Museum Without Walls

By ROBERT HUGHES

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who died four years ago at the age of 83, was by general consent one of the three grand masters of early modern architecture, along with Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. Mies' pure, honed elegance, as seen everywhere in his works, from his famous Barcelona chair (1929) to his glass-curtain walls, has transformed the appearance of every major city on earth. No modern architect has been more widely (or in most cases more clumsily) imitated.

Until 1958, when the success of his bronze Seagram building in Manhattan changed Mies from the architects' architect to something of a general cult figure, his output of finished structures was quite small. But his final years were full of projects, the last of which is the Brown Wing of Houston's Museum of Fine Arts, which officially opens next January. Completed after his death, it was previewed last fortnight by a black-tie party of more than a thousand Texans. It is the fourth museum building by a leading international architect to rise in Texas in the past year (the other three are Louis Kahn's barrel-vaulted Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth [TIME, Jan. 15], Philip Johnson's white cubist Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi and Edward Durell Stone's stark brick Amarillo Art Center). Certainly the Mies building is the most problematic-- an anthology of his vices and virtues.

One has a right to expect fine detail from Mies, and the Houston museum is no letdown; every junction is the vehicle of his meticulousness, proclaiming that a millimeter's change in the thickness of a mullion flange would read as a loss. The ground-floor film and lecture theater, with its black seats and dark teak rear wall, is a jewel of sober, lucid design. But on the large scale, all this is lost. Apart from the Houston Astrodome, one could barely imagine a less sympathetic space for showing art than Mies' vast curving hall, longer than a football field and 22 ft. high. "It's like trying to make the rotunda at the National Gallery into an intimate space," says E.R. Carmean, the museum's curator of 20th century art.

Lofty Unconcern. Some of the impracticality of this august airport lounge is due to Mies' staff, who with the fervor of acolytes refused to "compromise" an inch on the maestro's plans. Hence the stiff lighting, the patchy services (such as an elevator too small for large-scale paintings) and, worst of all, the absence of any walls to hang pictures on. Three sides of the hall are glass; the fourth is an open internal balcony. Placing screen walls to carry paintings will be a headache for curators--especially since the Texas daylight, flooding through that glass acreage, creates pockets of glare and shadow.

In short, it seems that Mies, like his opponent Frank Lloyd Wright in the snailly windings of the Guggenheim Museum, felt a lofty unconcern verging on arrogance toward the needs of arts other than his own. Every grand old man has a prescriptive right to his cliches. But few have exercised it with more ruthlessness than Mies van der Rohe in this, his last building.

.Robert Hughes

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