Mies van der Rohe designed the Karl Liebknceht & Rosa Luxembourg monument (image 1) in Berlin in 1926. This monument is considered emblematic in the search and strengthening of Germany's national identity, since it was built by order of the country's Communist Party in honor of fallen fighters, during the Spartacist uprising in 1919. The mentioned victims were executed in front of a brick wall, so Mies designs a corresponding wall, thus constructing in the viewer's mind the image of the act that was carried out. History is clear and recorded and the arc hitect wishes to present the harsh truth of the facts and praise the achievements of the country party. Mies' clear references to objective facts are also characteristic of the plans for the monument, where Mies included an inscription of Rosa Luxemburg's last words "Ich bin, ich war, ich werde sein" (I was,I am and will am). In 1933 the Nazis destroyed the Mies monument.
Image 1:Karl Liebknceht & Rosa Luxembourg Memorial, Berlin 1926
Karl Liebknceht & Rosa Luxembourg is a pioneering monument as it was meant to convey a certain raw honesty. For this reason it differs from the mo numents of the past which are famous for their aesthetics. This monument does not look forward to beauty and through its brutalism leaves no room for beautifications and tragedies in memory. Specifically, it is not treated as a building with excellent aesthetics but as a monument with a symbolic character and with the sole purpose of strengthening the collective memory and identity of the country. This is also betrayed by the shape of the monument which is a simple square shape that gives clarity and honesty. It is considered a modern monument which is a field of controversy as to whether it contributes to the evolutionary rates of development of the city and the modernization of society. Furthermore, this work innovates after being used to present political ideologies in the public space and then demolished to combat those ideologies; it finds its place in the search for a new monumentality that tries to project the past to support the future.
As already mentioned, the central idea of the Karl Liebknceht & Rosa Luxembourg monument is the design of the brick wall in front of which the mentioned victims were executed so that society can structure the execution scene in its mind and engrave it in its memory. The monument was built with raw materials and mainly with bricks held together with stee l and concrete grouts. These materials were used for the tangible representation of the execution wall of the victims which was made of bricks that had been worn away by time and gunfire. Thus, through symbolism and materials, Mies van der Rohe achieves his goal and expresses the central idea of monumental construction in the synthetic structure. Architecture historians began to look at history with a contemporary view, looking to the past for inspiration and confirmation for the architecture of their time. A new reading of the past is proposed that deeply connects the history and practice of architecture. More specifically, this monumental construction is linked to the theories of collective memory and the strengthening of the country's national identity. These theories appeared immediately after the end of the first world war and attracted the interest of many architects of the 20th century. Also, all this is connected to a theory of place, which is not a synthesis of collective memory, in order to form a comprehensive view of the relationship between man and environment, but it also shows that the history of modern architecture is directed towards one goal: the recovery of the place. The concept of place unites modern architecture with the past and there is a new demand for continuity. Moreover, it is not so much in line with the theories of the time about monuments because it is a pioneering work, which does not highlight the aesthetics but the brutality of the event it commemorates.
Karl Liebknceht & Rosa Luxembourg does not show much relation to the theories formulated by Mies van der Rohe during the 20th century but is more connected to his philosophy. More than any other modernist, Mies van der Rohe used philosophy as a basis for his work. He thus created an influential architectural style of the twentieth century, characterized by extreme clarity and simplicity. His buildings exude the purity and clarity of the simple geometric structure, where the tension is created through the strictness of the contours and the careful proportion of the individual elements. "Less is more" is his other imperative, which also appears in this monument , and which led to the supreme rationality and cold beauty of his creations, which are realized thanks to the perfection of technology, of which the architect proves to be a genius connoisseur and user while his passion for detail becomes evident in this monument.
Modernism's heyday ran parallel to two major tragic wars and perhaps humanity's greatest trauma: the Holocaust. The atrocity of human insanity leaves behind fragmented societies and destroyed economies. The following decades of the 1950s and 1960s are charged with the memories of first and second generations of survivors and as expected memorials to World War II and the Holocaust begin to be built across Europe and America. Aldo Rossi, influenced by the Karl Liebknceht & Rosa Luxembourg monument, designs in the 1960s two World War 2 themed monuments, one of which was built. First is the Resistance Monument in Cuneo (image 2) designed in 1962 in honor of the fighters against the German invasion of Italy. Rossi's proposal is a cube, which is intersected by a pyramid-shaped staircase. Ascending the staircase the visitor would enter an inner platform. Opposite him would be a linear notch in the wall from which he would have a view of the Italo-German battlefield. The monument, however, was never realized. Rossi's second monument is the Monument to the Fighters of the Second World War in Segrate, Italy (image 3) which was designed and finally built in 1965. Rossi again uses geometric elements in the design, the parallelogram, the cone and the cylinder, as well as the ladder element. The visitor again follows a linear staircase to be taken to the interior of the monument. These two monuments were designed with the clarity of the simple geometric structure and the careful proportion of their elements. This lends Rossi's influence from Mies van der Rohe to the design of these monuments.
Image 2: Resistance Monument in Cuneo, Aldo Rossi, 1926
Image 3: Monument to World War II fighters, Aldo Rossi, Italy 1965
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