PART 2 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe / Aya Soika

This is PART 2 of the Podcast episode about Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It puts a magnifying glass over a specific period of time in Mies’s life: his commissions for the Nazis after the Bauhaus had closed in July 1933 and his final emigration to the US in 1938. For this episode, the art-historian Aya Soika shares her expertise. She published a book about this time of Mies’s life with the title „Mies van der Rohe in the Third Reich. The Brussels Project, 1934" (link in the show notes). Aya Soika doesn’t denounce Mies van der Rohe for his commissions for the Nazis but emphasizes the circumstances in which Mies found himself as a modern architect and as a person that didn’t necessarily want to leave his home. But she also underlines his naivety in thinking that as an architect he could be apolitical. Although Mies never won the competition and the pavilion was never even built due to a financial lack of Nazi Germany to come up with enough foreign currency, this project – and some others – that Mies van der Rohe accepted to plan for the Nazis, those projects were, of course, hotly disputed by architecture historians. And what did Mies himself say about this after the end of the Second World War? Well, that’s what you will find out in the 2nd part of my podcast about Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.