Featuring a catalogue of works and new photography, Mies van der Rohe is an ambitious critical monograph that aims to challenge the established narrative of this seminal architect. Dietrich Neumann takes a nonhagiographic approach, driven by the importance of context—social, political, and architectural—for understanding the architect’s life and work. Organized chronologically, Neumann consults contemporary responses to Mies’s work, competition entries, building codes, structural and material qualities of built forms, and detailed looks at the work on the drafting table in Mies’s office and those of his collaborators. He attributes two previously unknown houses to Mies and several smaller projects; these further complicate typical biographies of Mies which present his work as a series of masterpieces. Neumann notably provides a nuanced portrait of Mies’s relationship with his benefactors, including his refusal to take a stand against the Nazi government for fear that doing so would compromise any potential commissions.

Rebecca Louise Carter
July 2019
University of Chicago Press
Co-winner, 2020 Edie Turner First-Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing

Reconstructing Architecture: Sifting through visual language in the built environment can decode messages and ideas.

Itohan Osayimwese is an architectural historian at Brown, but she works much like an archaeologist, sifting through visual language to see how it is translated into messages and ideas. Osayimwese believes that many people still don’t think of Germany as a colonial power of the 19th century and do not understand the country’s modern architectural history in relation to larger developments worldwide. When Osayimwese, an assistant professor of history of art and architecture, did the research for what became the book Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany, she aimed at widening the conceptual and geographic lens of architectural history.

The Society of Architectural Historians is pleased to announce the 2019 class of SAH Fellows. Dolores Hayden, David Van Zanten, Dietrich Neumann and Richard Guy Wilson will be inducted as Fellows of the Society of Architectural Historians on Thursday, April 25, 2019, during the SAH 72nd Annual International Conference awards ceremony in Providence, Rhode Island. SAH Fellows are individuals who have distinguished themselves by a lifetime of significant contributions to the field of architectural history, such as scholarship, service to SAH or stewardship of the built environment.