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Dietrich Neumann (ed) Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Villa in Gubin History and Reconstruction With contributions by Ivan Brambilla, Annegret Burg, Florian Mausbach, Therese Mausbach, Dietrich Neumann, Fritz Neumeyer, Lars Scharnholz 210 × 230 mm, 176 pages, 210 images, Softcover ISBN 978-3-86922-819-8 (English) ISBN 978-3-86922-829-7 (German, hardcover edition) ISBN 978-3-86922-594-4 (Polish) EUR 28.00 September 2023. DOM publishers, Berlin

New from DOM publishers:

Dietrich Neumann (ed)

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Villa Wolf in Gubin

History and Reconstruction

Villa Wolf in Gubin, built between 1925 and 1927, was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s first decidedly modern building and is hailed as a key project in his oeuvre. The residential building was destroyed at the end of the Second World War and in the immediate post-war period.

This volume, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Villa in Gubin, presents the history of the Villa Wolf and documents the 2021 excavation of the remaining basement and foundations. Alongside historic documentation, photographs, and drawings it also contains a graphic reconstruction as a prerequisite for the building’s reconstruction, as well as comprehensive contributions on the creation of the villa, its placement within van der Rohe’s work, and reception of the building which was built high above the banks of the Lusatian Neisse River. As the title is intended as the basis for the planned reconstruction, it also looks at the subject of reconstructing lost Modernist buildings.

The building practice of Mies van der Rohe – who is internationally known for his visionary glass skyscrapers and concrete buildings – remained conventional for a long time. It was only when he was almost forty that he suggested a radical reinterpretation of the upper-class residential building to his clients, the Wolf family: an open, diagonal sequence of rooms on the garden side, with the cubically-towered areas of the utility rooms and bedrooms next to it. This organisation of spaces which flow into one another, and in which walls were not seen as dividers but instead as arranging elements, was the key part of Mies’ new concept of space – actually a continuum of interlinked spaces, which are only properly experienced by traversing them. This comprehension of space was further developed in successor buildings, such as the German Pavilion in Barcelona (1928–1929) and Villa Tugendhat in Brno (1929–1930). Unfortunately, the success of these later projects, which were also destroyed but then reconstructed, overshadowed the reception of the Villa Wolf.

The title is part of an initiative to reconstruct the Villa Wolf and is published in English, Polish and German language editions.

 

All images: © DOM publishers