ABSTRACT
As a European, one can be familiar to that portrait of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe early American work as an abstract and nonrepresentational foundation for an architecture of authenticity. The “poetry of assembled components” in his buildings has been long considered to have redeemed the common steel framed structure through the development of its own expressive potential. As a consequence, one cannot be surprised when reviewing the claim posed for a “tough, hardened lyricism that would be uniquely American” (Lambert 2001) in the extraordinary scientific documentary efforts of the recent American studies about this period of their own Architectural History. But even if the architect’s struggle for “forging a language” (Lambert 2001) out of the rolled steel sections catalogue is nowadays considered patent, emphasis on issues such as its dazzling reminiscent quality despite material shortage with which it was to be made —both absent in his disciples work-, or his particular vocation for resistance within the pragmatic forces that shaped American architecture and urbanism during the post-war years, has proven the inadequacy of interpretations to which it has been routinely subjected.
