Potsdam's 2 Neoclassicist buildings are both by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, documenting the architect's early career before his radical break toward glass and steel. Villa Urbig and House Riehl — domestic commissions from the 1910s — reveal a young Mies working through classical tradition: symmetrical facades, pitched roofs, stone or rendered surfaces, and a restrained proportional system drawn from Schinkel and the Prussian building tradition.
These houses engage with their landscape through terraces, gardens, and carefully framed views — a domestic sensibility that Mies would later abandon for the "universal space" of his American career. For anyone who knows the Barcelona Pavilion and Farnsworth House, these early Potsdam works are revelatory: the classical foundations beneath Modernism's most radical minimalist.
