At present, there are two common ways to understand the impact of industries on the environment. One of them is to abstract statistics from the real industrial pollution scene and base the understanding and decision making on those statistics. The other is to regard the images of industrial landscape as a certain type of aesthetics. Neither of these two perspectives can give us a real insight of what is actually happening around Yekaterinburg, one of the cities in the world most polluted by heavy industry, what the causes are and how they have reshaped the local life. Instead, we need a ‘transcorporeal’ perspective - a term developed by Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker. Being transcorporeal, in her essay, means to go beyond the bifurcations of nature-culture or human-weather opposition, and instead to feel the process of ‘weathering’ where human body interacts intimately with the change of temperature, humidity, sunlight resonating in our skin, veins and nerves, for a better understanding and reaction to climate change. This essay applies and adapts Neimanis’ inspiring theory of transcorporeality to the realm of industrial impacts, because climate change and industrial impacts are similar to each other, in the sense that they can both be seen as the disturbance or damage to the natural environment, where human activity has played the main role combined with the feedbacks from the ecosystem, and in return has influenced the living conditions of people. With this ‘transcorporeal’ perspective, we might truly internalize the industrial impact on the environment, and even help us be critical about our moves towards the industrial impacts.

This thesis aims at depicting the Kröller-Müller commission which involved Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) and Hendrik Petrus Berlage (1856-1934), followed by a research of the Berlagian origin in Mies. Firstly, Mies’ short stay in the Netherlands in the summer of 1912 when he was dealing with the Kröller-Müller project is represented in a detailed manner, with a series of details given, to show extensively Mies’ activities and some events during this certain period which are closely associated with Mies. Mrs. Kröller-Müller played a critical role in the whole Kröller-Müller project, because she was the one who shifted the whole commission from Peter Behrens to Mies. Secondly, the significance of the Kröller-Müller project to Mies is explained, from the aspect of Mies’ own attitudes, and more importantly the whole case as the trigger of Mies’ further dedication to Berlage’s thoughts and works. Some letters of Mies and related people are given as evidences of Mies’ huge investment in the project. Finally, an analysis of Mies’ Berlagian origin is carried out by comparing Berlage’s thoughts and architecture to the counterpart of Mies’. This analysis is divided into two categories, first the European period of Mies and from the tectonics he learned from Berlage, and second the American period and what he learned from Berlage’s theories. After this analysis, it is clear that Mies could have been inspired greatly by Berlage, and based the frame of his own architectural philosophy on Berlage’s argument where he emphasized a style - ‘unity in diversity’, or the existence of a universal principle, which is very consistent with Mies’ homogeneous grid system.