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- Title
Die Instandsetzung von Haus Mosler.
- Authors
Krohn, Carsten
- Abstract
Visitors to Mies van der Rohe’s Mosler House (1924- 1926) in Potsdam today, have no intimation of the comprehensive history of destruction, documented in the book Mies van der Rohe. Frühe Bauten. Probleme der Erhaltung - Probleme der Bewertung. The building appears from the outside almost as when it was constructed. Commissioned by a private client, the architect Uwe Barthel removed all traces of its former use. After the Jewish banking family Mosler had to escape from Germany in 1938, the house served as a Red Cross children’s hospital. In the year 2000 a new owner, a building developer, destroyed a lot of the preserved original surfaces in the house. The building was located for many years in a prohibited zone so hardly any scholar visited it. Through the garden ran the Berlin wall. One of the most amazing details within the house is the placement of two door handles on two different positions of a door. The handle is not filled through the door, as is usual, but it is a specially designed door lock. A unique closing mechanism was developed, so that the handles, which sit on small ledges, have the same distance to the frame. But the renovation of the house, which is inhabited again, caused further alterations. On one side of the house a window has been transformed into a second entrance door. Also a new door has been built between the entrance hall and the library. The profiles of the door are now white and re-designed to mirror the garden doors. A well-preserved door with an enclosed door leaf has been relocated including its frame. This house remains shadowed by the other buildings and projects by Mies. Whoever looks at this building from a stylistic point of view, could describe it as conventional in contrast to the avant-garde modernism of Neues Bauen. But if one considers the way it was organized spatially, how it was proportioned and in respect to the technical craftsmanship of the building, one can also see it as a continuation of his other oeuvre.
- Subjects
GERMANY; DOMESTIC architecture; MIES van der Rohe, Ludwig, 1886-1969; NEUE Sachlichkeit (Architecture); HOUSING rehabilitation; MIES van der Rohe: Fruhe Bauten: Probleme der Erhaltung-Probleme der Bewertung (Book); BARTHEL, Uwe; BUILDING repair; MODERN movement (Architecture)
- Publication
Architectura: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Baukunst, 2014, Issue 2, p117
- ISSN
0044-863X
- Publication type
Article