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(b Aachen, 27 March 1886; d Chicago, IL, 17 Aug 1969). German architect, furniture designer and teacher, active also in the USA. With Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, he was a leading figure in the development of modern architecture. His reputation rests not only on his buildings and projects but also on his rationally based method of architectural education.
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| Biography: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe |
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), Germanborn American architect, was a leading exponent of the International Style. His "skin and bones" philosophy of architecture is summed up in his famous phrase "less is more."
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was born in Aachen on March 27, 1886. He attended the cathedral school until he was 13 years old and spent the next 2 years at a trade school. He had no formal architectural training but acted as a draftsman for a manufacturer of decorative stucco, and from 1905 to 1907 he was employed by Bruno Paul, the Berlin furniture designer.
In 1908 Mies joined Peter Behrens (the employer of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius), who was one of several enlightened German architects attempting to link the ideals of the British Arts and Crafts movement, as propagated in Germany by Hermann Muthesius, to machine production. Behrens designed buildings and products for the German electrical industry AEG but also reverted to the esthetics, concepts, and architectural expression of the early-19th-century neoclassicist Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Thus it is not surprising that Mies's early domestic architecture, notably the Perls House (1911) at Zehlendorf near Berlin, with its hipped roof and axial plan, could have been designed by Behrens, or even by Schinkel a hundred years earlier. Mies supervised the construction of the German Embassy in St. Petersburg before leaving Behrens's office in 1912.
Early Work
During 1910 and 1911 Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural projects were published by Ernst Wasmuth of Berlin. Mies acknowledged his debt to Wright ("The encounter [of Wright] was destined to prove of great significance to the European development."), but he was also strongly influenced after World War I by the de Stijl movement of Theo van Doesburg and Gerrit Rietveld. This Dutch movement had developed from the cubistderived tradition of painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Mies's brick country house project (1923) and his brick monument to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg (1926; destroyed) in Berlin were essays in the de Stijl idiom. Even the plan of the German Pavilion (1929; destroyed) at the International Exposition in Barcelona, Spain, had the geometry of a de Stijl painting. The travertine podium, chrome-plated steel structural columns, green marble dividers, and gray glass of the pavilion, as well as the reflecting pool with a sculpture by George Kolbe and the famed Barcelona chair, stool, and table by Mies, gave the building a timeless quality of inexorable perfection.
Mies also designed the furniture for some of his other buildings, such as the tubular dining and lounge chairs for the second Deutscher Werkbund Exposition of 1927 in Stuttgart. He was director of this exposition and broad-mindedly invited Behrens, Le Corbusier, Gropius, J. J. P. Oud, Bruno Taut, Hans Poelzig, and others to contribute. "I have refrained," said Mies, "from laying down a rigid program, in order to leave each individual as free as possible to carry out his ideas." His own contribution was a row of apartments, steel-framed, finished in stucco, and with horizontal bands of windows.
In 1930 Mies designed the Tugendhat House at Brno, Czechoslovakia - a house evolved from the Barcelona pavilion - and for it he created the Tugendhat chair and the Brno chair. That year he became director of the Bauhaus, the famed German school of art which revolutionized 20th-century design. The growing strength of Nazism in Germany during the early 1930s forced the Bauhaus to move from Dessau to Berlin. Mies closed the school in 1933 but stayed on in Germany, trying to effect a change in the country's politics.
The American Years
Forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1937, Mies went to the United States; he became an American citizen in 1944. His work, and that of other modern architects, had been introduced to the American architectural scene by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock in an exhibition held in 1932 at New York City's Museum of Modern Art and in its catalog, The International Style: Architecture since 1922.
Mies's philosophy of architecture, which was to dominate his designs in the United States, was exemplified in his revolutionary projects of 1919 and 1920-1921 for glass skyscrapers in Berlin. They were to be "new forms from the very nature of new problems." His 1922 project for a reinforced-concrete office building epitomized all the ideals of the International Style; volume rather than mass, simplicity of surface treatment with no ornamentation, and horizontal emphasis (except in tall structures). Mies stated, "Reinforced concrete structures are skeletons by nature. No gingerbread. No fortress. Columns and girders eliminate bearing walls. This is skin and bones construction."
In 1938 Mies became director of architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology (formerly the Armour Institute), an office he held until he resumed private practice in 1958. In his brief inaugural address he stated that "true education is concerned not only with practical goals but also with values…. Education must lead us from irresponsible opinion to true responsible judgment…." He ended by quoting St. Augustine: "Beauty is the splendor of Truth."
A grid of 24-foot squares was the basis of Mies's Illinois Institute of Technology campus plan (1939-1940). Vincent Scully (1961) described it as a veritable "Renaissance townscape … conceived … upon a modular system of fixed perspectives" and compared it to a streetscape by the mannerist architect Giacomo da Vignola. The horizontal lines of perspective and the low vertical structural rhythm are common to both Renaissance spaces. Mies considered Crown Hall (completed 1956) on the campus, which houses the School of Architecture and Design, with its main floor an undivided space measuring 120 by 220 feet, his finest creation.
Particularly noteworthy among the residences and apartments that Mies built in and near Chicago are the Farnsworth house (1950) in Plano, Ill., and the pair of glass-sheathed apartment towers (1949-1951) on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. He also designed Federal Center (1964), a three-building complex in the heart of Chicago's commercial area. In New York City he collaborated with Philip Johnson on the Seagram Building (1956-1958), a 38-story tower of gray and bronze glass, which was the ultimate realization of Mies's 1919 project for a glass-walled sky-scraper. He died in Chicago on Aug. 18, 1969.
Mies, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier are the paternal triumvirate of 20th-century architecture. Mies's Werkbund apartment block of 1927 was a low-cost housing project of high-caliber design that has rarely been equaled even in the 1960s and early 1970s, when architects were desperately trying to solve the pressing need of well-designed housing. His Barcelona pavilion of 1929 was an esthetic contribution to 20th-century spatial design, comparable to Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie house and Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye.
Further Reading
A selection of drawings by Mies van der Rohe from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art is in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Drawings (1969). Biographies include Philip C. Johnson, Mies van der Rohe (1947; rev. ed. 1953); Ludwig Hilberseimer, Mies van der Rohe (1956); and Arthur Drexler, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1960). Mies van der Rohe is discussed in Peter Blake, The Master Builders (1960; rev. ed. 1963); Vincent Scully, Modern Architecture (1961); and John Jacobus, Twentieth-century Architecture: The Middle Years, 1940-65 (1966).
| Modern Design Dictionary: Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe |
German architect and designer Mies Van Der Rohe was a leading figure of the
After working as a draughtsman in an Aachen stucco decoration workshop from 1899 to 1903 he served as an apprentice in furniture designer Bruno Paul's workshop from 1904 to 1907, whilst also studying at the School of Arts & Crafts in Munich. From 1908 to 1911 he worked in the architectural offices of Peter Behrens (like
| Architecture and Landscaping: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe |
German architect, one of the most influential of International Modernism. Without any formal architectural education, he went to Berlin in 1905 to work for Bruno Paul. In the following year he designed the Riehl House at Neubabelsberg near Berlin (completed 1907), which drew on the English Arts-and-Crafts style promoted by Muthesius in Das Englische Haus (1904–5). In 1908 he joined the atelier of Behrens, where he met Gropius and Adolf Meyer, among others, and absorbed something of Behrens's style, mingled with a strong flavour of the severe architecture of Schinkel, Behrens's hero. Several suburban villas followed, including the Perls (later Fuchs) House, Zehlendorf, Berlin (1911), in which the precedent of Schinkel's domestic architecture was clear. He also designed a monument (unrealized) to Bismarck for a rocky promontory at Bingen-am-Rhein, which anticipated the stripped Classicism of Speer later in C20. Indeed, from 1911 his designs were influenced by Behrens's interest in a simplified
After the 1914–18 war, when the political climate in Germany had shifted Leftwards, Gropius organized (1919) an exhibition of architecture considered suitable for the new era. Mies submitted his 1912–13 Kröller-Müller designs which Gropius (a convinced believer in the tabula rasa) refused to accept because of its clear links to historical precedent. The result was a transformation: Mies (which has connotations with what is seedy, wretched, and out of sorts, though its cuddly pussy-cat associations were preferred in the UK) became Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (which sounds vaguely grand (the pretentious ‘van der’) as well as having allusions to bareness, rawness, and roughness (his mother's name was Rohe) ); and the new Mies van der Rohe emerged as a radical Leftist Modernist. He joined the Novembergruppe (1921), becoming its President in 1923. His ‘Five Projects’ of the period (1921–3) included the unrealized glass-clad Friedrichstrasse Office Block, published by Bruno Taut. Then followed the design for a Glass Skyscraper (1922), the Concrete Office Block (1922—one of the first designs to have the International-style strip- or ribbon-window arrangement), the Brick Country House (1923— influenced by van Doesburg and De
With Bartning, Behrendt, Häring, Mendelsohn, Poelzig, the Tauts, and others, he formed Der Ring, which rapidly became a nationwide organization to reject all historical allusions and styles and to prepare the ground for an architecture of the new epoch supposedly to be based (or to look as though it was based) on contemporary technology. In 1926 Mies designed the monument (destroyed 1933) to the Socialist and Spartacist Karl Liebknecht (1871–1919), the Polish Communist agitator Rosa Luxemburg (1870–1919), and the November 1918 Revolution in the Friedrichsfelde Friedhof, Berlin: of brick projecting and receding planes on which the hammer and sickle were predominantly displayed, it was nevertheless based on a steel-framed construction (so much for ‘honesty’ of expression in building). In the same year he designed the Wolf House, Guben (destroyed), where blocky masses of brick were pierced with windows, and all Historicist references were expunged.
Mies and other members of Der Ring were elected to the Deutscher Werkbund in 1926, which, as a result, shifted ground from its historical mission to promote good industrial design and crafts to become a bullying pressure-group promoting the ‘new architecture’, i.e. that approved by Mies and his circle. As Vice-President of the Werkbund and Director of the proposed Weissenhofsiedlung Exhibition in Stuttgart (1927), he consolidated his reputation as leader of the avant-garde. The exhibition, for which he designed the master-plan and the long apartment-block on the highest land, contained temporary structures as well as over twenty permanent buildings, including villas, designed by leading German and other Modernists, including Bourgeois, Le Corbusier, Oud, and Stam. Predominant motifs were long horizontal strips of windows, smooth white walls, and flat roofs: the image of the cult of International Modernism had been found. Mies was also able to exhibit his tubular-steel chair, the earliest of several later variations that were to place him among the foremost furniture designers of C20. For the International Exposition, Barcelona (1928–9), shortly after he completed the Lange House, Krefeld, Mies designed the German Pavilion with a flat roof supported on steel columns clad in chromium-plated casings and walls of onyx and marble (some of which projected beyond the roof). This little building (demolished 1929, reconstructed 1983–4), exquisitely and expensively detailed, won immediate approval and became one of the most admired paradigms of the late 1920s. It was furnished with Mies's ‘Barcelona Chair’, consisting of a chromium-plated frame with black leather upholstered back and seat. Then followed the Tugendhat House, Brno, Czechoslovakia (1930), with a single storey on the street-frontage and two storeys facing the garden. The living-room was a continuous space with chromium-cased steel columns and free-standing panel, derived from the Barcelona design, while the full-height windows could be fully lowered out of sight, enabling the interior space to extend into the garden terrace. Every detail of the house was purpose-made, designed by the architect.
In 1930 Mies was appointed to run the Dessau
Bibliography
The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe |
He left Germany in 1937 for the United States, where, from 1938 until his retirement in 1958, he headed the department of architecture at Chicago's Armour Institute (now the Illinois Institute of Technology), teaching and putting into practice the Bauhaus aesthetic that fused art with technology. There he planned the new campus and designed (1942-58) several of its buildings, notably the superb Crown Hall (1956), home of the architectecture department. During this period he also created some private homes, including the outstanding 1951 Farnsworth House in Plano, Ill., now a state museum. In the 860 Lake Shore Drive apartments in Chicago (1949-51), the Seagram Building in New York (with Philip Johnson; 1956-58), and other buildings, Mies incorporated the principles of the glass skyscraper with a surface expression of steel-frame construction. In doing so he helped create a style that dominated the American urban modernist idiom, but with a perfectionism rarely matched by any other architect. He also experimented with buildings of a single great space, such as the New National Gallery in Berlin (1962-68).
Bibliography
See his works ed. by M. Pawley (1970); biographies by F. Schulze (1985) and Y. E. Safran (2000); studies by P. Johnson (1953), A. Drexler (1960), P. Blake (1964 and 1996), P. Carter (1974), W. Tegethoff (1980), J. Zukowsky, ed. (1986), E. S. Hochman (1989 and 1990), W. Blaser (rev. ed. 1997), E. Stoller (1999), R. Daza (2000), and P. Lambert, ed. (2001).
| Quotes By: Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe |
Quotes:
"Simply by not owning three medium-sized castles in Tuscany I have saved enough money in the last forty years on insurance premiums alone to buy a medium-sized castle in Tuscany."
| Wikipedia: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe |
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| Ludwig Mies van der Rohe | |
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| Personal information | |
|---|---|
| Name | Ludwig Mies van der Rohe |
| Nationality | German 1886-1938/American 1938-1969 |
| Birth date | March 27, 1886 |
| Birth place | Aachen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany |
| Date of death | August 17, 1969 (aged 83) |
| Place of death | Chicago, Illinois, USA |
| Work | |
| Significant buildings | Barcelona Pavilion Tugendhat House Crown Hall Farnsworth House 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Seagram Building New National Gallery |
| Awards and prizes | Order Pour le Mérite (1959) Royal Gold Medal (1959) AIA Gold Medal (1960) Presidential Medal of Freedom (1963) |
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies (March 27, 1886 – August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect.[1] He was commonly referred to and addressed by his surname, Mies, by his colleagues, students, writers, and others.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, along with Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of Modern architecture. Mies, like many of his post World War I contemporaries, sought to establish a new architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their own eras. He created an influential 20th century architectural style, stated with extreme clarity and simplicity. His mature buildings made use of modern materials such as industrial steel and plate glass to define interior spaces. He strived towards an architecture with a minimal framework of structural order balanced against the implied freedom of free-flowing open space. He called his buildings "skin and bones" architecture. He sought a rational approach that would guide the creative process of architectural design, and is known for his use of the aphorisms "less is more" and "God is in the details".
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Mies worked in his father's stone-carving shop and at several local design firms before he moved to Berlin joining the office of interior designer Bruno Paul. He began his architectural career as an apprentice at the studio of Peter Behrens from 1908 to 1912, where he was exposed to the current design theories and to progressive German culture, working alongside Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. Mies served as construction manager of the Embassy of the German Empire in Saint Petersburg under Behrens.[2] His talent was quickly recognized and he soon began independent commissions, despite his lack of a formal college-level education. A physically imposing, deliberative, and reticent man, Ludwig Mies renamed himself as part of his rapid transformation from a tradesman's son to an architect working with Berlin's cultural elite, adding his mother's more impressive surname "van der Rohe". He began his independent professional career designing upper class homes in traditional Germanic domestic styles. He admired the broad proportions, regularity of rhythmic elements, attention to the relationship of the manmade to nature, and compositions using simple cubic volumes of the early 19th century Prussian Neo-Classical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, while dismissing the eclectic and cluttered classical so common at the turn of the century as irrelevant from the modern zeitgeist.
After World War I, Mies began, while still designing traditional custom homes, a parallel experimental effort in international style, joining his avant-garde peers in the long-running search for a new style for a new industrial democracy. The weak points of traditional styles had been under attack by progressive theorists since the mid-nineteenth century, primarily for attaching historical ornament unrelated to a modern structure's underlying construction. Their mounting criticism of the historical styles gained substantial cultural credibility after the disaster of World War I, widely seen as a failure of the old order of imperial leadership of Europe. The classical revival styles were particularly reviled by many as the architectural symbol of a now-discredited aristocratic system.
Boldly abandoning ornament altogether, Mies made a dramatic debut with his stunning competition proposal for the faceted all-glass Friedrichstraße skyscraper in 1921, followed by a curved version in 1922. He continued with a series of pioneering projects, culminating in his two European masterworks: the temporary German Pavilion for the Barcelona exposition (often called the Barcelona Pavilion) in 1929 (a 1986 reconstruction is now built on the original site) and the elegant Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic, completed in 1930.
While continuing his traditional design practice Mies began to develop visionary projects that, though mostly unbuilt, rocketed him to fame as a progressive architect. He worked with the progressive design magazine G which started in July 1923. He developed prominence as architectural director of the Werkbund, organizing the influential Weissenhof prototype modernist housing exhibition. He was also one of the founders of the architectural association Der Ring. He joined the avant-garde Bauhaus design school as their director of architecture, adopting and developing their functionalist application of simple geometric forms in the design of useful objects.
Like many other avant garde architects of the day, Mies based his own architectural theories and principles on his own personal re-combinations of ideas developed by many other thinkers and designers who had attacked the flaws of the traditional design styles, defined new criteria, and created alternative design solutions.
Mies' modernist thinking was influenced by the aesthetic credos of Russian Constructivism with their ideology of "efficient" sculptural constructions using modern industrial materials. Mies found appeal in the use of simple rectilinear and planar forms, clean lines, pure use of color, and the extension of space around and beyond interiors expounded by the Dutch De Stijl group. In particular, the layering of functions in space and the clear articulation of parts as expressed by Gerrit Rietveld appealed to Mies.
Like other architects in Europe, Mies was enthralled with the free-flowing inter-connected rooms which encompass their outdoor surroundings as demonstrated by the open floor plans of the American Prairie Style work of Frank Lloyd Wright.
The theories of Adolf Loos found resonance with Mies, particularly the ideas of eradication of ornament and the casting off of the superficial, the use of unadorned but rich materials, the nobility of anonymity, and an admiration for the unfettered pragmatism of American engineering structures and machines.
Mies pursued an ambitious, lifelong mission to create not only a new architectural style, but also a solid intellectual foundation for a new architectural language that could be used to represent the new era of technology and production. He saw a need for an architecture expressive of and in harmony with his epoch, just as Gothic architecture was for an era of spiritualism. He applied a disciplined design process using rational thought to achieve his spiritual goals. He adopted the idea that architecture communicated the meaning and significance of the culture in which it exists. The self-educated Mies painstakingly studied the great philosophers and thinkers of the past and of the day to enhance his own understanding of the character and essential qualities of the times he lived in. More than perhaps any other practising pioneer of modernism, Mies used philosophy as a basis for his work. Mies' architecture was created at a high level of abstraction, and his own descriptions of his work leave much room for interpretation. Yet his buildings also seem very direct and simple when viewed in person.
Opportunities for commissions dwindled with the worldwide depression after 1929. In the early 1930s, Mies served briefly as the last Director of the faltering Bauhaus, at the request of his colleague and competitor Walter Gropius. After 1933, Nazi political pressure soon forced Mies to close the government-financed school. He built very little in these years (one built commission was Philip Johnson's New York apartment); his style was rejected by the Nazis as not "German" in character. Frustrated and unhappy, he left his homeland reluctantly in 1937 as he saw his opportunity for any future building commissions vanish, accepting a residential commission in Wyoming and then an offer to head an architectural school in Chicago.
Mies settled in Chicago, Illinois where he was appointed as head of the architecture school at Chicago's Armour Institute of Technology (later renamed Illinois Institute of Technology - IIT). One of the benefits of taking this position was that he would be commissioned to design the new buildings and master plan for the campus. All his buildings still stand there, including Alumni Hall, the Chapel, and his masterpiece the S.R. Crown Hall, built as the home of IIT's School of Architecture. Crown Hall is widely regarded as Mies' finest work, the definition of Miesian architecture. In 1944, he became an American citizen, completing his severance from his native Germany. His 30 years as an American architect reflect a more structural, pure approach towards achieving his goal of a new architecture for the 20th Century. He focused his efforts on the idea of enclosing open and adaptable "universal" spaces with clearly arranged structural frameworks, featuring pre-manufactured steel shapes infilled with large sheets of glass. His early projects at the IIT campus and for developer Herb Greenwald opened the eyes of Americans to a style that seemed a natural progression of the almost forgotten 19th century Chicago School style. His architecture, with origins in the German Bauhaus and western European International Style became an accepted mode of building for American cultural and educational institutions, developers, public agencies, and large corporations.
Mies worked from his studio in downtown Chicago for his entire 31-year period in America. His significant projects in the U.S. include the residential towers of 860-880 Lake Shore Dr, the Federal Center, the Farnsworth House, Crown Hall and other structures at IIT, all in and around Chicago, and the Seagram Building in New York. These iconic works became the prototypes for his other projects.
Between 1946 and 1951, Mies van der Rohe designed and built the Farnsworth House, a weekend retreat outside Chicago for an independent professional woman, Dr. Edith Farnsworth. Here, Mies explored the relationship between ourselves, our shelter, and nature. This small masterpiece showed the world that exposed industrial steel and glass were materials capable of creating architecture of great emotional impact. The glass pavilion is raised six feet above a floodplain next to the Fox River, surrounded by forest and rural prairies. The highly crafted pristine white structural frame and all-glass walls define a simple rectilinear interior space, letting nature and light envelop the interior space. A wood-panelled fireplace (also housing mechanical equipment, kitchen, and toilets) is positioned within the open space to suggest living, dining and sleeping spaces without using walls. No partitions touch the surrounding all-glass enclosure. Without solid exterior walls, full-height draperies on a perimeter track allow freedom to provide full or partial privacy when and where desired. The house has been described as sublime, a temple hovering between heaven and earth, a poem, a work of art. The Farnsworth House and its 60-acre (240,000 m2) wooded site was purchased at auction for US$7.5 million by preservation groups in 2004 and is now operated by the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois as a public museum. The influential building spawned hundreds of modernist glass houses, most notably the Glass House by Philip Johnson, located near New York City and also owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The iconic Farnsworth House is considered among Mies's greatest works. The house is an embodiment of Mies' mature vision of modern architecture for the new technological age: a single unencumbered space within a minimal "skin and bones" framework, a clearly understandable arrangement of architectural parts. His ideas are stated with clarity and simplicity, using materials that are allowed to express their own individual character.
Mies then designed a series of four middle-income high-rise apartment buildings for developer Herb Greenwald (and his successor firms after his untimely death in a plane crash), the 860/880 and 900-910 Lake Shore Drive towers on Chicago's Lakefront. These towers, with façades of steel and glass, were radical departures from the typical residential brick apartment buildings of the time. Interestingly, Mies found their unit sizes too small for himself, choosing instead to continue living in a spacious traditional luxury apartment a few blocks away. The towers were simple rectangular boxes with a non-hierarchical wall enclosure, raised on stilts above a glass enclosed lobby. The lobby is set back from the perimeter columns which were exposed around the perimeter of the building above, creating a modern arcade not unlike those of the Greek temples. This configuration created a feeling of light, openness, and freedom of movement at the ground level that became the prototype for countless new towers designed both by Mies's office and his followers. Some historians argue that this new approach is an expression of the American spirit and the boundless open space of the frontier, which German culture so admired.
Once Mies had established his basic design concept for the general form and details of his tower buildings, he applied those solutions (with evolving refinements) to his later high-rise building projects. The architecture of his towers appears to be similar, but each project represents new ideas about the formation of highly sophisticated urban space at ground level. He delighted in the composition of multiple towers arranged in a seemingly casual non-hierarchical relation to each other. He created, just as he did in his interiors, free flowing spaces and flat surfaces that represented the idea of an oasis of uncluttered clarity and calm within the chaos of the city. Nature was included by leaving openings in the pavement, through which plants seem to grow unfettered by urbanization, just as they would in their pre-settlement environment.
In 1958, Mies van der Rohe designed what is often regarded as the pinnacle of the modernist high-rise architecture, the Seagram Building in New York City. Mies was chosen by the daughter of the client, Phyllis Bronfman Lambert, who has become a noted architectural figure and patron in her own right. The Seagram Building has become an icon of the growing power of that defining institution of the 20th century, the corporation. In a bold and innovative move, the architect chose to set the tower back from the property line to create a forecourt plaza and fountain on Park Avenue. Although now acclaimed and widely influential as an urban design feature, Mies had to convince Bronfman's bankers that a taller tower with significant "unused" open space at ground level would enhance the presence and prestige of the building. Mies' design included a bronze curtain wall with external H-shaped mullions that were exaggerated in depth beyond what is structurally necessary, touching off criticism by his detractors that Mies had committed Adolf Loos's "crime of ornamentation". Philip Johnson had a role in interior materials selections and the plaza, and he designed the sumptuous Four Seasons Restaurant which has endured un-remodeled to today. The Seagram Building is said to be an early example of the innovative "fast-track" construction process, where design documentation and construction are done concurrently.
Using the Seagram as a prototype, Mies' office designed a number of modern high-rise office towers, notably the Chicago Federal Center, which includes the Dirksen and Kluczynski Federal Buildings and Post Office (1959) and the IBM Plaza in Chicago, the Westmount Square in Montreal and the Toronto-Dominion Centre in 1967. Each project applies the prototype rectangular form on stilts and ever-more refined enclosure wall systems, but each creates a unique set of exterior spaces that are an essential aspect of his creative efforts.
During 1951-1952, Mies' designed the steel, glass and brick McCormick House, located in Elmhurst, Illinois (15 miles west of the Chicago Loop), for real-estate developer Robert Hall McCormick, Jr. A one story adaptation of the exterior curtain wall of his famous 860-880 Lake Shore Drive towers, it served as a prototype for an unbuilt series of speculative houses to be constructed in Melrose Park, Illinois. The house has been moved and reconfigured as a part of the public Elmhurst Art Museum.
Mies's last work was the Neue Nationalgalerie art museum, the New National Gallery, in Berlin. Considered one of the most perfect statements of his architectural approach, the upper pavilion is a precise composition of monumental steel columns and a cantilevered (overhanging) roof plane with a glass enclosure. The simple square glass pavilion is a powerful expression of his ideas about flexible interior space, defined by transparent walls and supported by an external structural frame. The glass pavilion is a relatively small portion of the overall building, serving as a symbolic architectural entry point and monumental gallery for larger scale art. A large podium building below the pavilion accommodates most of the buildings actual built area in more functional spaces for galleries, support and utilitarian rooms.
The campus of Whitney Young High School and the adjacent Chicago Police Academy are two examples of the influence van der Rohe had on Chicago architecture.
Mies designed modern furniture pieces using new industrial technologies that have become popular classics, such as the Barcelona chair and table, the Brno chair, and the Tugendhat chair. His furniture is known for fine craftsmanship, a mix of traditional luxurious fabrics like leather combined with modern chrome frames, and a distinct separation of the supporting structure and the supported surfaces, often employing cantilevers to enhance the feeling of lightness created by delicate structural frames. During this period, he collaborated closely with interior designer and companion Lilly Reich.
Mies played a significant role as an educator, believing his architectural language could be learned, then applied to design any type of modern building. He worked personally and intensively on prototype solutions, and then allowed his students, both in school and his office, to develop derivative solutions for specific projects under his guidance. Some of Mies' curriculum is still put in practice in the first and second year programs at IIT, for example the excruciating drafting of bricks in second year. But when none was able to match the genius and poetic quality of his own work, he agonized about where his educational method had gone wrong.
Mies placed great importance on education of architects who could carry on his design principles. He devoted a great deal of time and effort leading the architecture program at IIT. Mies served on the initial Advisory Board of the Graham Foundation in Chicago. His own practice was based on intensive personal involvement in design efforts to create prototype solutions for building types (860 Lake Shore Dr, the Farnsworth, Seagram, S.R. Crown Hall, The New National Gallery), then allowing his studio designers to develop derivative buildings under his supervision. Mies's grandson Dirk Lohan and two partners led the firm after he died in 1969. Lohan, who had collaborated with Mies on the New National Gallery, continued with existing projects but soon led the firm on his own independent path. Other disciples continued his teachings for a few years, notably Gene Summers, David Haid, Myron Goldsmith, Jacques Brownson, and other architects at the firms of C.F. Murphy and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.
But while Mies' work had enormous influence and critical recognition, his approach failed to sustain a creative force as a style after his death and was eclipsed by the new wave of Post Modernism by the 1980s. He had hoped his architecture would serve as a universal model that could be easily imitated, but the aesthetic power of his best buildings proved impossible to match, instead resulting mostly in drab and uninspired structures. The failure of his followers to meet his high standard may have contributed to demise of Modernism and the rise of new competing design theories, notably Postmodernism.
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Over the last twenty years of his life, Mies developed and built his vision of a monumental "skin and bones" architecture that reflected his goal to provide the individual a place to fulfil himself in the modern era. Mies sought to create free and open spaces, enclosed within a structural order with minimal presence. Mies van der Rohe died in 1969, and was buried near Chicago's other famous architects in Chicago's Graceland Cemetery. His grave is marked by a simple black slab of granite and a large Honey locust tree.[1]
The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Archive, an administratively independent section of the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Architecture and Design, was established in 1968 by the Museum's trustees. It was founded in response to the architect's desire to bequeath his entire work to the Museum. The Archive consists of about nineteen thousand drawings and prints, one thousand of which are by the designer and architect Lilly Reich (1885-1947), Mies van der Rohe's close collaborator from 1927 to 1937; of written documents (primarily, the business correspondence) covering nearly the entire career of the architect; of photographs of buildings, models, and furniture; and of audiotapes, books, and periodicals.
Archival materials are also held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Collection, 1929-1969 (bulk 1948-1960) includes correspondence, articles, and materials related to his association with the Illinois Institute of Technology. The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe/Metropolitan Structures Collection, 1961-1969, includes scrapbooks and photographs documenting Chicago projects.
 Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, Washington. |
 Interior of Neue Nationalgalerie museum in Berlin, Germany |
 Lafayette Park, Detroit is on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places |
 Lafayette Towers Apartments East, Detroit. |
 Toronto-Dominion Centre logo includes the font text created by Mies |
 S.R. Crown Hall on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology is a National Historic Landmark |
 Highfield House, Baltimore |
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This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (October 2009) |
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Mentioned in
A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous.
- Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
