Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies) (March 27, 1886 - August 17, 1969) was an architect and designer.

Career in Germany

Born in Aachen, Germany in 1886 as Ludwig Mies, he worked in the family stone-carving business before he moved to Berlin and joined the office of Bruno Paul. He worked at the design studio of Peter Behrens from 1908 to 1912, where he was exposed to the newest design ideas and to progressive German culture.

Related Topics:
Aachen - Germany - Berlin - Peter Behrens - 1908 - 1912

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A physically imposing, deliberative, and reticent man, the talented Ludwig Mies renamed himself as part of his rapid transformation from a stonecutter's son to an architect working with Berlin's cultural elite, adding the more aristocratic surname "van der Rohe". He began his independant professional career designing upper class homes in traditional Germanic styles. He admired the early nineteenth century Prussian Neo-Classical work of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, while dismissing the eclectic and cluttered classical of the turn of the century .

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But imediately after the disastrous "Great War", Mies suddenly abandoned traditional styles, and joined his avant-garde peers Le Corbusier and Gropius in the search for a new style to replace the prevalent Classical style of the now discredited aristocracy. Mies made a dramatic splash with his stunning proposal for an all-glass skyscraper in 1919, and continued with a series of pioneering modern projects, culminating with the German Pavilion for the Barcelona exposition in 1929 (a reproduction was built on the original site in 1986) and the elegant Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic, completed in 1930 and now listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Related Topics:
Villa Tugendhat - Brno, Czech Republic - World Heritage Site

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Mies worked with the magazine G which started in July 1923. He made major contributions to the architectural philosophies of the late 1920s and 1930s as artistic director of the Werkbund-sponsored Weissenhof project. He was influenced by the aesthetic credos of both Russian Constructivism and the Dutch De Stijl group, and was impressed by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. He designed modernist furniture which have become popular classics, such as the Barcelona chair and table, and the Brno chair.

Related Topics:
1923 - 1920s - 1930s - Werkbund - Russian - Constructivism - Dutch - De Stijl

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Mies developed an ambitious lifelong mission to create not only a new style, but a new architecture that would represent a new epoch just as Gothic did for the middle ages. But the depression and the rise of the Nazis interupted his quest.

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In the 1930s Mies served briefly as the last Director of the faltering Bauhaus, at the request of his friend and competitor Walter Gropius. Nazi political pressure forced Mies to close the school, a victim of its previous association with communism and other radical ideologies. He built very little in that decade (his major built commission was Philip Johnson's New York apartment), his style rejected by the Nazis as not "German" in character. He left his homeland reluctantly in 1937 as he saw his opportunity for future building commissions vanish, accepting a residential commission in Wyoming and then an offer to head an architectural school in Chicago. When he arrived in the United States, his reputation as a pioneer of modern architecture was already established by American promoters of the international style.

Related Topics:
Bauhaus - Walter Gropius - Philip Johnson - United States

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