Lilly Reich. Single-Person Apartment in The Dwelling of Our Time, German Building Exhibition, Berlin, Germany (Two perspectives, cooking cupboard with side cabinet). 1931. Ink on tracing paper, 9 7/8 x 18 3/8" (25.1 x 46.7 cm). Lilly Reich Collection, Mies van der Rohe Archive

“Clothes must and can...form an organically inseparable whole with the woman wearing them....”

Lily Reich

In 1909 the German Werkbund, an organization dedicated to improving society by promoting the highest standards of design and manufacture, declared that women were “unequal to the demanding design tasks of architecture.” Eleven years later, the Werkbund nominated the first woman to its board of directors: Lilly Reich. The ensuing three decades saw Reich produce an innovative body of work in fields as diverse as architecture, fashion, and industrial and exhibition design.

Reich’s training included a period at the Wiener Werkstätte, where she worked in textiles and interior design, these being among the few careers in design available to women in early-20th-century Germany. Through this early experience she gained a mastery of texture, color, and how the human body occupies space—skills that informed projects throughout her career. In her writing about fashion, Reich distilled her formal philosophy: “Clothes must and can grow together, form an organically inseparable whole with the woman wearing them, give a picture of her spirit, and enhance the expression of her soul and the feeling of life.”

The organic interplay of material and the human form in space was dramatically manifested in an installation Reich designed for a Velvet and Silk Café at a 1927 fashion exhibition in Berlin. Using a sinuously hanging fabric wall to delineate the space, Reich created zones of visual and auditory quiet within the vast volume of a cluttered exhibition hall. The flexible wall system Reich employed in Berlin was later used to great effect by the architect Mies van der Rohe, with whom Reich collaborated closely over the next decade.

Reich and Mies’s partnership on furniture, building, and exhibition projects changed both their practices, resulting in an injection of bold individualistic styles, which emphasized dramatic uses of color and luxury materials, into the functionalist program that dominated modern architecture and design. The period during which they worked together resulted in some of the most iconic designs of the modernist era, including the Barcelona chair (originally a bright kelly green). Their numerous architecture projects include designs for exhibitions at the 1927 Weissenhofsiedlung, the 1929 World’s Fair in Barcelona, and the 1931 Building Exhibition in Berlin. During this busy period they also jointly oversaw the final years of the influential Bauhaus school in Berlin—with Mies as director and Reich as head of the weaving studio and the interior design workshop—before its closure under pressure from the Nazi regime.

It was common for women architects of the early modern period to have their work overshadowed by that of their partner; this was true of Reich as well. Mies emigrated to the United States in 1938 (leaving behind both his family and his creative partner) and outlived Reich by more than 20 years, a period during which his prolific output of iconic buildings cemented his fame as one of the leading architects of the post–World War II period. More recent research and reappraisals have recentered women like Reich in the story of the modernist project, both as collaborators and—as in Reich’s case—influential creative voices in their own right.

Paul Galloway, Collection Specialist, Department of Architecture and Design, 2023

Wikipedia entry
Introduction
Lilly Reich (16 June 1885 – 14 December 1947) was a German designer of textiles, furniture, interiors, and exhibition spaces. She was a close collaborator with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for more than ten years during the Weimar period from 1925 until his emigration to the U.S. in 1938. Reich was an important figure in the early Modern Movement in architecture and design. Her fame was posthumous, as the significance of her contribution to the work of Mies van der Rohe and others with whom she collaborated with only became clear through the research of later historians of the field.
Wikidata
Q64648
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
Getty record
Introduction
Interior designer and collaborator with Mies Van der Rohe.
Nationality
German
Gender
Female
Roles
Artist, Designer, Furniture Designer, Interior Designer
Name
Lilly Reich
Ulan
500248275
Information from Getty’s Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License

Works

84 works online

Exhibitions

Publications

  • Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 88 pages
  • Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops in Modernity Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 344 pages
  • Lilly Reich: Designer and Architect Exhibition catalogue, Paperback, 64 pages
Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].