When Mies Designed a Drive-in

As I’ve often claimed, designing a gas station (a prototype, say, for a national brand rollout) would have more impact on more people than any museum or city hall or library ever could. If the success of architecture is measured by the number of people’s lives improved (and why not) you simply can’t beat mass market design, in whatever form it takes. It may not make the history books, but in terms of pure transformative power it is unequalled.

Given that, I’m not sure how I missed the (unbuilt) fast food drive-in that Mies van der Rohe (yes, that MvdR; of Barcelona Chair, Seagram Building and Farnsworth House fame) designed for an Indianapolis restaurant and theater owner. Then there’s that gas station outside Montreal, which was actually built and survives as (perhaps more appropriately) a community center. And the glass house for the owner of the fast food joint (not built, though it would have preceded the Farnsworth House). And these were not just throw aways; any of them fully realized would have shifted not only the history of architecture, and Mies’s place in it, but the panorama of the American roadway.

Joseph Cantor, who owned drive-ins, movie theaters and roller rinks in Indianapolis, said “the best architect in the world doesn’t charge me more than any other architect” and hired Mies. I certainly hope that’s not true, but in those days there was a schedule of fees ‘suggested’ by the AIA that defined acceptable percentage fees architects could charge. In 1971 that was deemed to violate the Sherman Act (anti-trust laws) but the idea that the best architect in the world charged no more than the worst is offensive to my sense of meritocratic achievement. Not to mention market forces.

But hire him he did, and Mies’s sketches and drawings and model photos have him dealing with issues he never touched before or again; like how massive signage might work on a building seen at 60mph. Or parking right up against a glass wall under an outsized cantilever. Or a transparent glass box that included a back of house restaurant kitchen. It would have been great to see what Mies would do with the most American of inventions; food served to be eaten in a car (or any building that was approached by car, for that matter).

Architects can be an imperious lot, and Mies had those pretentions as much as anyone. He was born Ludwig Mies, which translates roughly as ‘Famously Lousy Warrior’. Just like so many of the most famous architects (Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, Frank Gehry and especially Craig Ellwood*) he needed a name upgrade. ‘Von der’ was reserved, in Germany, for those with provable noble blood and illegal for others to use. He cleverly used ‘van der’ the Dutch version, eliding the prohibited usage by one letter (one small vertical stroke in some modern san serif lower case typefaces. Well Futura.) and grafted on his mother’s maiden name Rohe. It’s doubly clever, as Rohe is not a place but an adaptation of the French Roi, or king. Mies was still ‘bad’ or ‘lousy’ or ‘rotten’ but at least he got as many upper class references in there as possible. Plus he married the daughter of a rich industrialist. So check and mate.

[Working in Italy I was translating, via Google translate, some text that included the name of our friend and collaborator Andrea Grassi…‘Andy Fat’ was automatically substituted and I’ll never look at that name the same way again. And to be clear, I am not suggesting that changing ones name is a gateway to fame as an architect. Otherwise I might be “Il Majesto” or “Franck Lord Right”]

As Mies molted from a stone craftsman to a professional with regal pretensions (but without the educational pedigree that usually accompanies the change) he adopted suitably elegant materials in his work; huge sheets of marble, chrome or polished stainless steel, leather, travertine, bronze and rare woods. And like him (imposing and taciturn with erect posture) his work isn’t small and efficient, it’s grand and luxurious. The Barcelona chair is enormous and heavy compared to Corb’s (and Charlotte Perriand’s) Le Petit Confort (well, the name says it all) and the Mies daybed is like an ocean liner compared to the shapely LC4 chaise.

While all early modern architects promoted their work to improve the domestic life of the unwashed masses, they all built their signature works for captains of industry. That isn’t to say they didn’t try (or that housing then didn’t need massive improvement); the 1927 Weissenhof Seidlung in Stuttgart, organized by Mies included virtually every other (modern) architect of note, including Le Corbusier, JJP Oud, Gropius, Behrens, Scharoun, Mart Stam, Hilberseimer, Max Taut and Poelzig and more.

Hygienic homes for Volk was the cover for promoting a style they all wanted to develop for, or in spite of, the actual population’s desires.

Corb did design a community at Pessac, a genuinely fleshed out estate of worker housing, near the local sugar factory. It was during the period where he, as Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, worked out his ideas; where he started as a disciple of Perret (employing modernized cornices and vertical windows and even pitched roofs — gasp!) but ended as a fully formed modernist. He also started as a somewhat traditional urbanist and ended, after the 14 years it took to develop the ideas to design and build the last of the units, a more convinced suburbanist. The power of the individual home to better work out his ideas was becoming apparent. While he did return to multiple housing, it was a long wait.

Mies had presided over the end of the Bauhaus in 1933, closed by the Nazi regime, but even then he didn’t leave Germany. He spent time doggedly trying to convince the Nazis (mostly through Goebbels, a man who understood image) that modern architecture was indeed the only appropriate expression of the Reich. He even shifted his work, just a tad, to better reflect what was becoming the accepted visual style a la Leni Riefenstahl and Albert Speer. He didn’t care that it was for the Nazi’s, just that he was in command. It didn’t work, and he fled in 1939, just in time, to Chicago.

Mies, who created one of only 2 genuinely multiple housing projects for Weissenhof, was equally attracted to individual homes (with their infinitely expandable budgets), but perhaps not to the auto as an integral part of living, an American invention. He didn’t own a car until the 1950’s and even then may have been driven around more than self-motoring. But Mies liked money and he liked to produce work, so when Joseph Cantor, a wealthy Indianapolis theater owner, contacted him he agreed to work on the drive-in fast food restaurant, and later on the client’s private home (or perhaps the two were bundled by Mies, it is not clear).

The drive-in restaurant, besides being a very Miesian building, is clever in both the distant view from the highway and the closeup under its huge suspended roof. From the highway the elements above the roofline were primary; the gigantic open steel trusses and the vertical elements and sign supports, as well as the signs themselves. I am sure that Mies never had to deal with gigantic building signs! He wasn’t a part of DeStijl where big signs seemed like part of the language, but he did it with the same gravity he applied to all his work.

In addition to the trusses there are 2–4 vertical (seemingly illuminated) columns and in some versions they support enormous signage. The scale of the trusses and the spans is breathtaking; we are looking at 150’-200’ in length and about a 100’ in width including the 25’-30’ cantilevers! That’s 15,000–20,000sf of completely column free space under a single floating plane of a roof with just 4 columns and wrapped by a glass wall.

At night the lighting would create an immense glow of illuminated activity in the transparent box tucked under the roof.

Compared to what we have become accustomed to (and remember that Howard Johnson’s orange roof was brand new at this point) Cantor’s restaurant would be as if it was from Mars. In 1950’s America it might have completely reshaped roadside retail. If that seems a bit ambitious, remember what a single Mies building did to reshape urban towers; the Seagram Building was, and remains, the starting point for all vertical work and housing architecture.

It’s not that towers didn’t exist before that; The Woolworth Building of 1913 was half again as tall but never started a run on gothic skyscrapers. Nor did The Chrysler or Empire State Buildings create a universal style. Seagram did that almost alone. There was Lever House and the UN Secretariat building, but each was less a model for the future than slightly eccentric solutions for very particular sites. Seagram was the first building that acted as a pattern book for a generation of glass towers, and Cantor’s drive in could have done the same.

Cantor started with the nebulous name ‘Fairpost’ and fortunately seems to have morphed into HI WAY between the sketches and the completed scale model. The shorter the name the taller the letters can be in a given space, so HI WAY really worked. Plus, every letter seemed to echo some part of the exposed steel structure and the snappy reference to roads and to quality endowed it with multiple layers and a sense, like the building, of both refinement and gutsy simplicity.

The parking/dining interface, shown separated by huge sheets of clear glass, didn’t really acknowledge headlights or any of the other specificities of 1940’s autos, but then cars weren’t really Mies’s thing. Exiting one’s car under a huge canopy, protected from the weather, without those pesky columns to dodge, would have been simply grand. And a 100’ x 150’ suspended plane would have been impressive even to those seeking a quick meal.

The scale of HI WAY was considerably larger than what we see today, maybe 3 to 4 times larger. Drive in restaurants hadn’t quite been defined in the late 1940’s, in fact cars were just beginning to develop the style that we think of as post war. Car production stopped entirely from 1942–1945, and those cars produced in 1946 were essentially unchanged from pre-war designs. It wasn’t until the early 1950’s that cars became the colorful, high style symbols of status and modernity that we think of as mid-century auto design. Cantor’s drive in was perfectly ahead of its time.

20 years later the Montreal gas station (that may have been designed principally by Mies, or possibly by his staff; it was near the end of Mies’s life) was perhaps less heroic but still a far cry from anything we have seen. First, it was black. Of all the brand colors oil companies claimed, not surprisingly black was not among them. Black must have been thought to be a reminder of soot, or the blackness of oil.

[n.b. Richard Wilson’s amazing installations of black, waist height, room filling horizontal mirrors have a surprise. There’s always a slot constructed so you can be surrounded by the eerie reflection, and that’s when you realize it’s a pool of black oil. It doesn’t move, it perfectly fills the room and has only a slight telltale aroma.]

But it works. While the frame is black, as are all the mullions, the ceiling, covering inside and out, is white, with lines of fluorescent tubes. It’s elegant, kind of disappears a bit, and is remarkably cheery when under the enormous roof. The innovation is not just color, but the fact that the roof covers 2 pavilions; one in glass (the sales area, with Mies chairs!) and one partially solid (the car repair bays).

The pumps were custom designed to look like large kitchen island counters, with the nozzles barely a feature. It was so controlled and machine-like, so much a building as opposed to a gas station, that it still, more than 50 years later, looks perfectly modern. Contrast it with the ‘innovative’ stations of the day, and even those today and it more than stands up.

As with most Mies buildings, once you see it the design seems inevitable. There is a way in which the best of his work (and these might have fallen within that canon) seems to define a world in which we aspire to live. It’s not just a gas station, or office tower, or glass house; it’s a universe defined in part by the concatenation of historical echoes that inhabit the work. From Schinkel’s precision-made rethinking of classicism to Behren’s foray into less historically determined formal language to Mies (and from Behrens studio to Le Corbusier and Gropius as well) there is a continual refinement towards the fundamental.

Mies famously saying ‘less is more’ is about his stripping away of everything except the fundamentals. Frame, plane, glass (enclosure), vertical surface. Getting to that point took decades of reductivism. Ironically the reduction doesn’t remove the luxury or grandeur, it seems to increase them. Rather than a profusion of detail, luxury is redefined in proportions, materials, precision and elegance. It’s why his work is so easy to copy yet so hard to match; it only looks simple.

The house for Joseph Cantor is much more complex (programmatically and as a design) than, say, the Farnworth House. It’s no accident that the most famous glass houses were for single owners. Phil (Johnson) and Edith (Farnsworth) had no reason for doors or walls while the Cantor house had three bedrooms, plus help’s quarters, garage, etc. It was a complex, not an object.

Mies designed, in the 1930’s, a series of courtyard houses as a way to experiment with transparency while acknowledging smaller, urban and suburban sites. His Cantor house, only 10 years later, references those houses, but slips the transparent box partially out of the courtyard. It’s a bit like opening a drawer or sliding a book out of a slipcase. Slipcase is a perfect name for the scheme, in which the glass box is precisely the same dimensions as the walled courtyard but slid out of it to make both a perfect courtyard and a crystalline house. The expansive roof stretches even further and Mies, in sketches, pretends that the cantilevers can extend without supports, but the plan (a more serious attempt at constructability) gives that ruse away.

The house, poised between an old world and a new one, hasn’t quite resolved the issues of formal vs casual entrance, or how servants interact with families, or guests vs family members. These issues, like the cars of the same period, are nearly identical to pre-war arrangements, but Mies is searching for a new set of relationships, as yet undefined by society.

These projects are a window into architecture catching up with life. Or life as informed by architecture. The dialectic is interesting.

But as Mies said “I don’t want to be interesting. I want to be good.”

*Real names: Charles-Eduoard Jeanneret, Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky, Frank Goldberg, Jon Nelson Burke

Postscript: There was an attempt to build the Mies design, by a student who based his thesis on Cantors restaurant, but later built a bank in the same model. It proves how anyone can copy Mies, but no one could be Mies. The colors (brown!?) the details, the scale and every choice of detail belies the derivative and graceless execution.

Later, just to attempt the hybrid, the bank was later a gas station and a mini-Mies was added for the pump canopy.

More is not more, as this proves.