Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Villa Wolf in Gubin: History and Reconstruction
Villa Wolf in Guben (now Gubin), built between 1925 and 1927, was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s first decidedly modern building.
The residential building was destroyed at the end of the Second World War and in the immediate post-war period. 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. With Villa Wolf, he presented a radical reinterpretation of the upper-class residential building: an open, diagonal sequence of rooms on the garden side, with the cubically-towered areas of the utility rooms and bedrooms next to it. The reception of the building was overshadowed by the great success of Mies van der Rohe’s successor buildings, such as the German Pavilion in Barcelona (1928–1929) and Villa Tugendhat in Brno (1929–1930). This volume presents the history of Villa Wolf in Gubin and documents the recent excavation of the basement as well as the graphic reconstruction as a prerequisite for the building’s reconstruction.
Dietrich Neumann (*1956) is Professor of Modern Architectural History at Brown University in Providence, USA, and Director of the John Nicholas Brown Centre for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage. He was trained as an architect and historian in Munich and London (AA) and held visiting professorships at Yale University and the University of Porto. He has worked on building types and materials, film sets and architectural illumination, as well as on Richard Neutra and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. He was a fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, the American Academies in Berlin and Rome, and has received several awards for his research from the Society of Architectural Historians. He was President of the society from 2008 to 2010 and was elected a fellow in 2019. He is a member of the Architecture and Design Committee at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and president of Docomomo New England.
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