Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a very famous architect for his much-misunderstood dictum “Less is More”. He sought to create contemplative, emotionally neutral spaces through an architecture based on material honesty and structural integrity. The first seeds of this austere vision of architecture may have been planted when Mies attended mass as a schoolboy in the Palatine Chapel, Aachen.
Early employment in the family stone carving business gave him an appreciation of materials that was to endure throughout his life. Following an apprenticeship in the office of Bruno Paul in Berlin, he entered the studio of Peter Behrens in 1908 and stayed there, with a brief intermission, until early 1912. Under the influence of Behrens, Mies discovered the combination of Prussian Classicism and advanced structural techniques that were to determine his subsequent development.
An important model was provided by Schinkel, whose clearly articulated architectural language, based on a simple post-and-lintel construction, was to be rivalled by Mies in the c20 materials of steel and glass. Although never intimately involved with the glass fantasists of post-1918 German Expressionism, Mies created the most powerful early icons of the glass architecture of the future with his proposals for an office tower on Friedrichstrasse, Berlin (1921), and for a thirty-storey glass skyscraper (1922).
Mies’s sympathy for the aesthetic credos of both Russian Constructivism and the Dutch De Stijl group explains his involvement with the magazine G, launched in July 1923 by El. Lissitzky, Hans Richter and Werner Graeff. In the second issue, Mies described his current scheme for a concrete office building as follows: “The office is a building of work, of organization, of clarity, of economy…The materials are concrete, steel, and glass. Reinforced concrete buildings are naturally skeletal constructions…skin and bone buildings.” While this office project was firmly ordered by Classical axiality, Mies’s contemporary projects for a Concrete Country House (1923) and a Brick Country House (1924) have open plans strongly reminiscent of De Stijl paintings, with wall panels and windows arranged as vertical planes around which internal and external spaces can flow without interruption.
Mies made a major contribution to the architectural polemics of the late 1920s as artistic director of the Werkbund-sponsored Weissenhof project, in which a model estate was constructed on a site outside Stuttgart as a test-bed for the white, functionalist housing of “Neues Bauen”. In addition to designing the site-plan and an apartment block, Mies commissioned house designs from sixteen leading Modernists, including famous architects – Gropius, Scharoun, Rehrens, Bruno and Max Taut, Oud, Siam, and Le Corbusier.
A sensuous delight in flowing space and highly finished materials can he admired in the Barcelona Pavilion (1928-9), a single-storey building set on a travertine podium, with a grid of chrome-plated columns and vertical planes of onyx and coloured glass. With the curved steel frame of the Barcelona chair, designed for the same occasion, famous architect Mies achieved a timeless minimalist elegance.
As Director of the Bauhaus, Mies supervised the last two years of the school’s life in Dessau (1930-32) and the final year of its existence in Berlin (1932-3). Deprived of regular employment, and with few prospects in the hostile environment of Nazi Germany, he looked to a future in the USA. He moved to Chicago in 1938, and commissions rapidly followed, most notably a master-plan for the IIT campus (1940-41), in which a series of modestly scaled and immaculately detailed buildings are set in a loosely axial relationship, to create an oasis of calm and repose amid the disorder of the Chicago suburbs.
The Farnsworth House (1946-51) – a single storey glazed box floating on a steel frame above a meadow in rural Illinois – achieved similar results in a more propitious setting. Over the last two decades of his life, Mies realized his vision of a monumental “skin and hone” architecture in a series of designs that established an international model and standard for the urban office block: the Seagram Building, New York (1954-8), Federal Center, Chicago (1959-64), and the Dominion Center, Toronto (1963-9). Mies’s design for the New National Gallery in Berlin (1962-7) provides a fitting coda to a life dedicated to the notion of a universal architecture, reduced to its essentials.
List of Mies’s major works:
Kiehl House, Berlin-Neuhahelsherg, 1907.
Project: Krüller-Miiller House, Wassenaar, Holland, 1912.
Project: Office Building, Friedrichstrasse, Berlin, 1921.
Project: Glass Skyscraper, 1922.
Wolf House, Guben, 1925-7.
Monument to the November Revolution: Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Berlin-Friedrichsfelde, 1926.
Site planning and apartment building, Weissenhof Estate, Stuttgart, 1927.
German Pavilion, Barcelona Exhibition, 1928-9 (rebuilt 1986).
Tugendhat House, Brno, 1928-30. Model House and Apartment, Berlin Building Exhibition, 1931.
Project: Reichshank, Berlin, 1933.
Project: Resor House, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, 1937-8.
Preliminary Plan for Campus of Armour Institute of Technology, Chicago, 1939.
Master Plan, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, 1940-41 (implemented 1942-57). Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois, 1946-51.
860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments, Chicago, 1948-51.
Crown Hall, TIT, Chicago, 1950-56.
Seagram Building, New York, 1954-8.
Project: Bacardi Office Building, Santiago, Cuba, 1957.
Federal Center, Chicago, 1959-64.
New National Gallery, Berlin, 1962-7.
Lafayette Towers, Lafayette Park, Detroit, 1963.
Dominion Center, Toronto, 1963-9.
Project: Mansion House Square and Tower, London, 1967.
Bibliography
Philip C. Johnson Mies van der Rohe, London, 1978.
Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe, Chicago and London, 1985.
Wolf Tegethoff, Mies van der Rohe: The Villas and Country Houses, Cambridge, Mass., 1985.
Fritz Neumeyer, Mies van der Rohe: Das kunstiose Wort, Berlin, 1986.
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