Mies van der Rohe's Krefeld Villas

With all of the attention Mies van der Rohe has received over the last few years, it's hard to believe that there could be a pair of "undiscovered" buildings begging for even the slightest considerationand receiving none. Such has been the fate, however, of Mies's Krefeld Villas, a pair of neighboring brickresidences of typically restrained elegance built from 1927 to 1930. Their anonymity is, to some degree, Mies's own doing; in 1959, in his only public comment about the projects, he quipped…