simplicity love: Mies 1:1 Golf Club Project, Germany

Golf Club Project on the outskirts of Krefeld, Germany, is a temporary wooden pavilion based on a design by Mies van der Rohe, which was never built.

Photo © Heiner Engbrocks

More than 80 years ago (1930), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe took part in a competition for the design of a club house for the newly founded Krefeld Golf Club. Due to the Great Depression, however, the house was never built.

It has been realized in May 2013 as a walkable 1:1 architecture model on the original site under the artistic directorship of Belgian architecture office Robbrecht en Daem architecten. The installation of 84 by 87 m is conceived as a life-size model whose abstraction brings out the essence of Mies’s architecture and spatial concepts.

MIES 1:1 Golf Club Project will be open to the public until 27 October 2013.

Photo © Heiner Engbrocks

Photography © Thomas Mayer | Heiner Engbrocks | Franky Larousselle

Description from Robbrecht en Daem architecten:

In the summer of 2013 Robbrecht en Daem architecten realizes a temporary pavilion based on a competition design by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930. The design, a clubhouse for a golf course in the gently rolling countryside around the former industrial city of Krefeld, mGermany, was never built at the time it was designed.

Christiane Lange, art historian and curator for ProjektMIK, invited Robbrecht en Daem architecten to design an objet d’architecture on the basis of the unpublished historical sketches of the project that were found in the Mies van der Rohe Archive (MoMA) in New York. The temporary installation resulting from this commission is open for viewing from 26 May to 27 October 2013 at the original site of Mies’s project.

The 84 by 87 metre installation is built primarily in wood. It is a life-size model revealing the essence of Mies’s architecture through its abstraction. The pavilion is temporarily enriching the architectural heritage of a city that is known for being home to two of Mies’s other remarkable buildings: the double project ‘Haus Lange’ and ‘Haus Esters’.