Mies van der Rohe’s Landhaus Lemke: The simple is difficult

Times were bad when Karl and Martha Lemke approached the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in early 1932 to build a house on their property on the Obersee. In 1932 the low point of the world economic crisis was reached.

Karl Lemke, owner of a flourishing graphics business, wanted, as he told the architect, to build “a small, modest house” and envisaged a budget of just 16,000 Reichsmarks.

Elegant unity of architecture, nature and art

The result was the Landhaus Lemke, the last building executed in Germany by the famous last director of the Bauhaus before he emigrated to the USA. Compared to the houses that Mies was able to build beforehand, the Esters and Lange houses in Krefeld or even the Villa Tugendhat in Brno, the Lemke house is really small. But that doesn’t mean it is of less importance.

Wita Noack writes of the “qualities of Mies’s building” that they “take hold of you, if not even move you. Because in the Lemke country house, simplicity and plainness are coupled with functional functionality in living.” Wita Noack is the manager of the Mies van der Rohe house in Hohenschönhausen.

Since 1992, she has turned the building, which was abused by the Stasi before reunification, into a cultural site that has become an integral part of Berlin’s cultural life. And she wrote about the house. Her work is now available in a new version, equipped with numerous photographs by the photo artist Michael Wesely, which capture the magic of this lake house.

“The center of the house is in the outside space, in the light,” writes Noack. The house with an L-shaped floor plan encloses a corner of the spacious property in such a way that from the three living rooms one cannot help but constantly look out into the garden, a creation of the famous Potsdam garden artist Karl Foerster and his colleague Herta Hammerbacher.

Haus Lemke was just finished in 1933, before the Nazis banned the flat roof. Wita Noack points out the intricacies of the house, which may not be fully apparent when visiting the events of this cultural house; the interior that Mies designed together with Lily Reich has also been lost.

However, a thorough restoration in accordance with the requirements of a listed building in 2000/02 brought back the beauty of the brick facades with the metal frame windows, which are made of bricks that change in color and format, as well as the floors made of oak or slate, and even the specially designed door handles.

This smallest of the Mies houses can be experienced again in its original “simplicity and plainness” – as designed by Mies, who aimed for the essentials of a building, as a condensate of his building ideas.

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