Architecture · Modernist

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

1886–1969 · German-American

International Style — 'skin and bones' architecture

The last director of the Bauhaus and, after emigrating to Chicago in 1938, the architect who gave corporate America its house style. Mies reduced building to a steel or concrete frame, a glass skin and a free-flowing plan, pursued with a precision that made 'less is more' and 'God is in the details' the most quoted lines in architecture. His Barcelona Pavilion and Farnsworth House are the purest statements of the idea; the Seagram Building is its most expensive.

How to spot them

▸A steel frame in dark bronze or black, glass walls, and non-structural I-beam mullions welded to the outside to express the frame
▸Free-standing polished stone planes that never meet in a corner; travertine podiums; a building set back behind a plaza
▸Quiz clue: 'less is more', 'God is in the details', 'beinahe nichts' (almost nothing), 'Barcelona chair'
▸Symmetry, repetition and near-identical buildings on the same campus

Key buildings

A German national pavilion of 1929 in travertine, green marble and golden onyx, dismantled after the fair and rebuilt on the same spot in 1986 (1929)

Montjuïc, Barcelona

The German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition, designed with Lilly Reich; the chair designed for it is still made

A one-room glass box on stilts above an Illinois flood plain, whose owner sued the architect over the cost (1951)

Plano, Illinois

The Farnsworth House, for the Chicago physician Edith Farnsworth; the lawsuit was bitter and mutual

A 38-storey bronze and amber-glass tower of 1958 set back behind a granite plaza on Park Avenue, built for a distillery (1958)

375 Park Avenue, New York City

The Seagram Building, with Philip Johnson; the plaza set-back changed New York zoning law

A single column-free glass hall of 1956, its roof hung from four exposed steel plate girders, housing an architecture school in Chicago (1956)

Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago

S. R. Crown Hall — 'almost nothing', the centrepiece of his IIT campus

A black steel temple of 1968 in Berlin with a huge square coffered roof on eight external columns, floating over a stone podium (1968)

Kulturforum, Berlin

The Neue Nationalgalerie, his last completed work; the roof was jacked up into place in a single day

A pair of black steel-and-glass apartment towers of 1951 set at right angles beside a Chicago lakefront drive (1951)

Chicago, Illinois

860–880 Lake Shore Drive — the prototype of the glass residential tower

A 1930 house in Moravia built for a textile family, with an onyx wall and plate-glass windows that sink into the floor (1930)

Brno, Czech Republic

Villa Tugendhat, with Lilly Reich; a UNESCO World Heritage Site

Key ideas

'Less is more' — his best-known formulation, later answered by Robert Venturi's 'less is a bore'
'God is in the details'
Skin and bones: a clear structural frame, with everything else hung from it or slid between the columns
Universal space: a single clear-span volume that can be adapted to any use, as at Crown Hall
Beinahe nichts — 'almost nothing' — the goal of reduction

Quick-fire facts

•Born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies in Aachen on 27 March 1886, the son of a stonemason; he added his mother's name, van der Rohe, in the early 1920s
•He trained in the offices of Bruno Paul and Peter Behrens, where Gropius and Le Corbusier also worked
•As vice-president of the Deutscher Werkbund he directed the Weissenhof Estate at Stuttgart in 1927
•He was the third and last director of the Bauhaus, from 1930, and closed it in 1933 under Nazi pressure
•He emigrated to the United States in 1938 to head the architecture school at the Armour (later Illinois) Institute of Technology, designing some 20 buildings for its campus
•His unbuilt 1920s projects — the Friedrichstrasse glass skyscraper and the brick country house — were as influential as anything he built
•He received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1959 and the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963
•He died in Chicago on 17 August 1969, ten years before the Pritzker Prize was founded
•London's Mansion House Square tower, designed with Peter Palumbo, was rejected after a public inquiry in 1985; James Stirling's No 1 Poultry was built instead

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources

Fundació Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona — The Pavilion — history
Franz Schulze and Edward Windhorst — Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography