Mies van der Rohe, << MEEZ van duhr ROH uh, >> Ludwig (1886-1969), was one of the most influential architects of the 1900’s. He won fame for the clean, uncluttered design of his buildings of brick, steel, and glass. His architectural philosophy is sometimes summarized by the phrase “less is more.”
Mies, as he was called, was born on March 27, 1886, in Aachen, Germany. He built his first steel-framed building in 1927 at the Werkbund exposition he directed in Stuttgart, Germany. Two years later, he built his famous German Pavilion at an international exhibition in Barcelona, Spain. It featured onyx partition walls, a hovering slab roof, and travertine walls. The building enclosed space in an abstract manner through its asymmetrically placed wall elements that extended beyond the body of the building.
In 1930, Mies became director of the Bauhaus school of design in Dessau, Germany. That same year, he built the Tugendhat house in Brno, Czechoslovakia. This house applied his abstract principles of composition to domestic architecture. In 1932, Mies moved the Bauhaus to Berlin where he remained until it closed in 1933.
Mies moved to the United States in 1938. He became director of the school of architecture, planning, and design at the Armour Institute in Chicago, later the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). In 1939, Mies began planning a new campus for IIT. He left the symmetrical steel skeletons of the buildings exposed and combined them with great expanses of glass and carefully arranged panels of brick (see Architecture (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe)). One of his most praised buildings is the Seagram Building (1958) in New York, which he codesigned with Philip Johnson. It shows his love of fine materials and regular forms that he believed were applicable to any type of building. Mies died on Aug. 17, 1969.
