Student Project for Concert Hall, Perspective Collage

In 1942 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his students began working on a conceptual design for a concert hall, which would have a profound influence on the architect’s development of open-plan pavilions. In the work seen here, Mies’s student Daniel Brenner cited Albert Kahn’s 1937 aircraft factory as a specific inspiration for this type of clear-span construction: an image of this open industrial structure forms the photographic support for the collage. Mies was fascinated with American building methods and the economical language of technology as important symbols of their time.