When we were still married, my ex and I would sometimes find a babysitter or willing grandparent with whom to leave the kids so we could spend a night at a hotel in downtown Chicago. Our last local getaway was spent at The Langham, the boutique hotel in what was formerly the IBM Building, designed by Mies van der Rohe. It was in the summer of 2016, the night of the “nevertheless, she persisted” presidential debate. After we checked in, my wife and I had a drink in the lounge and went out for dinner. We walked a bit, came back to the Langham, did our best to behave like adults in a hotel room, watched a little of the debate, and called it a night.
The hotel was, and most likely still is, quite lovely. The low-lit, capacious space was charming in a moody kind of way. The infestation of finance types in the lounge was mitigated by the windows, which were tall and ceaseless and gave the impression that the world outside could move through them at any point, that a cleaner and purer vision of the city was immediately at hand. But it was still impossible to escape the sense that this was an office building. As I walked down the hallway—wide and airy, unusually high-ceilinged (specs for hosting 1970s computers make for surprisingly good ambiance), amenable to bodily traffic even though there was little that night—the closed doors on either side didn’t have the typical uncertainty—curious, tawdry, boring—of hotel rooms seen from the exterior. It felt like contracts were being signed, Selectrics sold by the boatload, memoranda drafted, invoices reviewed. The abiding atmosphere was Capitalist Ghost Porn. That was my experience of Sleeping with Mies.
As part of the 2023 Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Edith Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, is hosting an exhibit of photographs by Arina Dähnick from her Living with Mies project. Following The Mies Project, an effort to make portraits of as many places built by Mies as possible—it took seven years, from 2012 to 2019—Dähnick set out to document the ordinary parts of life experienced inside these places. (A necessary aside: I find it very difficult to follow the convention of referring to the architect by a pet name. I gather it was preferred by the man himself, but it feels like a collective affectation by his admirers that ultimately reduces everyone to a fan. Nonetheless, I am a guest in this field and will therefore follow by its self-enacted rules.) We are shown lily pads at his Haus Werner in Berlin and a portrait of its caretaker, a happy, infinitely German-looking fellow in a nondescript courtyard that is clearly tyro Mies. The Langham puts in an appearance, specifically its lobby, specifically the near lack of structural presence. In true Miesian fashion, the reflected exterior makes almost as much of an impression as the light-pummeled interior. (“Go figure that in a glass house, the outside is where the eyes dwell,” says Bryan Boyer. We’ll talk more about him in a bit.) There is a stirring image, a scene worthy of DeLillo, of a nun bent leaning toward a wall (in prayer? in note-taking?) in the Villa Tugendhat, a Mies home in Czechia. Between the golden sunlight and conference table and adjoining, unfilled space, a feeling of the mystery in ordinary days creeps in.
A quote from Reed Kroloff, posted in Living with Mies: “To live and work in buildings designed by Mies offer [sic] the long-term pleasure of meaningful questions rather than the short-term satisfaction of easy answers.” Kroloff is the dean of the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, a place that is Miesed six ways from Tuesday. It’s a rather fascinating proposition. Within so much physical unobtrusion and almost self-negating structures, you’ve got to supply your own atmospheric narrative. When the spaces are viewed secondhand, via photographs, the questions don’t disappear. They are magnified.
Mies’s spaces are the most open of interstices. They create coexistence with light. They are a great democratizing absence, a built antonym of suffocation.
Eventually, it becomes difficult to separate Dähnick’s own work from her veneration of her subject. This is an inherent danger in any art about art. Her images aren’t overwhelmed by Mies’s works; they just seem very enamored of them. This is most evident in the portraits she took in Mies’s two high-rises on North Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. One belongs to Dirk Lohan, an architect and Mies’s grandson, the other to Trinita Logue, a painter and visual artist. (Very powerful late-era Bellow vibes.) Both are shown basking in the builder’s gift of abundant sunlight, Lake Michigan beneath them, the rest of the city distant and tiny and very unthreatening. We’re told that Logue repurposed her unit’s bedroom as her studio to better take advantage of the natural light. Lohan has his grandfather’s drafting table stationed, altar-like, before another massive window. There is an unspoken and probably unintended sentiment here: being able to afford to Live with Mies is really neat! Housed in the works of a man with such an overwhelming dedication to mass functionality who was also a student of collectivism, this quiet status reverence becomes rather uncomfortable.
There are glimmers of the more quotidian aspects living on display. A view of Lohan’s closet is dominated by a portrait of somber, bulky Mies, not the one with Philip Johnson and the Seagram Building but almost certainly also by Irving Penn. (Was Mies ever photographed not looking like he was remembering a dead lover from long ago?) A wall-mounted shelf in Logue’s kitchen is mirrored by a pen-and-ink drawing (one of hers, it’s fair to assume) of a small figure fast asleep on a couch. Here, Dähnick uses Mies’s angles to movingly evoke the possibly accidental but unmistakable and inescapable curation that happens to a home over years of living and habit-making and being a person in a space of one’s own. Probably the most poignant image is not of an interior at all but rather the view from Lohan’s window: Lake Shore Drive, the biking and running paths, the breakwater, and Lake Michigan, with the shadow Mies built peering down timidly over it all like a giant child, a reminder that even the most memorable and graceful of constructions are all accidents of time and place.
But what’s it like Pooping with Mies? Or Waking Up Depressed with Mies? Or Having Leftover Chinese Again with Mies? These are parts of Living, after all. So much of intimacy is mundaneness.
Bryan Boyer (remember him?) is an architect and professor at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan who lives in Lafayette Park, Mies’s townhome project outside of downtown Detroit. The homes look a little like the Chicago high-rises in miniature, turned on their sides. They aren’t part of Dähnick’s exhibition (though the New York Times ran a series about them in 2010, also called “Living with Mies”). As it turns out, Taking Out the Trash with Mies isn’t so easy. Lafayette Park has an underground tunnel running between all ten homes, Mies’s way of keeping his grassy, parklike exterior free of the visual litter of trash cans. “It’s beautiful and arguably essential to the design of Lafayette Park and yet increasingly challenging to operate because it requires paying for someone to come through once a week and drag trash out to the curb,” Boyer told me in an email. Cooking with Mies? “Kitchens are an afterthought,” Boyer says. “Misogyny? Probably.”
But what’s it like Pooping with Mies? Or Waking Up Depressed with Mies? Or Having Leftover Chinese Again with Mies? These are parts of Living, after all. So much of intimacy is mundaneness.
But there are effects of Mies’s design that move beyond the practical and aesthetic. “If you look at the steady rhythm of vertical I-beams on the facade and point to a window on the second floor, it’s difficult to know which unit belongs to which neighbor,” writes Boyer. For residents, the aesthetic is unifying, collectivizing. “The building says, you might live here, but it doesn’t matter who you are, what matters is who we are.” This sentiment doesn’t run counter to Living with Mies. It’s just not especially visible.
Spaces are ultimately just that: interstices for existing. Even ones made by Famous People. I once got a flu shot in the atrium of Mies’s Crown School of Social Service Administration building. I don’t like needles, and the openness certainly relaxed me. When I leave my cubicle at work to go to the restroom, I see a chiller plant designed by Helmut Jahn across the parking lot. I note how splendid it is, and then I pee. My freshman dorm in college was designed by Eero Saarinen and did its bright, yawning, atrial interior, hidden behind an inconspicuous brick skin and protected by a literal moat—it was the women’s dorm, once—make any impression on me when I wasn’t hooking up with anyone? Take a guess. A night in The Langham’s faithful reconfiguring of an office by Mies was a much more austere, grown-up distraction than nights in Chicago’s other upmarket hotels. When it was over, my marriage promptly returned to its long, stumbling descent.
Mies’s spaces are the most open of interstices. They create coexistence with light. They are a great democratizing absence, a built antonym of suffocation. To live with him is to commingle the outside world with one’s inner life. If you consider Mies’s places to live as sensitive, rather than scaled back or minimalist, then what you see in Dähnick’s photographs are people aware of the openness they’ve been blessed with, people who have molded that openness around themselves. The unpeopled images—The Langham’s lobby, the shadow of the high-rise—are reminders that openness is not emptiness, that the careful tending of air is an act of public benevolence.