https://circarq.wordpress.com/2019/11/17/lilly-reich-1885-1947/
https://circarq.wordpress.com/2019/11/17/lilly-reich-1885-1947/
https://circarq.wordpress.com/2019/11/17/lilly-reich-1885-1947/
(3/2/2022)
Work
The Velvet and Silk Cafe
Date of production: 1927
Types of works
Graphic work
Genres
Art > Architecture > Interior design
Art > Object design
Socio-cultural movements
Late modern period / Contemporary period > Artistic movements since the end of the 19th century > Rationalist architecture / Modern movement > Bauhaus
Late modern period / Contemporary period > Artistic movements since the end of the 19th century > Rationalist architecture / Modern movement
Late modern period / Contemporary period > Artistic movements since the end of the 19th century > Art from the first third of the 20th century
Works
Information about the work and context of creation
The "Velvet and Silk Cafe" is designed by Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich for the "Die Mode der Dame" (Lady's Fashion) exhibition, held in Berlin during 1927 at the Funkturmhalle (Hall of the Radio Towel), an avant-garde pavilion built in 1924 by Heinrich Straumer at the fairgrounds.
The cafe is installed at one of the ends of the pavilion. Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich propose a singular and experimental space based on open plan ideas in an area of around 21×31 meters (651m2), the visible area of the cafe. The space receives natural light from above from the upper side windows of the trapezoidal porch, and creates a spacious space with great ambient and light quality.
Mies and Lilly propose an open plan space, creating areas with large silk, rayon and velvet curtains, hung from tubular chromed steel structures, placed orthogonally.
The materials are exhibited in an enhancement of the material, fleeing from any type of ornamentation, in all its dimensions, mounted like canvases on apparent structures. They are dematerialized by their chromed steel mirror finish, with a tubular section, formed by some frames whose horizontal bar stretches the fabrics that support light structures anchored to the ground, with a minimum section. Silk and velvet cloth, as well as other fabrics in the industry, are arranged independently and orthogonally. The structures become independent, overflowing the virtual floor plan that supports the scene, in a kind of eccentric and rotational movement, which offers the visitor a non-directional route, but a random and free one.
Together with Lilly Reich, within the modern movement in architecture, we find pioneering architects and designers of the time: the Irish Eileen Gray, Truus Schröder (co-author, together with Gerrit Rietveld, of the famous Schröeder house), Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (with her extensive work in social housing and her obsession with facilitating women's work inside the home so that they have more free time); the Finnish Elissa Mäkiniemi; the Danish Ragna Grubb, interested in social housing; the French Charlotte Perriand; or the Chinese American Anne Tyng, co-author with Louis Khan of the most significant buildings of the Khan office in the 50s in the USA, among others.
Indications
-History of art
-Architecture
-Industrial design
-Furniture design
-Technologies