- Werner Oechslin attempted to reconcile Mies’s cryptic and contradictory writings made while still in Germany. Vivian Endicott Barnett contributed an essay about Mies’s own art collection, and Cammie McAtee related new information about Mies’s first, tentative visit to America. Phyllis Lambert, the volume’s editor, provided a multichaptered “book-within-a-book” spanning Mies’s American phase. Detlef Mertins, the only contributor to both volumes, followed Lambert with an essay about Mies’s relation to the concept of organicism. Sarah Whiting added the volume’s most outstanding contribution: her incisive discussion of IIT’s urbanism situates Mies in the social and political context of Chicago, and adroitly uses the metaphor of the bas-relief to set a new standard for discussing space and mass in Mies’s American work. Michael Hays employed neo-Marxian criticism in presenting Mies’s American programming and aesthetic choices as glyphs of resistance, as intimations of a possible but forever receding social utopia. Peter Eisenman, referring to his own entry for the 1997 IIT Student Center Competition, discussed the dialectic of absence/presence in Mies’s work, and Rem Koolhaas ended the volume with an impassioned though wry defense of his firm’s contentious winning proposal for that same competition.
LIYANG DING 