Mies van der rohe architect biography

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The skin-and-bones construction is nakedly apparent in the house's I-beams and concrete-slab frame, with a simple box enclosed on all four sides by floor-to-ceiling curtain walls of glass. This is a kingdom!" At the end of a four-day visit, Wright even drove Mies back to Chicago, stopping at Racine to show him the Johnson Wax Building under construction.

For the exposition, Mies unveiled his MR tubular steel chair, inspired by earlier examples by Marcel Breuer and Mart Stam. It constitutes Mies' and Reich's most succinct statement in the reduction of a building to the minimal requirements to define space: a handful of columns elevated on a platform juxtaposed with asymmetrically-arranged opaque and transparent wall planes, supporting a flat roof.

Paradoxically, while Mies' approach had a huge impact on students, and the aesthetics of his finest buildings proved impossible to match, his very success led to such slavish imitation that architects and public got bored. By 1921, he had embraced the clear-span pavilion, which he believed facilitated the accommodation of varying uses over time.

Even at this early stage, however, Mies's designs were noticeably free of unnecessary or eclectic decoration, a tendency which would later lead to his signature minimalist style. Behrens was widely known for his commercial work in Berlin, but he also designed residences that demonstrated the new regard for classicism as a whole and for the work of one of Germany’s historically distinguished architects, Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

A leading figure in the modernist movement that flourished in Europe during the 1920s, Mies later emigrated to the United States, where his reputation and influence took on international dimensions. It uses, as a result, the minimal amount of material necessary to enclose its volumes, and the choice of glass for its skin makes the building almost disappear.

Most practically, it always admitted natural light as much as possible inside - but conversely did not make the building particularly energy-efficient. During that time, he independently completed his first project in 1907, a private house in Potsdam-Neubabelsberg commissioned by the philosophy professor and Friedrich Nietzsche scholar Alois Richl.

The resulting publicity and success of the show added to Mies' global renown, and that same year he met Herbert Greenwald, a Chicago real-estate developer who became one of Mies' most loyal clients (until February 1959, when Greenwald died in a plane crash). While Mies might have worked for the Nazis as he perceived them shortly after Hitler's accession, the party line turned away from modernist expression in the arts in 1934.

After protracted wrangling with Hitler's underlings to allow the school to reopen, Mies received a green light, after which he and his fellow faculty closed the school on their own accord, realizing that it would not survive in the new German political order.

Move to the USA

Despite Mies' professed apolitical stance, it was clear that his professional situation in Nazi Germany had become untenable by 1937.

It was, for sure, the most progressive building constructed at the exposition, contrasting sharply with the rather old-fashioned neo-Baroque structures that dominated the grounds.

In 1913, Mies set up his own shop in Lichterfelde. The house was designed as a weekend retreat for Edith Farnsworth, a physician who owned nine acres of land along the Fox River 50 miles outside Chicago near Plano. As he had earlier done with the Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago, Mies chose to enclose the fireproof concrete-clad steel frame in a metal casing, and then emphasize each vertical spandrel with an ornamental I-beam rising the entire height of the building and reinforcing the sense of verticality.

He designed the Seagram Building (1954-58) New York's most elegant and, at the time, most expensive office building, in collaboration with Philip Johnson (1906-2005); and as part of Detroit's renewal, his design for Lafayette Park (1955-63) demonstrated that urban life could combine the best of city and country living.

Indeed, one friend observed that Mies habitually let others dominate a conversation until he gauged that they had spilled everything they wanted to say, then would often sneak in and make a summary pronouncement or inject something that nobody had considered yet, which gave his words a certain gravitas.

Mies took over the Bauhaus, but with the rise of Nazis and the continued hostility in Dessau, it became clear that even after the move to Berlin in 1932, the school was doomed.