(1886-1969)

“Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space”

 

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a man without any academic architectural training, was one of the great artist-architect-philosophers of his age. He was acclaimed as a genius for his uncompromisingly spare design, his fastidiousness, and his innovations. During his lifetime, he expressed the spirit of the industrial 20th century. “I have tried to make an architecture of a technological society. I have wanted to keep everything reasonable and clear—to have an architecture that anybody can do.” Mies stature rested not only on his lean yet sensuous business and residential buildings, but also on the profound influence he exerted on his colleagues and on public taste. Mies sought to make meaning out of machine-made buildings. Mies evolved a belief in “architectural integrity” and “structural honesty.” Simply stated, Mies made the actual rather than the dramatized supports of his buildings their dominant architectural features.

 

In 1922 Mies introduced the concept of ribbon windows, uninterrupted bands of glass between the finished faces of concrete slabs, in a design for a German office building. This “skin and bone” construction has since become the basis for many commercial structures. That is, his glass skyscraper revealed the building’s underlying steel structure.

 

In 1924 Mies produced plans for a concrete villa that is now regarded as the forerunner of the California ranch house. In 1931, he introduced the idea of space dividers, the use of cabinets or screens instead of walls to break up interiors; and to have originated the glass house, with windows and glass sliding panels extending from floor to ceiling to permit outside greenery to form the visual boundaries of a room. Apart from simplicity of form, what struck students of Mies’s buildings was their painstaking craftsmanship, their attention to detail. “God is in the details,” Mies liked to say.

 

Perhaps Mies’s most famous executed project in the interwar period in Europe was the German Pavilion (also known as the Barcelona Pavilion), which was commissioned by the German government for the 1929 International Exposition at Barcelona. It exhibited a sequence of spaces on a 175 by 5-foot travertine platform, partly under a thin roof, and partly outdoors, supported by chromed steel columns. The spaces were defined by walls of honey-colored onxy, green Tinian marble, and frosted glass, and contained nothing but a pool, in which stood a sculptural nude, and a few of the chairs Mies had designed for the pavilion. These cantilevered steel chairs, which are known as Barcelona chairs, became an instant classic of 20th-century furniture design.

 

Mies’s chairs were almost as well known as his buildings. In addition to the Barcelona chair, he designed the MR chair in 1926. It had a caned seat and back and its frame was tubular steel.

 

Up to 1937 when he immigrated to the United States, Mies lived in Germany. The Nazis shortly after assuming power in 1933 closed the Bauhaus.  Mies served as director of this architectural school. The Bauhaus served as a laboratory of architecture and design. The Nazis objected to his modern design as “degenerate” and “un-German.”

 

Upon moving to Chicago, Mies became director of the Architecture School at the Illinois School of Technology. Over the next twenty years, the school became world-renowned for its disciplined teaching methods as well as for the campus that Mies designed.

 

After World War II, Mies could implement many large-scale projects, among them several high-rise buildings that were conceived as steel skeletons sheathed in glass curtain-wall facades. Among these major commissions are the Promontory Apartments in Chicago (1949), the Lake Shore Drive Apartments (1949-1951) and the Seagram Building (1956-58) in New York City, a skyscraper office building with a glass, bronze, and marble exterior. The Seagram building, designed in association with his friend Philip C. Johnson, illustrated the concept “less is more”. The principle that “less is more” meant achieving the maximum effect with the minimum needs. He demonstrates, despite his austere and forthright use of the most modern materials, his exceptional sense of proportion and his extreme concern for detail. Misian-influenced steel-and-glass office buildings appeared all over the United States and the world.

 

Mies had had an offhand list of six favorite buildings.

 

1. The Illinois Institute of Technology’s Crown Hall This was a good example of his “skin and bone architecture”. 

2. The Chicago Federal Center, a large complex of high-and low-rise buildings, possessed symmetry. He felt that this complex showed a victory over disorder.

3. Seagram Building

4. The Two Lake Shore Apartment House Towers

5. Mies liked his design for a Chicago convention hall that was never completed

6. His final pet was the now-destroyed German Pavilion at the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. This building combined the richness of bronze, chrome, steel and glass with freestanding walls.