Another YouTube comment, on a video about Mies van der Rohe and minimalism

Stewart Hicks just posted a interesting and also amusingly snarky but also thoughtful video on Mies van der Rohe's architecture at IIT and some of the surrounding and subsequent context, and I wrote a rather long comment that I'm archiving here and sharing for you all.

The video was a bit of an experimental format -- and you might want to go watch it before I spoil the details -- and commenters were mixed on how well it worked. I was responding to a particular comment that said it fell flat and also felt like a cheap take-down of Mies, and Hicks had replied to say that that hadn't been his intention.

My reply:

stewarthicks : I think in some ways the implementation was flawed, in that the "original" video often contained the contradiction of views within itself. You mentioned the tone being a bit uneven in a few spots, and I think some of that was that in parts of it you were genuinely talking about the good things in the architecture, and in parts of it you were talking about how "great" the thermal bridging and rust-stains were. And so the overall video contained a duality of being a "pro vs. con" video and being a "sarcastic criticism supported by thoughtful criticism" video.

With that said, I personally have two orthogonal appreciations for it. First, I enjoyed it as entertainment; it is a visceral delight to see some of these aspects of architecture being so well skewered in the ways that they deserve. Second, I appreciated it as an experiment; even though I agree with [the previous commenter] that it's flawed, it's trying something different and finding out what works and what doesn't, and making something new. That which doesn't change becomes repetitive, and I would guess that even if you don't do another video "like this one", your videos will still be more interesting in the future as a result of this.

Besides which, YouTube videos aren't public buildings; even if it is completely no good at all, it won't destroy a neighborhood in order to doom multiple generations of students to an uncomfortable, badly-climate-controlled, depressing, and terrible classroom experience. So you might as well try some things that are likely to be interesting failures every once in a while.

Meanwhile, I think this video succeeded in one of its goals: I now would be fascinated to see some deeper explorations of a lot of the topics that you touched on here. Certainly the practices of treating vibrant lower-class neighborhoods as tabula rasa to build a sweeping new vision of a mono-plan piece of city didn't start with Mies, or with the builders of IIT. Where did it start? What cultural and architectural forces fed it? Was it as big a thing in European cities as in the U.S., and if so, was it at similar times or much earlier because the cities are older? Then, with Mies and the "minimalist" movement: Insofar as the minimalist movement takes Meis as its patron saint, how much was and is it following what he actually intended, and how much is it a misunderstood and minimalized corruption of his ideas? What are the corruptions missing? This architecture seems to have some commonalities with the Craftsman ideal of "honesty of materials", but also differences in that some commenters mentioned that those steel beams are not actually structural in the way they appear -- how did Mies and its other originators think about that connection? Some other commenters mentioned that one of the things that distinguishes genuine Mies buildings from bad imitations is a precise use of proportion and spatial relationships -- is it perhaps that minimalist buildings are not so much inherently bad but inherently difficult, and so they show shortcomings in design and maintenance far more than maximalist buildings? And perhaps the failings of the IIT campus and surroundings are not because of the minimalism so much as because the minimalism lays bare the places where Mies's architecture missed the mark, and the places where the maintainers and city planners very definitely did?

In any case, I am fascinated by the video many paragraphs after having watched it, and I would be delighted if you were to produce videos going further into any or all of this. Even if, and perhaps especially if, the videos are their own experiments with their own unique and interesting ways of missing some marks.