LUDWIG MIES VAN DER

ROHE
''Less is more.''
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), a German-born

architect and educator, is widely acknowledged as one of the
20th century's greatest architects.
By emphasizing open space and revealing the industrial
materials used in construction, he helped define modern
architecture.
 Biography
• Born in Aachen, Germany, Mies spent the first half of his career
in his native country. His early work was mainly residential, and
he received his first independent commission, the Riehl House,
when he was only 20 years old.
• He worked in his father's stone carving shop and at several local
design firms before he moved to Berlin, where he joined the
office of interior designer Bruno Paul.
• He began his architectural career as an apprentice at the studio
of Peter Behrens from 1908 to 1912, where he was exposed to the
current design theories and to progressive German culture,
working alongside Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, who were
later also involved in the development of the Bauhaus.
• Mies served as construction manager of the Embassy of the
German Empire in Saint Petersburg under Behrens.
 Pioneers of Modern
Architecture
• Along with Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd
Wright, he is widely regarded as one of the pioneers
of modern architecture.
 • Mies quickly became a
leading figure in the avant-
garde life of Berlin and was
widely respected in Europe
for his innovative structures,
including the Barcelona
Pavilion.

In 1930, he was named

director of the Bauhaus, the
renowned German school of
experimental art and design,
which he led until 1933 when
he closed the school under
pressure from the Nazi
Regime.
 PHILOSOPHY
• Mies' buildings, beyond merely affecting our lives,
endow them with greater significance and beauty.
• The absence of any decorative treatment was
fundamental.
• His buildings radiate the confidence, rationality, and
elegance of their creator and,
• His buildings were free of ornamentation .
• His works confess the essential elements of our lives.
• He followed the reductionist approach.
• Less is more.
 STYLE
 Mies, like many of his post-World War I contemporaries,
sought to establish a new architectural style that could
represent modern times.
 Mies' architecture has been described as being expressive
of the industrial age.
 He created an influential twentieth-century architectural
style, stated with extreme clarity and simplicity.
 FEATURES
• His mature buildings made use of modern materials such
as industrial steel and plate glass to define interior spaces.
• 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.
• Mies found appeal in the use of simple rectilinear and
planar forms, clean lines, pure use of color, and the
extension of space around and beyond interior walls.
 Traditionalism to
Modernism
• After World War I, Mies began, while
still designing traditional neoclassical
homes, a parallel experimental effort.

Boldly abandoning ornament altogether,

Mies made a dramatic modernist debut
with his stunning competition proposal
for the faceted all-glass Friedrichstraße
skyscraper in 1921, followed by a taller
curved version in 1922 named the Glass
Skyscraper.
• He joined the German
avant-garde, working with
the progressive design
magazine G which started
in July 1923. He developed
prominence as architectural
director of the Werkbund, •
organizing the
influential Weissenhof
Estate prototype modernist
housing exhibition. He was
also one of the founders of
the architectural
association Der Ring.
He joined the avant-
garde Bauhaus design
school as their director of
architecture, adopting and
developing their
functionalist application of
simple geometric forms in
the design of useful objects.
He served as its last
director.
• Mies based his architectural mission and principles on his
understanding and interpretation of ideas developed by
theorists and critics who pondered the declining relevance
of the traditional design styles.
• He selectively adopted theoretical ideas such as the
aesthetic credos of Russian Constructivism with their
ideology of "efficient" sculptural assembly of modern
industrial materials.
• In particular, the layering of functional sub-spaces within
an overall space and the distinct articulation of parts
appealed to Mies.
• The ideas of replacing elaborate applied artistic ornament
with the straightforward display of innate visual qualities
of materials and forms found resonance with Mies.
 SIGNIFICANCE
• Mies pursued an ambitious lifelong mission to create a new
architectural language that could be used to represent the new
era of technology and production. He saw a need for an
architecture expressive of and in harmony with his epoch.
• He applied a disciplined design process using rational thought
to achieve his spiritual goals.
• One notable way that Mies connected his buildings with nature
was by extending outdoor plaza tiles into the floor of a lobby,
synthesizing the exterior and interior spaces of the site. The
device accentuated the effortless flow between natural
conditions and artificial structures. This characteristic is often
found in his large building projects such as the Seagram
Building.
•
 Characteristic Features
• simplicity and clarity of forms and elimination of
"unnecessary detail"
• materials at 90 degrees to each other
• visual expression of structure (as opposed to the hiding of
structural elements)
• the related concept of "Truth to materials", meaning that
the true nature or natural appearance of a material ought to
be seen rather than concealed or altered to represent
something else
• use of industrially-produced materials; adoption of the
machine aesthetic
 Structure is Paramount: Less is
More
• For Mies, structure was paramount, hence his
emphasis on the rectilinear frame constructed of
familiar building elements, including most
importantly the wide-flange beam.
• Mies believed in creating friendly functional
structures to serve people, rather than decorative
structures to serve historical notions of artistic style.
His focus on minimalism was expressed in his
famous aphorism “less is more.”
• By the late 1950s, the first signs of a Miesian school
were beginning to appear, most noticeably in
Chicago. But within a decade, this "Miesian" school
had expanded to become a "Chicago" school in
order to reflect the growing body of Chicago
architecture which was derivative but not directly
imitative of him.
 SECOND CHICAGO SCHOOL
• In the 1940s, a "Second Chicago School" emerged from the work
of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his efforts of education at
the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Its first and
purest expression was the 860-880 Lake Shore Drive
Apartments (1951) and their technological achievements.
• It was Mies van der Rohe, supported by a general postwar desire
in America for "modern" rather than "traditional" things, who
acted as the catalyst for the emergence of the Second Chicago
School.
• His first job was the reconstitution of the IIT campus, one of
the most ambitious projects he ever conceived. Its revolutionary
layout, landscaping and use of new materials, such as steel and
concrete frames with curtain walls of brick and glass,
exemplifies 20th century thinking - just like the rest of his
architectural commissions.
 Furniture
• Mies, often in collaboration with Lilly Reich,
designed modern furniture pieces using new
industrial technologies that have become popular
classics, such as the Barcelona chair and table,
the Brno chair, and the Tugendhat chair.
WORKS
• Mies van der Rohe continued with a series of pioneering
projects, culminating in his two European masterworks: the
temporary German Pavilion for the Barcelona
exposition (often called the Barcelona Pavilion) in 1929[(a
1986 reconstruction is now built on the original site) and
the elegant Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic,
completed in 1930.
THE BARCELONA PAVILION
 BARCELONA PAVILION
• The German pavilion at the
Barcelona exposition had simplicity
and clarity of means and
intentions—everything is open,
nothing is concealed.”
• Free of external ornament, the
building was made of the most
luxurious materials. Walls were
fashioned of thin plates of
luminous semi-precious stone, from
green polished marble to golden
onyx.
• They didn’t physically limit space.
• Materials: Glass, steel and four
types of marbles.
 S. R. CROWN HALL

• S.R. Crown Hall is the home of the College of Architecture at

the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Illinois
• Mies refined the basic steel and glass construction style,
beautifully capturing simplicity and openness.
• The building is configured as a self-
contained in a rectangular shape on two
levels.
• Is a free volume with its four walls of
glass, surrounded by a large green area,
with large trees, mainly in the south
facade. The glazing on all sides that
allows the faculty do not give back the
rest of the buildings, while respecting
the context.
• It is characterized by an industrial
aesthetic of simplicity, clearly stated in
their steel frames.
• The building is divided into two levels:
the main floor, shaped like a large space
and a semi-buried where they are
located the offices, meeting rooms and
services.
 TUGENDHAT HOUSE

• Mies built Tugendhat House for Fritz Tugendhat in

Czechoslovakia.
• FEATURES:
• Partition walls and furniture defined function of the room.
• One consecutive space with series of rooms.
Farnsworth House
• Between 1946 and 1951, Mies
van der Rohe designed and
built the Farnsworth House.
• Mies explored the
relationship between people,
shelter, and nature.
• The glass pavilion is raised
six feet above a floodplain
next to the Fox River,
surrounded by forest and
rural prairies.
• He envisioned a “skin and
bones” architecture that
separated the structure from
the free flowing space.
 SEAGRAM BUILDING
The integral plaza, building, stone faced
lobby and distinctive glass and bronze
exterior were designed by Mies van der
Rohe.
It is a 160m tall skyscraper.
It stands as one of the finest examples of
the functionalist aesthetic and a masterpiece
of corporate modernism.
The functional utility of the building’s
structural elements were made visible.
It was built of a steel frame, from
which non-structural glass walls were hung.
This buillding emphasises transparency
through the use of glass.
 IBM BUILDING
• The loftiest Chicago building he designed
was the 695-foot-tall IBM Building (1971) -
today called 330 North Wabash - which
makes the most of its prominent location
on the north bank of the Chicago River.
• Black anodized aluminum and gray-tinted
glass are used together to create a uniform
skin that gives the appearance of a single
imposing and impressive volume. It's
strength and clarity of form are
distinguishable and appreciated along
the Chicago skyline, a tribute to the
lifelong study of structural expression,
organizational scale, material simplicity,
proportion, and constructive detail.
Chicago Federal Complex
• Chicago Federal Center Plaza, also known as
Chicago Federal Plaza, unified three buildings of
varying scales: the mid-rise Everett McKinley
Dirksen Building, the high-rise John C.
Kluczynski Building, and the single-story Post
Office building.
• The structural framing of the buildings is formed
of high-tensile bolted steel and concrete. The
exterior curtain walls are defined by projecting
steel I-beam mullions covered with flat black
graphite paint, characteristic of Mies's designs.
The balance of the curtain walls are of bronze-
tinted glass panes, framed in shiny aluminum, and
separated by steel spandrels, also covered with flat
black graphite paint.
860–880 Lake Shore Drive
• Mies designed a series of four middle-income
high-rise apartment buildings for
developer Herbert Greenwald: the 860–
880 (which was built between 1949 and 1951) and
900–910 Lake Shore Drive towers on Chicago's
Lakefront.
• These towers, with façades of steel and glass,
were radical departures from the typical
residential brick apartment buildings of the
time..
• Just as with his interiors, he created free flowing
spaces and flat surfaces that represented the idea
of an oasis of uncluttered clarity and calm within
the chaos of the city. He included nature by
leaving openings in the pavement, through which
plants seem to grow unfettered by urbanization,
just as in the pre-settlement environment.
 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

• Mies designed two buildings for the Museum of Fine Arts,

Houston (MFAH) as additions to the Caroline Weiss Law
Building. In 1953, the MFAH commissioned Mies van der Rohe
to create a master plan for the institution. He designed two
additions to the building—Cullinan Hall, completed in 1958, and
the Brown Pavilion, completed in 1974. A renowned example of
the International Style, these portions of the Caroline Wiess Law
Building comprise one of only two Mies-designed museums in
the world.
National Gallery, Berlin
• Mies's last work was the Neue
Nationalgalerie art museum, the
New National Gallery for the Berlin
National Gallery. Considered one of
the most perfect statements of his
architectural approach, the upper
pavilion is a precise composition of
monumental steel columns and a
cantilevered (overhanging) roof
plane with a glass enclosure.
• The simple square glass pavilion is a
powerful expression of his ideas
about flexible interior space, defined
by transparent walls and supported
by an external structural frame.
 Toronto-Dominion Bank Tower
• The tallest structure ever designed by Mies,
the bank tower forms part of the Toronto-
Dominion Centre, or T-D Centre - a group
of buildings in downtown Toronto,
consisting of six towers and a pavilion - for
which Mies served as design consultant to
the architects, John B. Parkin & Associates,
and Bregman & Hamann.
• Mies was permitted the widest possible
latitude in designing the complex, and the
result is a classic example of his
International style modernism. It represents
a fitting end to the evolution of Mies' North
American career.