is the bloom.’ And that was true whether he was designing a home or an office building or Crown Hall. He was setting a stage for living.”

Read the full article here.

Connors, Thomas. “How Chicago, Mies Van Der Rohe's Adopted Home, Remembers the Architect.” 1stdibs Introspective, 28 Apr. 2019, www.1stdibs.com/introspective-magazine/ludwig-mies-van-der-rohe/.