Room Without Walls
We certainly do not need new idols. But we always need to tell the stories that history has concealed, overlooked, ignored deliberately or out of the habits of the last century. To speak of Lilly Reich is to speak of a history written by men that today needs to be rewritten and retold. She begins studying industrial embroidery and tailoring at the beginning of the century. Her intelligence allows her to understand how an art reserved for women alone could eventually become the perfect key to interior design and subsequently furniture design, focusing on exhibition stands and displays. The art of the century. The turning point, as for so many of her contemporaries, comes in 1908 when she works for a time at the Wiener Werkstätte in Vienna with Josef Hoffmann, absorbing the principles of Arts and Crafts, of anonymous design and of the infinite possibilities available to a designer who can move effortlessly from creating a tablecloth to a sofa. What matters, a cornerstone of her own philosophy too, is an abhorrence of trends, the desire to design time and an absolute dedication to materials: they dictate to you, not the other way around. And so in 1920 she joins the board of the Deutscher Werkbund, becoming the first woman in a leadership role in a world of men alone. She coordinates and designs the spaces for fairs and events organised for German design and products sponsored by the group.
Interior view of the Velvet and Silk Café, designed by Lilly Reich and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Berlin, 1927. Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal.
Then, in 1927, in collaboration with Mies van der Rohe, she creates a work that changed the vision of modern architecture, one in which her contribution is as closely studied and understood by the most attentive scholars as it has remained secondary in the history of architecture: the Velvet and Silk Café, for the fashion and textile trade exhibition in Berlin. For her, the two guiding principles of contemporary retail spaces were already clear a century ago: temporariness and speed of transformation, and cosiness, the sense of being almost embraced in spaces defined not by rigid walls but by enveloping textiles. And so she arranges the central hall, creating soaring spaces configured through curtains of red, black, pinkish, yellow and gold silk and velvet. It took courage to design such a colourful space after the disappointments and discontent of the First World War. The colours of joy and rebirth. This way of seeing spaces profoundly influenced Mies van der Rohe, her lover, since he was married at the time of their relationship, who applied it to all his modernist masterpieces, as in the Barcelona Pavilion. Or, as is evident, in the masterpiece of Villa Tugendhat, designed in 1928 and completed in 1930, where she designs the interiors and furnishings. Soaring walls, sometimes in fabric, sometimes rigid, but accompanying soft forms and capable of being moved. Moreover, the first models of chairs and tables, such as MR10, MR20 and MR60, were designed by her as far as the bent tubing was concerned, using the same technique that had been used at the Velvet and Silk Café for the curtain tracks.
Lilly Reich, Ludwig Hilberseimer (left), and students at the Bauhaus, Berlin, 4 April 1933.
Yet both at the time and still today, they are attributed to Mies van der Rohe alone by the firm that continues to hold the production rights, without even a small note in the description acknowledging a genius of the last century such as Lilly Reich.
She teaches us how textiles can create bonds, spaces, worlds, with a flexibility that allows us to imagine homes without walls.
Lilly Reich, embroidery detail, 1926. From Else Hoffmann, “Von Wäsche und Kleidern,” Neue Frauenkleidung und Frauenkultur 22, no. 2 (1926), p. 41, fig. 22a.
