Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Architect

• Born: March 27, 1886
• Birthplace: Aachen, Germany
• Died: August 7, 1969
• Place of death: Chicago, Illinois

German-born American architect

One of the greatest architects and architectural educators of the twentieth century, Mies van der Rohe left a legacy of famous buildings and a legacy in furniture design unmatched by any other member of the Modern movement.

Area of achievement Architecture

Early Life

Born to Michael Mies, a master mason, and his wife, Amalie, both German, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (meez vahn duhr roh) was to add a version of his mother’s family name to his own in adulthood, believing that mies, which in German means “bad” or “poor,” was professionally a liability. He was, however, known to intimates as “Mies” throughout his life.

His father owned a stone-cutting shop, and Mies van der Rohe got his first experience with building materials while helping his father. He was educated in the Aachen Cathedral School, which could trace its existence back to the time when Aachen (formerly Aix-la-Chapelle) had been the first capital of Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire. In his childhood, much of the medieval city was extant (much of it was lost during World War II), and he spoke of its architecture as an important influence on him in his formative years.

At the age of thirteen, he became a student in the local trade school, studying there for two years, during which time he was also a part-time apprentice to a brick mason. With a natural talent for drawing, at the age of fifteen he joined an interior decorating firm specializing in stucco ornamentation, soon becoming the firm’s designer. In 1904, he entered a local architect’s office, and a year later, he moved to Berlin. He had, by then, some deep knowledge of stone, but knew little about how to use wood; he took employment with Bruno Paul, who had a distinguished reputation for his use of wood in both his architecture and his furniture design.

In 1907, Mies van der Rohe left Paul to work on a private commission. His first house, designed in the popular eighteenth century German style, possessed an air of proportion and a fineness of detail that were to be common aspects of his architecture. The next year, the prestigious Peter Behrens firm hired him, and during his time there, two other young architects, who were, like Mies van der Rohe, to have important careers, passed through the firm: Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. Behrens carried on the tradition of the early nineteenth century architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), who had advocated the sensitive use of fine materials, gracious space and balance in design, and careful and fastidious concern for detail. The Behrens group was committed to the union of engineering and architecture, accepting the facts of industrialization and mass production without presuming that beauty had to give way to utility. AEG, the German equivalent of General Electric in America, used Behrens to design their buildings, their building fixtures, and even the letterhead for their stationery. Mies van der Rohe was involved in the building of the Turbine factory for AEG that Behrens had designed with interesting anticipations of later architectural ideas, and Behrens put him in charge of the construction of the German Embassy in St. Petersburg, Russia.

On his own by 1913, Mies van der Rohe designed some intriguing domestic buildings, still, albeit, in the old tradition, but showing a sensitive and original grasp of space and proportion. He served in World War I in the German army as an engineer, supervising the building of roads and bridges. A solidly built young man with the bland good looks of the German burgher, it would have been difficult to tell by looking that he possessed the imagination, energy, and will to impose his ideas of architecture and design on the entire Western world.

Life’s Work

After the war, Mies van der Rohe committed himself as a designer to the architecture of what has been called the Modern movement, and he became a prominent member of the group of German architects and designers determined to make a new kind of building using the materials of twentieth century industrial technology: steel, glass, and reinforced concrete. The German economy was so disastrously affected by the war that little major building took place, but Mies van der Rohe exhibited major projects that were to establish his reputation. These plans, the Glass Skyscrapers (1919-1921), the Concrete Office Building (1922), the Brick Country House (1923), and the Concrete Country House (1924), exemplify, in part in their titles, the new direction taken by their creator. Uninterested in politics, he accepted, nevertheless, the proposition that architecture should be a sign of a society’s vitality, that it was an important expression of its own time. He was a member of several organizations supporting the new movement in the arts, and the director of several exhibitions of contemporary architecture during the 1920’s.

By the mid-1920’s, Mies van der Rohe had established his reputation as an innovator but had constructed very few buildings. During this lean period, he put his experience in the crafts to the problem of designing furniture that would be consistent with the new architecture, and it was to be this work that would result in his development of the famous tubular steel chair that was to bear his copyright.

In 1928, he was awarded a commission for the German Pavilion at the International Exposition to be held in Barcelona, Spain. Although the building was to exist only during the period of the fair, it was to be remembered by photographs and drawings as one of the most important buildings of the Modern movement and was to become a touchstone building in modern architecture. Although he had revealed bits and pieces of his ideas in previous buildings during the 1920’s, this was the first time that he was free to express his ideas without the limitations and impositions of ordinary contracts. The building itself was simply to be a showpiece unwedded to any particular function, the funds were generous, and he was allowed the use of first-class materials and first-class artisans.

The trademarks of his career were displayed with astonishing success: roof weight was to be carried not by walls but by steel columns, and the walls, as a result, were to function as aesthetic planes and screens in space, with as little enclosed area as possible, so that the whole structure had an open-air aspect. He managed to join the austerity of modern design, the materials of twentieth century industry, to the traditional materials of the past builders, such as marble and onyx. He showed in one simple building that technology, the skeletal design, and modern materials could be used aesthetically.

In 1929-1930, his Tugendhat House in Brno, Czechoslovakia, applied the same principles to a private dwelling. Again, he freed the walls from load bearing, refused to box in anything save service areas such as bathrooms and kitchens, used an abundance of glass walls as exteriors, and only loosely distinguished living areas by the steel columns carrying the roof and curved planes of richly polished onyx and ebony. As in the Barcelona building, the furniture was specially designed to complement, and compliment, the light, airy openness.

In 1930, Mies van der Rohe became the director of Germany’s famous Bauhaus, the school founded by Walter Gropius to teach art and design in the modern mode, and in which the fusion of the functional and the beautiful was explored in the production of everything from cutlery to plans for entire towns. There had been continual conservative criticism of the school since its inception in 1919, and in the early 1930’s, the Nazis, on coming to power, closed it down. Mies van der Rohe resisted for a few months, received permission to reopen, but on unacceptable terms, and gave it up in 1933. Out of favor with the fascists, who suspected the intellectual community in general, Mies van der Rohe received few commissions and lived on royalties from his furniture designs.

In 1938, he left Germany and took the post of director of architecture at the Armour (later Illinois) Institute of Technology in Chicago. He became an American citizen in 1944.

Welcomed to Chicago by Frank Lloyd Wright, whose work he deeply admired (and who was later to complain about Mies van der Rohe’s “flat-chested” architecture), he brought the best aspects of the Bauhaus into conjunction with American architectural education, putting emphasis, as always, on the symbiotic relationship of modern technology and modern design. Fully committed to the steel skeleton as aesthetically valid, he led his school away from “facade” architecture. He had always been an articulate spokesperson for the new ideas, and in his role of educator and practitioner he continued to express the theories of the Modern movement with gnomic attractiveness.

He was to remain at the school until 1958, and during that period, he was to work at the design of an entirely new campus for the institute, using his ideas of variations on the skeletal steel configuration to build a campus of artistic oneness, even for buildings that in the hands of past architects were considered too special for such treatment. By 1947, he was so firmly established as a major figure that the Museum of Modern Art in New York held an exhibition of his work (as they did again in 1986).

His career, however, has not been without resistance, even from those who admired him. His Farnsworth House, designed and built between 1945 and 1950, won the important Twenty-five-year Award from the American Institute of Architects in 1981. Its owner complained about getting an expensive one-room glass box and was sued for its payment, but she was not far from the truth in the sense that Mies van der Rohe had designed a simple, glass-walled box with the roof and the floor riding on cantilevered supports in a sense, a transparent house through which the natural setting (it was a country retreat) flowed. For good or ill, it was to have an important influence on house design.

The same can be said for his work in urban, high-rise apartment design. His Lake Shore Drive apartments (1948-1951) were to be the first of the high-rise city dwellings made almost solely of glass and steel, and they were to be the prototype for the new age of urban architecture. He also provided a model for the urban housing development with his Lafayette Park project in Detroit (1955-1963), in which he mixed one-story, two-story, and high-rise apartment complexes in a garden and park setting with special attention to keeping the parking areas on the perimeters of the property.

His Seagram Building in New York City is one of the best examples of the application of his design theories to the needs of the corporate world. Facing on Park Avenue, it occupies one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the world, yet Mies van der Rohe preserved half the site as open space, using it as a jeweled base for the building by the tasteful addition of greenery, pools, pink granite paving, and marble benches. The building itself is an uncompromising exercise in his use of steel and glass, but the steel is bronze-clad, the glass is topaz-gray, and the incidental furnishings are of comparable richness. It set a new standard not only in design but also in siting and in dressing a building that the business world has insisted on imitating ever since, sometimes with success (if they could get Mies van der Rohe to do the work), and sometimes with less happy results.

His own buildings have, in the main, been formidable variations on the Seagram theme, and examples of his work can be seen in cities all over the world. In his later years, Mies van der Rohe confined himself almost exclusively to corporate projects with the emphasis on high-rise offices and apartment buildings. His thrusting, concrete-cased structures lapped in steel and glass, both richly colored, decorated by equally handsome I-beam mullions, are visual confirmations of the power of the industrialized world. Since his death in 1969, that enthusiasm for his work or for the work of his followers has continued, and his influence on renewed or revived or rebuilt city and town centers is ubiquitous.

Significance

If credit for the revolution of modern architecture must be shared by Mies van der Rohe with Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Frank Lloyd Wright, and if Gropius anticipated everyone with the matchbox style in his famous Fagus Werke in 1911, it was Mies van der Rohe who was eventually to dominate (indeed, almost corner) the market in urban center planning and particularly in post-World War II skyscrapers.

He became the most international of architects, who tended, in the past, to be confined in their commissions to their native land, although their influence might transcend space and time. Mies van der Rohe, like Gropius, straddled the Atlantic, Mies van der Rohe taking the Bauhaus to Chicago, Gropius taking it to Harvard. As a practitioner, however, Mies van der Rohe is everywhere in the Western world, and his work is standing in major and minor cities often cheek-to-jowl with that of his followers.

There is the rub: Mies van der Rohe, with no expense spared, using rich materials, brought together with craftsmanlike skill and fastidiousness, produced buildings of stunning aesthetic clarity and simplicity. Standing alone, they are often great works of art. Surrounded by equally tall imitations, they can lose that power simply because their creator is one of those artists who is easily emulated. The copies, less lavish materially, less lovingly constructed, often parodic in their determination to be like the original, are a principal reason for the monotony of late twentieth century city cores. The clutter of glass-and-steel monoliths, reflecting one another across narrow streets and looking alike from town to town, is the sad legacy of Mies van der Rohe’s domination of urban architecture.

Bibliography

Blaser, Werner. Mies van der Rohe. Rev. ed. New York: Praeger, 1972. Originally published in 1965, this book is particularly interesting because it is based on conversations with Mies van der Rohe and allows him to discuss the development of his ideas in relation to specific buildings.

Carter, Peter. Mies van der Rohe at Work. New York: Praeger, 1974. Divided into chapters dealing with technical aspects of Mies van der Rohe’s work but easily understood by the lay reader. A helpful chart shows the number of projects and their progression toward the big building.

Hilbersheimer, L. Mies van der Rohe. Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1956. A bit short on text, but the commentary is succinct nevertheless. Includes generous photographs.

Johnson, Phillip C. Mies van der Rohe. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1947. Published on the occasion of the 1947 Exhibition and prepared with the help of Mies van der Rohe himself, this volume offers a well-written, illustrated account of his career until the time of the show.

Lambert, Phyllis, ed. Mies in America. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001. The book’s nine essays and 550 illustrations examine the entire body of work that Mies van der Rohe created in the United States, including the Seagram Building in New York and the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

Pawley, Martin. Mies van der Rohe. London: Thames & Hudson, 1970. Pawley, quite properly, claims only to write an introduction and notes to what is really a book of pictures (some in color), but these pictures are by an excellent photographer, Yukio Futagawa. The best way to understand Mies van der Rohe is to see the buildings in person, but good photographs help.

Riley, Terrence, and Barry Bergdoll. Mies in Berlin. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2001. Eleven scholars and architectural historians analyze Mies van der Rohe’s work during his early career in Berlin. Published to accompany an exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2001.

Spaeth, David A. Mies van der Rohe. New York: Rizzoli, 1985. Popular critical biography, taking Mies van der Rohe through his entire career. Ample use of his own statements, with technical jargon kept to a minimum. Well illustrated with excellent photographs and generous use of drawings.

Speyer, A. James. Mies van der Rohe. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1968. Published at the time of the retrospective exhibition at the Art Institute, this book looks at specific projects, bringing together photos, plans, and short, sensible commentaries.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1901-1940: October, 1907: Deutscher Werkbund Is Founded; 1919: German Artists Found the Bauhaus.

1941-1970: 1956-1962: Saarinen Designs Kennedy Airport’s TWA Terminal; September 28, 1966: Breuer Designs a Building for the Whitney Museum.

1971-2000: 1978: AT&T Building Exemplifies Postmodernism.