Under the Influence of Lilly Reich

With the Bauhaus closed and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe safely in Chicago, Lilly Reich was in Germany, packing up Mies’s drawings, plans, and paperwork into tubes and crates. Mies was well on his way to transforming the Armour Institute, an unremarkable training school on Chicago’s South Side, into the architectural legend that would become the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). From her apartment in Berlin, which would be lost during the Nazi occupation, Lilly mailed materials and stashed them away from the destruction that the totalitarian dictatorship was inflicting on the country. By the time the allies had liberated Berlin in 1945, Lilly Reich had lost most of her personal belongings, and much of the documentation related to her decades of work as a polymath designer of interiors, furniture, textiles, and clothing.

Yet thanks to Lilly Reich, the documentation of Mies’s European work survived. From Mühlhausen, where they were stored at the home of a colleague, they were transferred to Berlin, then to Chicago, and finally to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This documentation became critical to the understanding of Mies’s work prior to his immigration to the United States in 1937. Mies’s story became architectural history, of course: a legacy of pioneering design, the progenitor of Modern architecture, medals for architecture in Europe and the United States, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963. It was Mies who designed the masterpieces that defined twentieth century architecture: The German Pavilion, Villa Tugendhat, S.R. Crown Hall, Seagram Building, Edith Farnsworth House, 860-880 North Lake Shore Drive. There is Mies the mononym, Mies the creator of the “less is more” dictum, Mies the icon, Mies the legend, Mies the master. Mies was generously celebrated during his lifetime and after his death in 1969. Today, Mies continues to enjoy an almost mystical position within architecture.

What happened to Lilly Reich? After spending the last few years of the war teaching textile design at a vocational school for girls and continuing to be Mies’s representative in Germany, Lilly Reich died in 1947 at age 62. Yet her work to safeguard Mies’s documents wasn’t exclusively in service to the legacy of Mies van der Rohe, who had been a close collaborator throughout the 1920s on a number of projects; she was also preserving the documentation of her own work as creative director of the German section of the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, and her work on a key component within it—the German Pavilion—a project that after years of attribution exclusively to Mies, is now rightfully recognized as the work of both Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich in equal measure.

Lilly was in care of the documents in part because they included representations of her own work; drawings for industrial exhibits, fabrics, and furniture that expressed the elegance of German modern design on a world stage. These documents showed what Lilly was capable of and clarified her next career iteration as director of the interior design workshop at the Bauhaus. The documents Lilly saved detailed the chronicles of the German Pavilion as a completely new kind of architecture on which Lilly Reich and Mies collaborated. The documents that emerged because of Lilly’s work allowed historians to shed light on Mies’s career before he arrived in the US, catapulting and contextualizing his legend and relationship with the Bauhaus, and specifically, his shared work on the German Pavilion. They also provided the primary source materials required to reconstruct the pavilion in 1986, which had been demolished after the International Exposition closed in 1930.

Lilly Reich in Barcelona: The Materialization of a Neglected Authorship by Laura Martinez de Guereñu is a close inspection of the German Pavilion as a product of the design mind of Lilly Reich and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The book, funded by the Fundació Mies van der Rohe, is rightly published there, under the Lilly Reich Grant for Equality in Architecture. The book endeavors to disrupt the hierarchies between Mies and Reich by positioning Mies as under the influence of Lilly Reich—not the other way around.

Architect Martinez de Guereñu examines the German Pavilion carefully, breaking down components previously understood to be signature Mies moves as those that are a product of Lilly Reich’s understanding of surface and texture. Indeed, you will too when you find yourself next in a building attributed to Mies van der Rohe! With a background working in textiles and exhibition design, Lilly Reich was an expert at hanging materials, allowing them to float, pleat, or rest as needed to create a sophisticated overall profile or emphasize their texture. Knowing what Martinez de Guereñu knows, and what Lilly knew how to do so expertly, it’s difficult not to view Mies’s buildings in a whole new light. This realization questions what Mies took from Lilly that would add to the aggregate of design components that made Mies himself. Yet in looking at the German Pavilion with a critical eye, it’s difficult to see that it could ever be the work of Mies’s singular hand—particularly in terms of the marble cladding the walls of the pavilion. Green alpine marble and golden onyx are book-matched to create wildly graphic abstract patterns. In context with the rest of Mies’s work, these details aren’t “less is more;” they are texture as ornament and too unique and outside of Mies’s work to be Mies’s alone.

Working without Lilly, one can see the Reichian qualities of Mies’s work elsewhere, but they are more subdued. At 860-880 North Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, for example, an ocean away from Barcelona, and designed nearly twenty years later, Mies clads the horizontal surfaces of the two high-rises in a blanket of deeply textured travertine marble. There is a fibrous texture and textile-like quality to this aspect of a Mies design, as well as others. Lilly Reich in Barcelona: The Materialization of a Neglected Authorship opens up the midcentury architecture enjoyer and aficionado alike to consider where Mies’s influences rest.

In July 1939, Lilly Reich visited Mies in Chicago. Many of Mies’s Bauhaus colleagues had found their way to IIT, yet Lilly chose to return to Germany. It’s difficult to not imagine what Reich might have achieved had she stayed, particularly considering the seemingly ample opportunities in architecture and design available to her. László Moholy-Nagy had established a New Bauhaus, which would later become the Institute of Design and be incorporated into the Illinois Institute of Technology. At the New Bauhaus, textile, weaving, and fashion, as well as exhibition design—all Lilly’s specialties—were being taught to students. Mies had become the head of architecture at IIT and had begun work on a master plan for the campus. Martinez de Guereñu considers that this decision to return to Germany may have been based on Lilly’s motivation to ensure that the designs of furniture Mies and Reich created together would continue to be attributed as their work, as Mies granted Lilly Reich unrestricted power of attorney to act on his behalf before she left the US. While Lilly Reich might have been able to legally defend the copyright on the furniture she collaboratively designed with Mies, her role in designing some of the most iconic tubular steel furniture within the cannon of midcentury design, such as the Barcelona Chair, would also be obfuscated.

Materialization of a Neglected Authorship lacks information on Lilly Reich’s personal life. Readers won’t find anything resembling historical fiction, or the characters within it. This is a relief. In a world of fanciful accounts of the hidden lives of the women who worked with (or against) or were loved and scorned by the world’s most famous architects, women often come off as scraggily spinsters, lovestruck pushovers, scorned lovers, or a combination of all three. Examples include Mamah Borthwick Cheney’s character in Nancy Horan’s Loving Frank, or Dr. Edith Farnsworth’s character in Alex Beam’s Broken Glass. In both of these books, the genius of their male main characters, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe respectively, outshine their disheveled appearances, ethical failings, and arrogance to become bloated objects of desire for women who, despite being educated and independent, are hopelessly infatuated with over churlish, petulant men. Martinez de Guereñu doesn’t entertain any of this at all in terms of Lilly Reich, and it’s refreshing to read a book devoid of gendered narratives or shock value. Instead, she allows Lilly Reich to be understood for who she was at the most important point in her career: a woman who was so incredibly good at her job that she was sent to another country to represent her own. Martinez de Guereñu allows Reich to shine brightly and clearly, as a professional without scandal or sensationalism in the context of the more well-known man that she is connected to.

Lilly Reich’s story as a professional exhibition architect is particularly significant in the current moment, as biennials and exhibitions have become an important component of the work of architects and architectural designers. There is much to learn in terms of Reich’s approach to both the exhibition generally, and the pavilion specifically. The pavilion played a critical part in the 1929 International Exhibition in Barcelona, to Lilly Reich and to Mies van der Rohe historically, and to those that participate in the biennial and exhibition circuit today. As creative director of the German section of the 1929 International Exhibition, Reich had leadership, organizational competence, and design skills, all vital attributes to a designer’s successful participation in an exhibition or biennial.

Towards the end of Lilly Reich’s life, we learn through Martinez de Guereñu’s excellent investigations into her correspondence, that Reich began calling herself an “Architecktin” (architect). Like Mies, surprisingly, Lilly Reich never went to architecture school and was never licensed. Yet Mies was, and is, naturally accepted under that title. Regarding this, Martinez de Guereñu writes “Reich’s choice to adopt the title at the end of her career, despite the lack of societal recognition she had to endure, can be read as a quiet but determined assertion of her professional identity. It was perhaps, a final gesture of self-affirmation, made all the more meaningful in light of her efforts to preserve the legacy of another architect.”