| The Case of the Missing Mies |
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| By Emily Gold Boutilier | ||||
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Last year, deepinside the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Dietrich Neumann made a curious discovery. A professor of architecture, Neumann was poring over the archive of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the father of modernist architecture, when he opened a folder containing a series of letters. Among them was a 1923 note to Mies from a friend named Gerhard Severain. The missive asked for help in designing a house in Wiesbaden, Germany, for one of Severain’s friends, a British woman named Ada Ryder.
Mary Beth Meehan (Neumann)
Dietrich Neumann
Mies replied with drawings and plans. Severain, however, wrote back to say the house would not be built; the deal to buy the land had fallen through. As far as history was concerned, the story had ended there. Now, thanks to Neumann, history’s been revised. Filed in a different folder, the professor found a letter that everyone else had somehow overlooked. This note said that Ryder had in fact bought the land, and that the first floor of the house was already complete. The detective work began. Neumann uncovered the e-mail address of an architect in Wiesbaden with the surname Severain. The man, it turned out, was Gerhard Severain’s grandson. He invited Neumann to Wiesbaden, a city in the central part of the country, to dig through a box of his grandfather’s belongings. In the box, Neumann and the younger Severain found a photograph with a familiar name—Ada Ryder—written on the back, along with a Wiesbaden address. Severain knew the street. When he and Neumann went there, they easily recognized the house from the drawings, even though a slanted roof had been used to replace the original flat one. “It was really one of those great moments,” Neumann says. “It’s like finding an unknown van Gogh painting or a Mozart opera nobody knew about.”
Mary Beth Meehan (Neumann)
Dietrich Neumann found this photograph of a Mies van der Rohe house. It helped lead him to the house itself.
Widely considered one of the greatest architects of the twentieth century, Mies began his career designing traditional German homes with steep roofs and gables. He went on to renounce all ornament. His most famous buildings are the German Pavilion in Barcelona, with its simple design and flat roof, and the glass-and-steel Seagram Building in New York City. Neumann describes the two-story Wiesbaden house as a “first, and somewhat timid, attempt to be a modern architect.” It includes some modern elements, such as the original flat roof, which coexist with more traditional ornamental flourishes. “It’s not a great house, quite frankly,” Neumann says. “But for scholars, it’s a missing link between his early style and his mature style.” Neumann is now completing a book on Mies. In fact, his work in the archive began as research funded by a $5,000 grant from literary agent Wendy Strothman ’72, who is secretary of the Brown Corporation. In March, Neumann returned to Wiesbaden to take part in a press conference about the house. The news made the front page of many German newspapers.
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