Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ( MEESS-...-ROH; German: [ˈluːtvɪç ˈmiːs fan deːɐ̯ ˈʁoːə]; born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies; March 27, 1886 – August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect. He was commonly referred to as Mies, his surname. Along with Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright, he is regarded as one of the pioneers of modernist architecture.

In the 1930s, Mies was the last director of the Bauhaus, a ground-breaking school of modernist art, design and architecture. After Nazism's rise to power, with its strong opposition to modernism (leading to the closing of the Bauhaus itself), Mies emigrated to the United States. He accepted the position to head the architecture school at what is today the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

Mies sought to establish his own particular architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their own eras. The style he created made a statement with its extreme clarity and simplicity. His mature buildings made use of modern materials such as industrial steel and plate glass to define interior spaces, as also conducted by other modernist architects in the 1920s and 1930s such as Richard Neutra. He strove toward an architecture with a minimal framework of structural order balanced against the implied freedom of unobstructed free-flowing open space. He called his buildings "skin and bones" architecture. He sought an objective approach that would guide the creative process of architectural design, but was always concerned with expressing the spirit of the modern era. He is often associated with his fondness for the aphorisms "less is more" and "God is in the details".

Personal life

In 1913, 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. During his military service in 1917, Mies fathered a son out of wedlock.

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. Mies carried on a romantic relationship with sculptor and art collector Mary Callery for whom he designed an artist's studio in Huntington, Long Island, New York. He had a brief romantic relationship with Nelly van Doesburg. After having met in Europe many years prior, they met again in New York in 1947 during a dinner with Josep Lluís Sert where he promised her he would help organize an exhibition in Chicago featuring the work of her late husband Theo van Doesburg. This exhibition took place from October 15 until November 8, 1947, with their romance officially ending not much later. Nevertheless they remained on good terms, spending Easter together in 1948 at a modern farmhouse renovated by Mies on Long Island, as well as meeting several more times that year. He also was rumored to have a brief relationship with Edith Farnsworth, who commissioned his work for the Farnsworth House. His daughter Marianne's son, Dirk Lohan (b. 1938), studied under, and later worked for, Mies.

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Early career

Mies was born in Aachen, Germany, on March 27, 1886. Before he moved to Berlin, where he joined interior designer Bruno Paul's office, he worked in his father's stone carving shop and several local design companies. He began his architectural career as an apprentice at Peter Behrens' studio from 1908 to 1912, where he was exposed to the latest design philosophy and modern German history. He worked with Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, who were later involved in the Bauhaus's construction. Mies served as the construction manager of the Embassy of the German Empire in Saint Petersburg under Behrens.

Ludwig Mies renamed himself as part of his cultural transition from a tradesman's uncle to an architect practicing in Berlin's cultural elite, as well as using the Dutch word "van der" and his mother's maiden name "Rohe" (the word mies means "lousy" in German) and "van der" means "under" because the German word "von" was strictly restricted to those of legitimate aristocratic lineage. He began his working life by designing upper-class homes.

Career in the United States

Mies landed in Chicago, Illinois, where he was appointed head of the architecture school at Chicago's Armour Institute of Technology (later renamed Illinois Institute of Technology). One of the perks of being a part of the university was that he would be retained to design the new buildings and master plan. All his buildings remain standing, including Alumni Hall, the chapel, and his masterpiece, the S.R. The School of Architecture at IIT's Corona Hall was built as the home of the School of Architecture. Crown Hall is widely regarded as Mies' finest work, the interpretation of Miesian architecture.

He became an American citizen in 1944, bringing an end to his severance from his native Germany. His thirty years as an American architect reflect a more concrete, pure commitment to achieving his goal of a new architecture for the twentieth century. He concentrated his attention on enclosures, with clearly defined structural frameworks including prefabricated steel shapes covered in with large sheets of glass.

His early projects on the IIT campus, as well as developer Herbert Greenwald, introduced to Americans a style that seemed to be a natural extension of the almost forgotten nineteenth century Chicago School style. His architecture, which has roots in the German Bauhaus and western European International Style, has since become an accepted style of building for American cultural and educational institutions, architects, education departments, and large corporations.

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