There is a moment in Detlef Mertin’s Mies when the architect’s steel structures appear flooded with water. As architecture critic Janet Abrams, once a resident of the 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartment Towers in Chicago, reminisces: ‘water appears … to flow right up to one’s floor level’, along with the objects that float on its surface, ‘dinner-cruise boats’, ‘water-skiers’, ‘white sails’, or ‘dead fish’, whose fleeting images, sounds or smells penetrate the glass surface and suffuse the towers’ interior (p336). While this may predominantly be a phenomenal or metaphorical overflowing, there is also the literal flooding of the Farnsworth House when the water of the nearby lake precipitously rises and engulfs the steel structure, erasing the ground and turning the flat roof into a floating island. These rare instances of flooding suggest an alternative transparency in which the building is not the agent but the object or even victim of transparency. The architectural structure does not assertively limit or attempt to optically control the objects of its natural surroundings but allows itself to be penetrated and ultimately dissolve inside the animate landscape − a form of transparency in which the building stages its own disappearance.

Could this self-reflexive transparency also apply to the figure of the architect, at once covered and exposed by a veritable flood of posthumous criticism attempting to compensate for the scarcity of his own statements? While Corb’s reception is sustained by his prolific writings and the treasury of unpublished material in his archive, Mies’s legacy appears to have been fuelled by the master’s celebrated silence. In this new voluminous study, Mertins does an admirable job in mining all the snippets of Mies’s epigrams from unpublished interviews and lecture notes. But in the end, it is either the absence or the multivalence of these enigmatic aphorisms, such as ‘less is more’, that makes them significant. They could mean everything and nothing, and therefore they mean both less and more.

This continuous oscillation between transparency and obscurity, silence and the proliferation of historiographic and critical discourses might be at the very core of Mertins’ multi-layered analysis of the architect. In empathy with Mies’s structures, this infinitely subtle study alternates between the wet and the dry, theoretical reflection and historical analysis, microscopic detail and macrocosmic argument, as well as clarity and suggestive ambiguity, which, here, is raised into a structural historiographic principle....Continue Reading

> via The Architectural Review