Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

 

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886 –1969) was a German-American architect. He served as the last director of Berlin's Bauhaus, and then headed the department of architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he developed the Second Chicago School. Along with Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, and Frank Lloyd Wright, he is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture.

Mies was born in Aachen, Germany. He worked in his father's stone-carving shop and at several local design firms before he moved to Berlin. He began his architectural career as an apprentice at the studio of Peter Behrens from 1908 to 1912, where he was exposed to the current design theories and to progressive German culture, working alongside Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, who were later also involved in the development of the Bauhaus*. Mies served as construction manager of the Embassy of the German Empire in Saint Petersburg under Behrens.

Mies began his independent professional career designing upper-class homes. He admired the broad proportions, regularity of rhythmic elements, attention to the relationship of the man-made to nature, he rejected the eclectic and cluttered classical styles so common at the turn of the twentieth century as irrelevant to the modern times. After World War I, he joined his avant-garde peers *in the long-running search for a new style that would be suitable for the modern industrial age.

While continuing his traditional neoclassical design practice, Mies began to develop visionary projects that rocketed him to fame as an architect capable of giving form that was in harmony with the spirit of the emerging modern society. Boldly abandoning ornament altogether, Mies made a dramatic modernist debut with his all-glass Friedrichstraße skyscraper in 1921, followed by a taller version in 1922 named the Glass Skyscraper. He continued with a series of pioneering projects, culminating in his two European masterworks: the temporary German Pavilion for the Barcelona exposition in 1929 and the elegant Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic, completed in 1930.

He was also one of the founders of the architectural association Der Ring*. He joined the avant-garde Bauhaus design school as their director of architecture, adopting and developing their functionalist application of simple geometric forms in the design of useful objects.

Commission opportunities dwindled with the worldwide depression after 1929. Starting in 1930, Mies served as the last director of the faltering Bauhaus*, at the request of his colleague and competitor Walter Gropius. In 1932, Nazi political pressure forced the state-supported school to leave its campus in Dessau, and Mies moved it to an abandoned telephone factory in Berlin. By 1933, however, the continued operation of the school was untenable (it was raided by the Gestapo in April), and in July of that year, Mies and the faculty voted to close the Bauhaus. He built very little in these years, for the Nazis rejected his style as not "German" in character.

Frustrated and unhappy, he had to emigrate to the USA in 1937, accepting a residential commission in Wyoming and then an offer to head the department of architecture of the newly established Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT)* in Chicago. One of the benefits of taking this position was that he would be commissioned to design the new buildings and master plan for the campus. All his buildings still stand there, including Alumni Hall, the Chapel, and his masterpiece the Crown Hall, built as the home of IIT's School of Architecture. The Crown Hall is widely regarded as Mies' finest work, the definition of Miesian architecture.

In 1944, he became an American citizen. His thirty years as an American architect reflect a more structural, pure approach toward achieving his goal of a new architecture for the twentieth century. Mies, like many of his post-World War I contemporaries, sought to establish a new architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their own eras. He sought a rational approach that would guide the creative process of architectural design, but he was always concerned with expressing the spirit of the modern era. He is often associated with his quotation of the aphorisms, "less is more" and "God is in the details". He created an influential twentieth century architectural style, stated with extreme clarity and simplicity. His architecture, with origins in the German Bauhaus and western European International Style, became an accepted mode of building for American cultural and educational institutions, developers, public agencies, and large corporations.

Notes:

* The Bauhaus: the Bauhaus School (1919–1933), one of the most influential schools of architecture, design, and art of the 20th century

* peer: = a person of the same age, status, or ability as another specified person.

* Atchitectural assaciation der Ring:Der Ring was an architectural collective founded in 1926 in Berlin. It emerged out of expressionist architecture with a functionalist agenda. Der Ring was a group of young architects, formed with the objective of promoting Modernist architecture.

* Illinois Institute of Technology:Illinois Institute of Technology, commonly called Illinois Tech or IIT, is a private Ph.D.-granting university located in Chicago, in the U.S. state of Illinois, with programs in engineering, science, psychology, architecture, business, communications, industrial technology, information technology, design and law.

Questions:

1. Did Mies have any professional higher education as an architect? Where did he start his career as an architect?

2. Could you name his two colleagues who were also involved with the Bauhouse? What do you know about them?

3. Did Mies have any experience of working in Russia?

4. How could his work be characterized after World War I?

5. Was his creative work successful under the Nazi?

6. When did he have to emigrate to the USA? Did he have anything to do there?

7. What is generally considered his finest work?

8. The author of the article mentions Classical and Gothic architectural styles. Could you briefly characterize these two styles?

9. What aphorisms of Mies are mentioned in the text? Do you agree with them? Why? / Why not? Give your reasons.