Progetti di musei d’arte di Brenner, Jansone e Lippert, e principi estetici della didattica di Mies

Résumé En

When, in 1938, Mies began teaching in the Department of Architecture at the Armour Institute (later the Illinois Institute of Technology), he defined a programme that would make technical and industrial developments in the United States problematic and theoretical. Students attending the Department of Architecture, in which Hilberseimer and Peterhans also teach, are confronted with questions of the most basic geometric form of the framework, with the expressive essence of materials, and experiment with the use of overlapping planes, assembled to reveal a sense of space, through models, technical drawings and collages. Some of the exercises concern the relationship between painting, sculpture and architecture, and are transformed into museum or art centre projects. In the essay, the projects for exhibition spaces drawn up by Brenner, Jansone and Lippert for the Master of Science in Architecture are analysed from archive documents. The spatial, structural and material characteristics of these projects are reconstructed, as well as their relationships to the programmes of the Department of Architecture, to the design processes suggested by Mies, to Le Corbusier’s projects for museums and to the Museum for a Small City designed by Mies together with Danforth.The theses of Brenner, Jansone and Lippert, united by the choice of a museum system that transfigures Le Corbusier’s model in the light of Mies’s vision, appear to be decisive documents not only for understanding the Department of Architecture’s didactic orientations, but also for accessing Mies’s unspeakable art of tracing and arranging lines and planes in space.