Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Less is more.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was the last director of the Bauhaus and designed the Barcelona Pavilion and the Seagram Building. He designed the Barcelona Chair with Lilly Reich.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies in Aachen in Germany in 1886. His father was a stonemason, and the son learned early on to respect materials and careful craftsmanship. He had no formal training as an architect but learned the profession in offices, including that of Peter Behrens in Berlin, where Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier also worked for a time. Later he added van der Rohe to his name.
In the 1920s he drew visionary projects, among them an all-glass skyscraper for Berlin that was never built. In 1927 he directed the Weissenhof housing exhibition in Stuttgart, where the leading architects of modernism showed new dwellings. His breakthrough was the German Pavilion at the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, with freely placed walls of marble and onyx beneath a flat roof carried on slender steel columns. The pavilion was dismantled after the exhibition but rebuilt in 1986. At the same time he designed the Villa Tugendhat in Brno, now a World Heritage Site.
He designed the Barcelona Chair and other furniture in close collaboration with the designer Lilly Reich, who was for many years his partner. In 1930 he became director of the Bauhaus, but the school closed under pressure from the Nazis in 1933. In 1938 he emigrated to the United States and became head of the architecture school at the Armour Institute, later the Illinois Institute of Technology, in Chicago, where he also designed the campus.
In the United States he realised his vision of an architecture of steel and glass. The Farnsworth House in Illinois of 1951 is a glass house that hovers above the ground. The Seagram Building in New York of 1958, designed with Philip Johnson, became the model for countless office buildings. His last major work was the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, which opened in 1968.
Mies died in Chicago in 1969. The phrase “less is more” is associated with him, and he emphasised proportion, precise detailing and free, open space. He is counted among the most important architects of the 20th century, and his glass skyscrapers have shaped cities all over the world, for better and for worse.