Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Decorative Arts)



 


 


 


 

Kunstgewerbemuseum is the Museum of Decorative Arts Located on Matthäikirchplatz in the heart of Berlin. It is the oldest of its kind still in existence and open to public in Germany. The Museum represents world-famous European arts and crafts from the middle ages to the present day. Also, it holds an extraordinary collection of fashion and design. As it holds the furniture built and designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. However, the Kunstgewerbemuseum presents features of its interior design from the 16th to 18th centuries. The building finished its construction in 1985 which was designed by Rolf Gutbrod. Kunstgewerbemuseum has organized a series of special exhibitions to show furniture that was designed for regular households. The few highlights of the exhibition are the sitting and reclining furniture by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. He was a German-American architect born in March 27, 1886 and died on August 17, 1969. He created the world-famous furniture – The Barcelona chair, Tugendhat chair & Barcelona couch, these chairs have many things in common such as the leather straps that are held on by 72 screws each tapped and screwed into the metal frame. The stainless steel on the chairs are all electrically arc welded and are all hand finished and polished . Besides from the machine used for sewing and welding of the steel most of the chair is hand made and finished with high precision. It is believed that the idea for the chair came from roman folding chairs, which were known as the Curule chair, mainly ruled by Roman aristocracy.

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The chair is thought out to be very well balanced and simplistic; the very form of the chair expresses the highest spirit of the modern era. Even before the Barcelona Chair was designed, Mies was known as a pioneer of modern furniture. He is known to apply all the basic ideas of Bauhaus to all his creations from using simple and clean materials to its 'true' form. This is accomplished by using substances such as stainless steel and plate glass in his buildings and furniture as referred by all Bauhaus architectures "skin and bones" of objects. This chair was actually created when Mies was designing the German Pavilion for the Barcelona exposition. Two of these chairs were made for King Alfonso XIII and his wife to rest while visiting the site.[1] Fun fact about the chair was that its real intention was to bring the visualization of sitting on a real throne to a kingdom. But the royal couple actually never sat on the chairs. In 1930, Mies become the head of Bauhaus school until 1933 when the Nazis forced the shutdown of the art school. The reason for the forced shutdown was because the school was suspected of publishing anti-Nazi propagandas, and many documents that were linking Bauhaus to the Communist party. However, Mies was a stubborn man and believed that he could force his way into the Alfred Rosenberg's office (the conservative minister of culture) from the newly elected Nazi government. Mies made a strong argument for Bauhaus school that it is a supporting force for any culture which brings peace to the community, but the school stayed shut.[2] Mies very much disliked the Nazis for their poor taste and for stopping him from his work for dirty Nazi politics. Nevertheless, Mies was acknowledged about Nazi government attacking his Jewish or left-wing colleagues. Which seemed as a threat to Mies and he finally decided to make his escape from Nazi Germany to the United States of America. This did not stop Mies from his creativity.

After the move to US, he designed the Chicago's twin towers and many other buildings. He was also asked to design a new national gallery here in Berlin that we visited earlier today. Going back to the Barcelona chair, he redesigned it in 1950 and moulded the whole structure in a single piece of stainless steel, leaving behind the bolted design. The chair was patented by Mies in Germany and the United States. Although he sold the patent to Knoll, a furniture company in Europe, who still produces the chair to this day.[3] Ludwig Mies van der Rohe passed away on August 17, 1969, leaving behind key furniture and designs which went on to represent the modern art.



[1] Watson-Smyth, Kate. "The Secret History Of: The Barcelona Chair." The Independent. October 23, 2011. Accessed March 30, 2019. https://www.independent.co.uk/property/interiors/the-secret-history-of-the-barcelona-chair-2289641.html.

[2] Dyckhoff, Tom. "Mies and the Nazis." The Guardian. November 30, 2002. Accessed March 30, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2002/nov/30/architecture.artsfeatures.

[3] Watson-Smyth, Kate. "The Secret History Of: The Barcelona Chair." The Independent. October 23, 2011. Accessed March 30, 2019. https://www.independent.co.uk/property/interiors/the-secret-history-of-the-barcelona-chair-2289641.html.

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