Background
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was born on March 27, 1886, in Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), Germany. From his father, who was a master mason, Mies gained a thorough knowledge of the possibilities and limitations of masonry construction.
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe. Dominidesign.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969)
Mies and Lora Marx in Chicago (1941).
Architect Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe Sitting at Desk W. Student at Institution of Technology.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe with Students.
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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was born on March 27, 1886, in Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), Germany. From his father, who was a master mason, Mies gained a thorough knowledge of the possibilities and limitations of masonry construction.
He attended the Cathedral School, which was founded by Charlemagne in the ninth century. This medieval heritage, especially the concepts of order expressed by Thomas Aquinas - "reason is the first principle of all human work" - influenced his strong conviction that all architecture should have a sane, rational appearance.
In 1905 he went to Berlin and there apprenticed himself to Bruno Paul, Germany's leading cabinetmaker. In 1908 he was employed as draftsman and designer for Peter Behrens, whose office in those days was a training ground for many famous architects of the modern movement, including Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. In 1912 Mies moved to The Hague and was much influenced by the buildings there designed by Hendrik Petrus Berlage, one of modern architecture's earliest champions.
After World War I, Mies organized exhibitions, financed the magazine G; and worked with the Novembergruppe, an organization promoting modern art. Though the projects he designed were too visionary to be built, they were frequently published and had a most important influence on modern architecture. In the next 12 years, Mies designed several exhibitions as well as his famous Barcelona, Tugendhat, and Brno chairs.
In 1926 Mies was made first vice-president of the Deutscher Werkbund, an association of craftsmen who studied the problems of applied design and was director of the 1927 Werkbund exhibition at Stuttgart, a landmark in the history of modern architecture. Here, a group of houses executed by several famous architects demonstrated that the International Style was becoming characteristic of much European architecture. Mies also designed the German pavilion for the International Exposition at Barcelona (1929) and the Tugendhat House in Brno, Czechoslovakia (1930). Both were masterpieces of craftsmanship expressing the concepts of the new architecture - functionalism and geometric precision. From 1930 to 1933 Mies was director of the Bauhaus, the noted school of design that stressed unity among the arts and the importance of industrial production in modern design.
Following the rise of the Nazi regime, he left Germany and came to the United States. Mies worked from his studio in downtown Chicago for his entire 31-year period in America. In 1938 he was appointed a director of architecture at Armour Institute (now the Illinois Institute of Technology) in Chicago. His low-lying design for its campus is an influential example of modern architectural group planning.
His work in the United States included the striking Edith Farnsworth House, Plano, Ill. (1950); a series of important apartment houses in Chicago, including the famous glass-expanse apartments on Lake Shore Drive (1951); and the bronze-tinged Seagram Building in New York City, which he designed in collaboration with Philip Johnson (1958)).
Mies van der Rohe died on August 17, 1969.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is regarded as one of the pioneers of modernist architecture.
He was a pioneer of the austere, geometric type of architecture known as the International Style, his most important work in Europe was the Berlin National Gallery. He is the only modern architect who formulated a genuinely contemporary and universally applicable architectural canon, and office buildings all over the world echo his concepts. In the United States, he created such famous works as the Chicago Federal Center complex, the Farnsworth House, Crown Hall and other structures of his so-called "skin and bones" architecture.
He admired the broad proportions, regularity of rhythmic elements, attention to the relationship of the man-made to nature, and compositions using simple cubic forms of the early nineteenth century Prussian Neo-Classical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. He rejected the eclectic and cluttered classical styles so common at the turn of the 20th century as irrelevant to the modern times.
He was a physically imposing, deliberative, and reticent man.
Ludwig Mies renamed himself as part of his rapid transformation from a tradesman's son to an architect working with Berlin's cultural elite, adding "van der" and his mother's surname "Rohe".
Mies married Adele Auguste (Ada) Bruhn (1885-1951), the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. The couple separated in 1918, after having three daughters: Dorothea (1914-2008), an actress and dancer who was known as Georgia, Marianne (1915-2003), and Waltraut (1917-1959), who was a research scholar and curator at the Art Institute of Chicago.
In 1925 Mies began a relationship with designer Lilly Reich that ended when he moved to the United States; from 1940 until his death, artist Lora Marx (1900-1989) was his primary companion.
