Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Mies van der Rohe designed the Barcelona Pavilion and the Villa Tugendhat and led the Bauhaus in its final years. In the United States his glass skyscrapers, such as the Seagram Building in New York, became the model for office buildings all over the world.
Ludwig Mies was born in 1886 in Aachen, the son of a stonemason, and later added van der Rohe to his name. He had no formal architectural training but learned in his father’s workshop and as a draughtsman for building firms. Around 1905 he moved to Berlin, where he worked for the furniture designer and architect Bruno Paul and, from 1908 to 1912, for Peter Behrens, at the same time as Walter Gropius. His first houses of his own were villas in a neoclassical spirit inspired by Schinkel. After the First World War he joined the Berlin avant-garde and drew visionary projects, among them all-glass skyscrapers that were never built but became famous through drawings and models.
Mies was artistic director of the Werkbund’s Weissenhof housing exhibition in Stuttgart in 1927. The Barcelona Pavilion of 1929 consisted of free-standing walls of marble and onyx, slender steel columns beneath a flat roof and a flowing space. The Villa Tugendhat in Brno followed the same idea. He was the last director of the Bauhaus, from 1930 to 1933, and in 1938 emigrated to Chicago, where he headed the architecture programme at the Illinois Institute of Technology and designed its campus, including Crown Hall. The Farnsworth House, the apartment towers on Lake Shore Drive and the Seagram Building in New York display his architecture of steel and glass, with exact proportions, universal space and structure that becomes ornament.
Mies ended his career with the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, a glazed hall beneath a vast flat steel roof, and died in 1969 in Chicago. His glass office towers became the model for business districts in cities all over the world in the post-war period, and the International Style is associated with his name. Critics in the 1960s and 70s argued that his followers’ copies made cities monotonous, and postmodernism was formulated partly in opposition to him. In Sweden his influence can be seen in the office and commercial buildings of the 1950s and 60s, in steel construction and in the glazed façades of Stockholm’s new city centre, whose Swedish architects studied his buildings in Chicago and New York.