Mies van der Rohe: Less Is More in Glass and Steel

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) was a German-American architect and one of the most influential figures of modernism. He created a strictly reduced architecture of steel, glass and pure proportions, summed up in the words “less is more” and “God is in the details”.

Facts

From Aachen to Berlin

Mies was born in Aachen, the son of a stonemason, and learned the trade in his father’s workshop. He later took his mother’s name Rohe and added van der to sound grander. In Berlin he worked for Peter Behrens, together with Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, at the same time as Behrens designed the AEG Turbine Hall. From Behrens he got a respect for classical proportion and for Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

In the 1920s Mies made visionary sketches of glass skyscrapers that were radical for their time, long before the technology was ready. In 1927 he directed the Weissenhof building exhibition in Stuttgart, where leading architects, among them Le Corbusier and Gropius, designed modern housing. It was the movement’s great breakthrough in Germany; read about it under functionalism.

Barcelona and Tugendhat

The Barcelona Pavilion was built as Germany’s contribution to the 1929 World’s Fair. It had no purpose other than to show a new architecture, with slabs of marble, onyx and glass that created space without enclosing it. The roof rests on thin steel columns, and the rooms flow into one another. The pavilion was demolished in 1930 but rebuilt on the same spot in 1986. For it Mies, together with Lilly Reich, designed the Barcelona chair with its crossed steel frame.

Villa Tugendhat in Brno, built 1928–1930, is a private home with a single large open storey of glass and steel, divided by a wall of onyx. It lies on a slope with a view over the city. In 1930–1933 Mies was director of the Bauhaus, but the school was closed by the Nazis. Read about the design side of the movement in the guide to the Bauhaus.

Chicago and New York

In 1938 Mies left Germany and moved to Chicago, where he became a teacher at and planned the campus for the Illinois Institute of Technology. Farnsworth House in Illinois (1945–1951) is a rectangular glass house between two slabs that seems to float above the lawn, carried by eight steel columns. It is perhaps the purest modernist idea in built form, but privacy was lacking, and the owner, Dr Edith Farnsworth, disputed the costs with Mies. In the same years Philip Johnson built his own glass house, the Glass House, which clearly followed Mies.

The Seagram Building on Park Avenue in New York, designed with Philip Johnson and finished in 1958, is the classic skyscraper in bronze-tinted glass and steel. The building was set back from the street to give a small plaza in front, and the bronze I-beams on the outside are decoration that makes the structure visible. It became the model for thousands of office buildings; read about the development in the guide to the history of the skyscraper.

The legacy

Mies’s last great work was the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1962–1968), a single large glass room under a square steel roof. He died in 1969 in Chicago. His influence is enormous: the International Style, post-war office buildings and even the minimalist design of computers and telephones. The ideals of the time are found under post-war modernism.

Critics hold that his forbearing rationality created a monotonous city of glass boxes, and that his homes are not very practical. But his pure spaces show what architecture can be when everything superfluous is taken away. Read on about functionalism, about the design work of Mies and Dieter Rams, who also sought the simple, and about high-tech architecture, which took steel further. Compare Frank Lloyd Wright, whom he admired.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Which is the best-known motto associated with Mies van der Rohe?