The Modern Interior

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apartments he designed for the Weissenhof Siedling had movable walls
within them. Mies’s full realization of fluid space in a residential setting
came, however, with the open layout of the interior of a model house he
designed, with Reich, for the Berlin Building Exhibition of 1931. 16 The
architect supplemented his use of open floor plans and free-standing,
movable wall elements, with his furniture items. The effects of the
abstract lines, surfaces and masses that they provided added to the spatial
sophistication of his interiors. Often with Reich, he designed many of
his own pieces of furniture for use within his own interior spaces. Like Le
Corbusier, and undoubtedly for the same reasons, he introduced club
armchairs into a number of his spaces, complementing them with his
own designs, many of them made from tubular steel. His use of daybeds
in living spaces suggested the mobile, modern lifestyles of their inhabitants.
In 1929 Mies created a little pavilion intended solely as a reception
space through which the King of Spain would make his entrance to the
International Barcelona Exhibition of which the pavilion was a part. The
sophisticated, open-plan building he created rested on slim steel columns
and consisted of free-standing walls made of different kinds of marble
and glass, forming a circulation space for the king and his entourage. The
An interior of the Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois, designed by Mies van der Rohe,
1945–51, showing Edith Farnsworth’s own furnishings.