How lengthy are these Brick Walls? The Brick Country House (1923-1924)

The Brick Country House of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1924) is linked to four other important projects of the 1920s: the Skyscraper on Friedrichstrasse in Berlin (1921), the Glass Skyscraper (1922), the Bürohaus and the Concrete Country House (1923). The Brick Country House is a sort of enigma, because it shows uncertainty, which is a dimension completely extraneous to Mies mentality. In his work everything is always defined and measurable, carefully precise, both in size and proportions. On the contrary, in this project the walls that extend towards the outside do not have a definite length and, therefore, even proportions aren’t clear, due to the differences between the original of 1924 and the Chicago versions of the Sixties. My hypothesis is that the Brick Country House was for Mies not a real house, but a type, a scheme describing a formal structure that aims to «obtaining a sequence of spatial effects», opening his research on relations between interior space and unbuilt space. In both perspectives there is a detail which has often been overlooked: it is the brick wall represented at the foreground and which seems to allude to a sort of connection between two slightly different levels of unbuilt space. In the sketch this wall is synthesized by a single line. Its presence in both drawings shows the importance that Mies attributed to it, even if it does not appear in the Mannheim plan of 1924, or at least, it seems that it does not appear. This sign suggests an interesting hypothesis, albeit risky: couldn’t the frame of the Mannheim drawing be an integral part of the project? Might the frame be a physical element, a bordering wall? In this case the walls of the house would have a definite size and the plan would turn into an ante-litteram Three-Court House, 11 years ahead of his studies of 1935. This hypothesis would allow us to anticipate his first studies on the delimitation, inclusion and partition of unbuilt spaces that will become one of the main research fields of his work. The discussion is open.