Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is commonly regarded as one of the most esteemed architects of the 20th century, a distinction he shares with Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. A leading figure in the modernist movement that flourished in Europe during the 1920s, Mies later emigrated to the United States, where his reputation and influence took on international dimensions. At least a dozen of his designs, built and unbuilt alike, are customarily numbered among the most distinguished efforts of the century.
Born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies in Aachen in 1886, he was known professionally as Ludwig Mies until about 1920 when he decided to combine his father’s name with his mother’s maiden name, Rohe, by adding the invented “van der.” Most of his forebears were stonemasons of modest means, a station that accounts for the fact that he finished trade school at 15 and never pursued more formal training. His initial contact with building consisted of service as an apprentice on construction sites around Aachen. He then held relatively low-level positions at several local ateliers and architectural offices, with the first pronounced evidence of talent manifesting in his draftsmanship. His skills were sufficient to suggest to friends that he apply for work at architectural firms in Berlin, which he did successfully. By 1905, at the age of 19, he had made his way to the German capital.
Mies’s first professional experience was served with the designer Bruno Paul, with whom he worked from 1906 until 1908. During that time, he independently completed his first project in 1907, a private house in Potsdam-Neubabelsberg commissioned by the philosophy professor and Friedrich Nietzsche scholar Alois Richl. While the design was mostly true to the vernacular of the time, Mies added a loggia and a rampart on one side of the structure that made lively use of the site. The design, when published, won praise in the architectural press. Impressed with his young designer not only as an architect but also as a person, Riehl sponsored Mies on a trip to Italy in 1908, intending to acquaint him with the classical tradition, which was newly popular among the cultured classes of Germany at the time. By 1910, a sober, relatively straitlaced architectural style reflective of classicism had largely replaced the freer curvilinearity of Jugendstil (the German equivalent of Art Nouveau) among Germany’s architects.
In 1908, Mies joined Peter Behrens, probably the most important living German architect at the time. Behrens was widely known for his commercial work in Berlin, but he also designed residences that demonstrated the new regard for classicism as a whole and for the work of one of Germany’s historically distinguished architects, Karl Friedrich Schinkel. While Mies worked on at least one of Behrens’s factory buildings, his own proclivities led him to pay serious personal attention to Schinkel’s classicist style, as two of his endeavors dating from the Behrens years demonstrate: a 1910—11 house for the gallery owner Hugo Perls and a major competition project (unbuilt) of 1910 that was meant as a memorial monument to the first chancellor of the united modern German Empire, Otto von Bismarck.
Despite a brief interruption in his service with Behrens from late 1909 to late 1910 (during which time he designed the Perls House and the Bismarck monument), Mies became one of Behrens's most trusted assistants and played a substantial role in two major commissions that Behrens received in the early years of the second decade of the century: the German embassy in St. Petersburg, completed in 1912, and the unrealized design of a house near The Hague meant to be a residence-cum-art gallery for the Dutch industrialist A.G. Kroeller. The project was turned down, and Mies was invited on his own to produce an alternative proposal, which was also rejected in favor of a third design by the Dutchman Hendrik Petrus Berlage.
After World War I, in which Mies served in the German armed forces, he returned to Berlin, finding an artistic climate undergoing significant changes from what he remembered of the Behrens years. The classicism he was familiar with was quickly being replaced by a pronounced tendency toward a modernist aesthetic, free of nearly all historicist implications. Mies, however, was slow to embrace this newer outlook. In 1919, he submitted the Kroeller-Mueller project to an exhibition of younger architects supervised by Walter Gropius, another of Behrens's prewar employees, who was a determined and accomplished devotee of the modernist point of view. Mies' entry was rejected.
The next two years were crucial in Mies' life and career, even though records of his movements during that time are unclear. In 1913, he married Ada Bruhn, a wealthy woman who bore him three daughters between 1914 and 1917. Thereafter, he and his family lived largely on her money, leaving him free to become familiar with the Berlin artistic avant-garde and foster friendships with its more energetic members. He and his wife separated in 1921, shortly after he had changed his name to the more professional-sounding Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, both moves symptomatic of the changes in the cultural life of Weimar Germany. Personal freedom was in the air, although the new modernism exerted its own form of domination, to which Mies responded brilliantly at the professional level. Between 1921 and 1924, he conceived the design of five projects that, although never built, affected not only his career but the mainstream history of 20th-century architecture as well.
Mies showed models or drawings of several of these works in exhibitions, attracting the attention of the Berlin art world. He also made a point of cultivating major figures of the pan-European modernist movement, assuming a place of importance in several of Berlin's professional architectural organizations. By the mid-1920s, he had assumed a place of importance in several of Berlin’s professional architectural organizations. He helped finance a journal, G (for “Gestaltung”), which stood for the new elementarist position, and contributed several manifesto-like articles.
By 1925, Mies’ work had become steadfastly modern in style, for the most part
rectilinear in its contours, cubic in its massing, and open in plan whenever possible. He retained a distinctly personal fondness for brick, a material closer to the crafts tradition than to the machine aesthetic he claimed to embrace in his writings of the period. One example of this preference was the Liebknecht-Luxemburg Memorial (1926), made up of boldly intersecting brick masses in high relief.
Mies' fortunes changed markedly in the course of the next decade. In 1930, he accepted the directorship of the state-run Bauhaus in Dessau, where it remained until local right-wing political elements forced its closure in 1933. Shortly thereafter, he reopened it as a private school in Berlin.
The depression devastated Germany's economy, enabling the National Socialists to take control of the government in 1933, turning the country into a totalitarian state under Adolf Hitler. While Mies might have worked for the Nazis as he perceived them shortly after Hitler's accession, the party line turned away from modernist expression in the arts in 1934. This shift forced Mies to face the facts of a world that he had not learned much about in the years since he worked for Behrens.
Mies moved to Chicago in 1938, assuming the headship of the School of Architecture at the Armour Institute of Technology, which later became the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). He spent the last 30 years of his life in the United States, during which he built more actively but went through fewer stylistic shifts.
His first major commission in the United States was a master plan for the campus of IIT, made up of buildings of his own design. Conceived in 1939-40, the plan went through a number of phases before construction began. Mies' significant reputation in the post-World War II era earned him commissions that he carried out in a narrow assortment of building types. By 1921, he had embraced the clear-span pavilion, which he believed facilitated the accommodation of varying uses over time. He followed this design in buildings like the architecture building of IIT, S.R. Crown Hall (1956), the Convention Hall (1954) in Chicago, and the Berlin National Gallery (1967).
Mies' clear-span pavilion was notably realised in the Farnsworth House (1951), a quintessential American Mies design, featuring a floor slab connected to a roof slab by wide-flanged columns. This design was repeated in many of his American high-rises, usually with a curtain wall of similar form over the main frame.
Mies’ influence on corporate-scaled architecture in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s was significant due to the unornamented simplicity of his high-rise buildings. His masterpiece, the Seagram Building (1958) in New York, is widely recognized for its lavish design and use of bronze cladding and travertine in the foyer.
Throughout his career, Mies maintained a focus on structure, and his preference for a minimalistic aesthetic was evident in his work in the United States. He made use of steel for its structural and expressive qualities, and the simplicity of his designs was summarized in his motto, "Beinahe Nichts" (almost nothing).
FRANZ SCHULZE
Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.2 (G-O). Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005 |
