The influence of Ebeling on Mies has recently stressed by Fritz Neumeyer. (the artless words,171-77) Ebeling saw space as a membrane, a protective covering, like the bark of the tree, between man and the outer world. It was thus directly formed by man’s activity and equalized his relationship with the external world. Space,formed by the biological sensibility of a man, became “a continuous force field,” activated by man’s movement and desire for life. This usually existential view of space was referred to in Moholy-Nagy’s The New Vision. Ebeling’s avocation of the skin-like outer surfaces of the walls that envelop and enclose interior space was quite parallel to Van Eyck’s idea that “the periphery of space constitutes the matter of its envelopment,” and Peter Magyar’s “boundary condition.”
LIYANG DING 