Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Architecture’s Spatial Distraction: The Hofhauser Sketch of c. 1935
- Publisher:
- Lund Humphries
- Publication Type:
- Chapter
- Citation:
- Architecture Through Drawing, 2019, pp. 40-51
- Issue Date:
- 2019
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An architect’s design sketches are rarely questioned for repurposing drawing conventions that are otherwise common to the profession. However, an architect’s sketches are most often characterised in some way by techniques and conventions underpinning perspective, axonometry or orthography. These conventions define certain ways of thinking about architecture.Through an investigation of a single sketch by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe titled Hofhäuser (Court Houses), completed around 1935, this chapter questions the purpose of framing architectural ideas through perspectival techniques. What these techniques offer is the capacity for the architect’s design sketch to reinforce architecture’s ordered regularity. For Mies, this attribute supported a specific notion of spatial and material value. In his sketch, perspectival conventions equally reflect a desire for certain human values to be recognised by the viewer. Certain moral inferences within his approach to representation have a mirroring effect on viewer comprehension. The Hofhäuser sketch provides the expectation that potential occupants of his architecture and the architecture itself will unite to reflect the same moral values.
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