Mies and Nietzsche

In architecture the pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his will to power, assume a visible form.

F.W. Nietzsche (1844 – 1900)

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Mies and Taoism

Thirty spokes converge on a hub
but it's the emptiness
that makes a wheel work
pots are fashioned from clay
but it's the hollow
that makes a pot work
windows and doors are carved for a house
but it's the spaces
that make a house work
existence makes something useful
but nonexistence makes it work

Great understanding is broad and unhurried;
small understanding is cramped and busy.

Great words are bright and open;
small words are chit and chat.
— from Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters (tr. David Hinton)
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Mies and Wagner

Woglinde in The Ring:

Only he who forswears
love's power,
only he who forfeits
love's delight,
only he can attain the magic
to fashion the gold into a ring.

It's not about pretty. You have to give something up - beauty? - to get to something higher.
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Mies and de Tocqueville

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that when a people are beset by anxiety:

“The taste for public tranquility then becomes a blind passion, and the citizens are liable to conceive a most inordinate devotion to order.”

Mies and Chinese Philosophy

In Chinese Philosophy, the center of the pot,

the emptiness it contains,

is its very essence.

digi-Mies

The 0's and 1's of digital language remind that at Mies' masterpiece residential highrise, 860-880 Lake Shore Drive, there are 3,000 windows for the residential units. But only two types. Narrow and wide.

It's all in how you arrange them.

Why Mies might have liked Chicago

"Chicago was  nowhere.  It had no setting.  It was something released into American space."

-Saul Bellow