Lilly Reich: a room can begin with a curtain

Must dividing a space always mean building a wall? The Velvet and Silk Café, designed by Lilly Reich and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for a Berlin exhibition of women's fashion in 1927, offers another answer. MoMA describes an environment shaped through large textile surfaces. Furniture is therefore only part of what we need to examine: hanging, curving and leaving an opening can also be acts of design. [2]

Reich's connection with textiles was not incidental. The Bauhaus Kooperation biography records her training in embroidery and work at the Wiener Werkstätte from 1908. She later ran studios concerned with interiors, fashion and exhibitions. These activities help us see a connection between material and inhabited space. In 1920 she became the first woman on the board of the Deutscher Werkbund, an organisation concerned with design and production. [1]

MoMA's account invites us to imagine the café as flowing space defined by fabrics instead of a rectangular box. Golden yellow, dark velvet and red silk provide a tangible presence. Our editorial reading is that a soft surface can organise a room without becoming a load-bearing structure: it directs attention and suggests somewhere to pause, although it does not carry the roof above our heads. [2]

Try this exercise invented by the editors. Draw a single room from above, with one table and two chairs. Add a solid partition, then replace it with a curved line that leaves a passage. How does the route change? Where might you imagine a conversation? We are not measuring sound insulation or safety. We are separating a visual boundary from a barrier that actually closes off the room. [2]

MoMA's collection includes Reich's drawings for exhibition spaces in Barcelona in 1929, involving showcases, walls and display surfaces. Individual records show why each project's attribution matters. Collaboration with Mies is no reason to erase Reich, but neither does it justify assigning her every chair visible in a photograph. To establish who designed what, a famous name cannot take the place of an object's specific record. [3]

The illustration beside this article is an editorial interpretation, not a certified reconstruction of the café. We are interested in the question the design leaves open: which elements make a space feel like a place? In our exercise we might name access, shelter, colour and distance. That list is a suggestion for looking; the documented history remains in the museum's drawings, attributions and sources, which deserve to be read separately. [2][3]