Mies van der Rohe

1886–1969 · German-American · 16 buildings on the wall

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) was a German-American architect and one of the pioneers of modern architecture, known for buildings of industrial steel and plate glass. He was the last director of the Bauhaus, emigrated to the United States after the Nazis came to power, and led the architecture school at what is now the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Two sayings are tied to him: "less is more" and "God is in the details".

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The Barcelona Pavilion (1929), designed with Lilly Reich for the International Exposition and rebuilt in 1986, sets free-standing walls of marble, onyx and tinted glass on a grid of chrome-clad, cross-shaped steel columns. At Villa Tugendhat in Brno (1930), a translucent onyx wall changes in the low evening sun. The Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois (1951) raises a glass house on eight steel columns above a floodplain. S. R. Crown Hall in Chicago (1956) is an early clear-span building, and the Seagram Building in New York (1958) wraps its tower in glass and bronze behind a public plaza. Mies van der Rohe's buildings are studied for structure, proportion and precise detail.

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