An Independent Practice
Lilly Reich’s career as a designer was established before she met Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. She trained in embroidery and textiles in the early 1900s, joined the Deutscher Werkbund in 1912, and by 1920 had been elected its first female board member. Her practice centred on exhibition design, shop window display, clothing, and interior fitting — work that required handling space, material, and surface as integrated problems. She ran her own atelier in Berlin throughout the 1910s and 1920s, taking commissions that ranged from retail interiors to trade fair installations, all of them grounded in Werkbund principles of functional clarity and material honesty.
This professional record matters because it defines what Reich brought to her collaboration with Mies, which began around 1926. The two kept separate studios but worked jointly on a series of exhibitions and interiors that became landmarks of European modernism. At the 1927 Die Wohnung exhibition at the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart, Reich contributed to the Glass Room and the industrial material displays. At the 1927 Die Mode der Dame exhibition in Berlin, the Velvet and Silk Café — walls of hanging fabric in varying weights and colours separating the room into zones — was hers to conceive and execute. The spatial impact of that room came from an expertise in textiles and display that Mies did not have.
The Barcelona Work
The German Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition is the project most associated with both names. Reich contributed the spatial organisation, material selection, curtains, and furniture upholstery — including work on the Barcelona Chair and the Brno Chair, which emerged from this period. Scholarship drawing on construction records, drawings, and period documents held by the Fundació Mies van der Rohe and MoMA attributes the pavilion’s interiors as jointly authored, with Reich’s input decisive on materials, detailing, and the overall sensory texture of the space. The architectural structure was Mies’s; the surfaces, the fabric, and much of what made the space feel inhabited were Reich’s contribution.
The Tugendhat House in Brno, designed 1928–1930, involved a similar division: Mies led the architecture, Reich contributed the interior finishes, curtain systems, upholstery, and the material decisions that brought the house’s strict geometry into liveable register. The two approaches depended on each other; neither fully explains the finished buildings without the other.
At the Bauhaus
In January 1932, with Mies now directing the Bauhaus, Reich was appointed to lead the weaving workshop and the consolidated interior design and finishing department, which brought together furniture, metalwork, wall painting, and textiles under one structure. She was the second woman to direct a Bauhaus workshop at master level, after Gunta Stölzl. The appointment was brief: the school relocated to Berlin in 1932 and closed in 1933 under Nazi pressure. Reich managed much of the daily administration through the final phase.
Attribution
For most of the twentieth century, the projects Reich and Mies worked on together were described as Mies’s. The 1996 MoMA exhibition Lilly Reich: Designer and Architect was the first major institutional effort to document her independent career and define the scope of her contributions to the joint work. Subsequent scholarship — particularly Martínez de Guereñu’s research on the Barcelona Pavilion — has established her authorship in specific projects through construction records and archival evidence rather than assertion. The correction is documented and ongoing. Reich’s practice was substantial before she met Mies, continued in parallel throughout their collaboration, and was not absorbed into his.