Mies in the London jungle ARTS
STEPHEN GARDINER
So we are to have at last—touch wood—a building by Mies van der Rohe in the City.
On show at the Royal Exchange the other day, 20,000 people saw his design for a single tower which will stand in a new square opposite Mansion House. We are very lucky indeed that Rudolph Palumbo had the courage to com- mission Mies for the work—we could do with more patrons like him. For Mies is the last surviving member of the famous trio which changed the direction of architecture in this century. He has demonstrated in America how the tower should be designed and now he is to do so over here. He is the accepted master of this form and he shows us, and his commercial followers, that it is really a reasonably simple problem; and that it has to be treated as such, without all the silly embellishments of different materials for panels and structure and so on that in the end add up to no more than fussy, irrelevant and, often enough, horrible decoration.
The Fine Art Commission has, of course, raised objections about the height of the build-
ing and its proximity to St Paul's. I find this
extraordinary. For one thing, the tower is a considerable distance away and the two build- ings will, therefore, rarely be seen together; secondly, the cathedral has already been spoilt by frightful office blocks immediately around it which destroy both close-up views and those from across the river. And to go to the other extreme—from the sublime to the entirely ridi- culous, so to speak—the relatively new St Paul's Choir School, attached to the little tower of St Augustine by Wren, ruins all kinds of angles from ground level in a way that Mies's design never could from half a mile away.
It seems a great pity that the Fine Art Com- mission do not spend as much time discussing architecture as they do worrying about heights and diagrammatic planning schemes. Archi- tecture is just as important and in some ways a good deal more so. After all, we don't nor- mally see cities in panoramic views, and not often enough from above—or for long enough —to matter. Down on the ground, in London and particularly at the centre, one is far more concerned with individual situations, street scenes on a limited but massive scale, and there the detail of actual elevations to build- ings is a vital part of what we see. To this,
of course, the Commission would say that at least they help to get the broader issues right (although whether they do or not is open to question); certainly this should be true where they are dealing with open spaces such as the river, parks, countryside and so on. Nevertheless the fact remains that this is only a small part of the battle and it really-doesn't matter all that much about shape and height if the building is in any case hideous. What we then see is an ugly elevation and we see it all the time, and for the rest of our lives.
The visual responsibility of an architect is vast—this can never be emphasised too strongly—and the damage he can do is also vast. Mistakes are irrevocable; this is the big difference between architecture and other arts. A bad book can go on a shelf, a painting under a bed and even a Moore can be shifted with a crane, but nothing can be done about a building. Once it's there you're stuck with it. And as the building enlarges, so, obviously, does the architect's responsibility: there's far more to see, for one thing. Without doubt his most dangerous weapon is the tower, whether offices or flats or hotels. With a tower he can smash any beautiful building in the vicinity, and on an open site, like the Hilton on the edge of the Park, shorten distances that origin- ally appeared infinite to a mere half-mile. Again, one wouldn't mind the Hilton nearly
so much if it were good to look at. In fact, it is no worse and no better than innumerable other awful towers. One simply has to con- clude that architects are too small to handle big buildings. They seem, for instance, unable to see their tower as the city object it is, getting bogged down instead on a much more domestic level with detail. They seldom assess the proportion correctly and usually end up with something thick and blunt. And they are utterly nonplussed by the junction of a tall vertical element with flat ground, blurring this inevitable happening with a confusion of self-deceptions—projecting wings, low blocks and so on—that make architectural impossi- bilities.
On all these counts, Mies does precisely what was expected of him in the City, arriving at a simplicity that not even he has achieved before. The front of the Seagram Building in New York, for instance, conceals a certain bulkiness of plan, but nothing is hidden be- hind this pure structure that is 290 ft high, standing aloof and alone at the end of its square. It is made of only two materials, glass and bronze, and its proportion, based on a 13 ft floor height and a 6 ft 6 in module, is equally economical and direct. The entrance at street level is largely open and the tower lands on the ground with no fuss at all, a brief glass hall making the connection. Surprisingly, it doesn't seem particularly tall but this, I think, is because it makes no pretentious claims for itself; Mies's new tower possesses that calm and remote authority which does not dominate a space but peacefully occupies it. Like all good architecture, it seems to have happened quite naturally, almost by chance.
That is by no means all. The magic goes on working. There is the new square, con- jured out of the disappearance of the New Zealand Bank and a change in direction of Queen Victoria Street, and beneath it a shop-
ping centre by the same architect. At any time' -- one longs for more open space in cities—small gardens, a bit of green, some trees—because it lets blue sky into narrow streets, and here we have it, lighting up three forgotten build- ings: St Stephen's Church by Wren, the side of Mansion House, a bank by Lutycns. Sud- denly—amazingly—something has been put right, the jungle has been cut down: a piece of real town planning has been done and stands a pretty good chance of being carried out: what on earth is going on in England? The answer is easy: the architect is Mies van der Rohe and he has insisted that, in three simple moves, order can be made out of chaos. The buildings which have been 'discovered' in retirement may not be stars—and the post-war Bucklersbury block on the south side is, of course, beastly--but it's clear, even from the model, that this sparkling new tower by Mics will, by its sheer reticence, rub a new shine into the best of them.
The height of the structure is right. Detail sizes are sufficiently small to equal those of the surroundings. A lifetime of experience has gone into it. How dare the Fine Art Com- mission disrupt the composure of such a beauti- ful thing when buildings like the Stock Ex- change are allowed? Its members should con- centrate on stopping stuff of little merit in- stead of permitting their supersensitivity to spoil the work of a great architect.
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