Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was born in Aachen Germany, March 27, 1886. He went to the Cathedral School of Aachen until he was 16, and then worked in his father’s stone yard where he achieved the status of journeyman brickmason. Mies also worked as a draftsman but did not choose to pursue that career academically. In 1905, He left for Berlin where he worked for several firms. In 1910, he went to work for Peter Behrens, whose Berlin studio was a thinkpot of architectural innovation. While he was there, Mies married Ada Bruhm and had three daughters by her.
| After Mies left the army in 1919, he designed some strikingly modern buildings including some all-glass skyscrapers. Soon after, he joined the Deutsche Werkbund, and was selected to head the 1927 Stuttgart Weissenhofsiedlung exhibition. The buildings for which Mies is most famous are the German Pavilion at the Barcelona Internal Exposition of 1929 and the Tugendhat House in Brno, Czechoslovakia (1930). | |
| For these buildings, Mies also designed modern-looking furniture using steel, leather, glass and marble. His furniture reflected many features of his work; careful proportions and a functionalist design of austere elegance. He also became the director of the famous Bauhaus in 1930 and supervised it’s closing three years later. | ||
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After the Bauhaus closed, Mies emigrated to the United States where he became the director of the School of Architecture at Chicago’s Armour Institute of Technology (later Illinois Institute of Technology). Copyright © Mary Ann Sullivan |   |
| Copyright © Mary Ann Sullivan There he produced many fantastic buildings in the International Style such as the Lake Shore Drive apartment towers in Chicago (1948-51) and the Seagram Building in New York City (1958). Mies’s maxim: “Less is More” is beautifully produced in the New National Gallery in Berlin (1968). The monument of Steel, glass and marble encloses a clear space filled only with light and art for all to enjoy. Ludwig Mies Van Der Roh died in 1969. Copyright © Mary Ann Sullivan | ||