Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969)

The Personal History Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is considered one of the most influential architects of the 20th century. Most of his work was in the design and construction of commercial and industrial buildings. Mies, as he was commonly called, was born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies in Aachen Germany on March 27th, 1886, the youngest of five children. His father, Jakob Mies was a stonemason and marble dealer specializing in tombstones and mantelpieces. The future architect gained early experience in the family trade and also in woodcrafting with a furniture designer. One of Mies first memories was of he and his mother, Amalia Rohe, carrying lunch to his father who was performing restoration work on the great Palatine Chapel built by Charlemagne around 800 AD. Mies commented that the large open spaces of the cathedral were influential in his later work. At some point during his teens, Mies set his sights on architecture and commenced a varied course of preparation for his future profession. Although an architecture school did operate in his hometown, the family could not support such study. After working briefly for architects in Aachen, Mies departed from the medieval capitol of Charlemagnes court when he was 19, briefly touring Italian cities noted for their ancient, medieval and Renaissance architecture before settling in Berlin. At 21 he designed his first independent project, the Riehl House in Potsdam. It was 1907 and the Riehl House served as both his first commission and his introduction to Berlin high society. Through the Riehls he was also introduced to his wife, Ada Bruhn. They were married in April of 1913 and moved to Werder outside of Berlin where they had 3 daughters. Dorotea (nicknamed Muck) was born in 1914, Marianne in 1915 and Waltraut (Waltrani) (nickname Georgia) in 1917. Though Adas family was wealthy and had good connections, it did not prevent Mies from being drafted into the German Army in October 1915. Having no university education, Mies was a member of the rank and file and was sent to Rumania where he saw no action. He returned to his family in January of 1919. Mies and Ada had a stormy relationship and in 1921 he separated from his family and changed his name. He and Ada were never divorced. In 1925 Mies met Lilly Reich a textile designer and they were associated both professionally and personally for many years. She managed most of his financial affairs and became his business manager. She was Mies constant companion from 1925 until he immigrated to the United States in 1938. She also looked after his affairs and the needs of his wife and daughters after he left Germany.

Barcelona Pavilion

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In 1929 Mies designed the Barcelona Pavilion in Spain which brought both Mies and German Architecture to the forefront of international recognition. It was dismantled just 6 months after it was constructed but was rebuilt completely in 1986. In June 1930, Mies replaced Hannes Meyer as the Director of the Bauhaus where he stayed until 1933. The Bauhaus, founded by architect Walter Gropius in 1919 combined crafts and the fine arts and unified art and technology. The Bauhaus came to symbolize the essence of modern design but also fostered a lot of left-wing thinking students. Mies tried to depoliticize the school but failed. In 1932 the government withdrew financial support but Mies re-opened the Bauhaus school with his own money. In Mid-March of 1933 the first concentration camps were opened and on April 11, the Nazis closed the Bauhaus. During March and April of 1933 exhibitions all over Germany were closed and modern paintings were removed from museums and private galleries. The international style was a prime target. In 1934, Mies joined a Nazi sponsored welfare organization in an attempt to become Hitlers Architect, however, Hitler did not condone modern architecture. By 1935 Mies financial situation had deteriorated such that he had to borrow money from Lilly Reich. John Holabird invited Mies to head the Architectural School of the Armour Institute of Chicago (later Illinois Institute of Technology, IIT) in a letter dated March 20th, 1936. At that time the school was housed at the Art Institute of Chicago. Mies put the letter aside and did nothing. Though many of Mies associates had left Germany, Mies was reluctant. In 1937 Mies managed to cross the German/Holland border by borrowing his brothers passport. From Holland he went to Paris where he met the Risers from America who wanted him to design and a build a home for them in Jackson Hole Wyoming. They gave him the commission as well as traveling money, so Mies returned to Germany to exit legally in the hope that he could someday return. On April 2nd, 1938 while working on the Risor project in America, which was never built, he accepted the offer from Holabird. Mies became an American Citizen in 1944. After arriving in Chicago, Mies lived in a hotel for 3 years before moving to an S.R. Crown Hall at the IIT Campus apartment at 200 E. Pearson St. His legacy is apparent on the campus of IIT where iconic buildings such as S.R. Crown Hall still stand. According to Myron Goldsmith, student and later an architect with Mies firm, Mies spoke little or no English and used another instructor as a translator when he taught. Mies wife and daughters were declared a family of an enemy emigrant and fell into disrepute. Their bank accounts were seized and they were ostracized by the Nazis. After the war Ada and the girls moved from country to country with Ada in continuing poor health. She died of cancer in 1951. Middle daughter Marianne gave birth to Dirk Lohan, a successful Chicago architect who spent his later years at his grandfathers knee, assisted in several restorations of the Farnsworth
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House including furniture design in 1971 and a restoration in 1991 and is still involved in an advisory position. Lilly Reich remained in Berlin, handling Mies affairs. She visited him in the U.S. in 1939, but she did not stay. She died in Berlin in 1947. Though Mies had little contact with his growing daughters, all of them eventually came to the U.S. after the war. Waltraub came to Chicago as a young adult, living with Mies for a while and working at the Chicago Art Institute. He was proud of her intellectual pursuits, using his own academic robes for her burial in 1959. His grandson, Dirk Lohan, emigrated to the U. S. from Germany and eventually became a partner in Mies firm in 1969, just before his grandfathers death. Mies met Dr. Edith Farnsworth in late 1945 at the home of his physician, a friend of Dr. Farnsworths. The evening of their meeting, she spoke to him at length about the property she had acquired on the Fox River and her desire to build a modern weekend retreat. By the conclusion of the evening, Mies had agreed to take on the commission. At this point in his career, Mies office was busy and he was gaining respect as one of the most influential architects of the 20th century. It is of continuing curiosity and debate as to whether there was an intimate relationship between Dr. Farnsworth and Mies. Her letters of communication during the initial phases of construction are flowery and suggest personal feelings, but Mies had an ongoing relationship with Lora Marx from 1940 until his death and she often came to the house with him during both the planning phases and the construction. At this time Mies was 59 and Dr. Farnsworth was 42. As the building progressed and the expenses mounted, Mies and Dr. Farnsworth began to argue. The initial 1946 estimate for the construction was approximated at $40,000, but the delay in construction, caused by demands on Mies schedule and Dr. Farnsworths wait for an inheritance from an aunt, caused the price to escalate. By the time construction began in 1949, the Korean War was underway and steel prices had risen dramatically. In addition, the shipping costs to import the Roman travertine were significant. A new estimate was supplied to the client; $65,000, but the house cost approximately $74,000 to construct. The estate is now estimated at a value between $8 and $10 million. The land had been purchased earlier by Dr. Farnsworth from the McCormicks and its cost was not included. The original land acquisition was 9 acres. The estate has grown to 62 acres. Dr. Farnsworth became very difficult to deal with and their relationship deteriorated. By the end of construction, they were not speaking at all. Dr. Farnsworth began to deal exclusively with William Dunlap who completed the work on the screened porch and the wardrobe, though actual design of both was believed to have been done by Mies.
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Mies filed suit against Dr. Farnsworth in pursuit of his fees. She counter sued claiming that he overcharged and misrepresented himself. The case was settled in Mies favor in 1953 for the sum of approximately $14,000. The bad publicity benefited neither. Dr. Farnsworth was vocal about her disappointments. In an article titled The Threat to the Next America published in House Beautiful magazines April 1953 issue, Elizabeth Gordon argued that modernism was an international conspiracy originating in Nazi Germany with the machine aesthetic of the Bauhaus school. With the unnamed help of Farnsworth she claimed the ''Less Is More'' movement in architecture was, in its flag-waving homage to domesticity, a nod to the McCarthy era. Mies fortunes continued to rise. He met Herbert Greenwald, a builder and real estate developer in 1946. The two men formed a collaboration which was very beneficial to both of them. They collaborated on three large projects in Chicago; The Promontory Apartments, the Lake Shore Drive Apartments and the 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments. Their association continued until Greenwalds untimely death in a plane crash in February of 1959. Mies also worked with real estate developer Robert McCormick. He designed and built the McCormick House in Elmhurst, now part of the Elmhurst Art Museum. This house was a prototype for inexpensive housing. As housing for the common man the idea never took off. In 1955 Mies designed a small house for a site on a Connecticut River. The client was Morris Greenwald, brother of Herbert Greenwald. Mies collected Paul Klee paintings and lived relatively simply in his apartment in Chicago, not of his own design. He kept his possessions to a minimum, though everything he did own was of the highest quality. He enjoyed the best cigars and martinis and finely tailored suits. By 1958 Mies arthritis crippled him to the extent that the last ten years of his life he was confined to a wheelchair and crutches. Mies died on August 17th 1969. He had been fighting cancer of the esophagus since 1966 and finally succumbed to Pneumonia. His body was cremated and buried at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago. Ironically, Dr. Farnsworth is also buried there. The saying Less is More is attributed to Mies as is his description of his goals for modern architecture to create Almost Nothing.

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Architectural Principles At the risk of oversimplifying his work, the list below provides a general introduction to the kinds of approaches and elements common to Mies van der Rohes mature work, including the Farnsworth House. Quotations by Mies are included to enhance this list. Articulated Structure Reduced palette of materials Highest Quality craftsmanship Open Space Exclusion of applied ornament Modularity for structural and spatial planning Expression of industrial materials and methods

Building, when it became great, was almost always indebted to construction, and construction was almost always the conveyor of spatial form. (1933) [From] genuine building elementsa new, richer building art can arise. They permit a measure of freedom in spatial composition that we will not relinquish any more. Only now can we articulate space, open it up and connect it to the landscape, thereby filling the spatial needs of modern man. Simplicity of construction, clarity of tectonic means, and purity of materials shall be the bearers of a new beauty. (1933) [The free or open plan] is a new concept and has its own grammar just like a language. Many believe that the variable ground plan implies totally freedom. That is a misunderstanding. It demands just as much discipline and intelligence from the architect as a conventional plan. (1952) When one looks at nature through the glass walls of the Farnsworth House, it takes on a deeper significance than when one stands outside. More of Nature is thus expressed it becomes part of a greater whole.

The Professional History The name of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe routinely appears on lists of 20th centurys most important architects. His legacy is large around the globe in the form of those buildings he designed through the middle decades of the 20th century, but also in the countless others designed by his innumerable followers. As the period of his greatest flourishing was spent in Chicago and its vicinity, it is not surprising to find the greatest concentration of Mies buildings in northeast Illinois. Nonetheless, rare must be the American community without at least one school or office building with clearly-expressed steel frame and large expanses of glass paying tribute to the system Mies perfected in such projects as the Lakeshore Drive Apartments and Seagram Building. Such highly visible, large scale projects standing in economic and cultural capitals might threaten to overshadow the significance of a weekend dwelling constructed outside a small town in northern Illinois. But it was here that Mies distilled his approach to architectural design into one project. The diminutive Farnsworth House offers for close inspection and at a humane,
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comprehensible scale, the essential elements of Mies architecture: its refined structure, extraordinary spatial configuration, elegant materials and nuanced details revealing an architecture which is beguiling in its apparent simplicity, and yet is by no means simple. As a pure example of Mies mature style, which he summarized as bienahe nichts almost nothing, the Farnsworth House does not immediately suggest the richness of experience and variety in experimentation that is evident in Mies background. Upon moving to Berlin, Mies sought office experience with one of the most progressive German architects of the early 20th century, Peter Behrens. From Behrens Mies drew an understanding of the fundamentals of what is now termed the Factory Style as well as an appreciation for the work of 19th century NeoClassical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Perhaps the ease with which Mies accommodated such diverse ideas in his youth made him all the more amenable to drawing from the variety of artistic outlooks which spread across Europe in waves beginning in the 1910s. While each varied in its particulars, they shared a common tendency to reject historical precedents and inherited traditions in favor of embracing individual visions and industrial materials. In the context of the economic turndown that followed the war, their forward looking proposals were rarely feasible, yet Mies took part in the practice of pursuing ideas through the form of paper architecture for the sake of invention alone. Two unbuilt projects from this period reveal how Mies participated in the avant-garde architectural speculating of his day. The glass Skyscraper projects of 1921 and 1922 reveal an indebtedness to Expressionism through their use of sheer curtain walls of glass enclosing irregular, lobed, and jagged floor plans to create soaring prisms intended to reflect and refract sunlight by day and glow as lanterns by night. In contrast, the Brick Country House of 1924 was a low, expansive, asymmetrical composition of floating glass partitions and opaque walls. In plan the design bears striking resemblance to de Stijl paintings. The architects views on the relationship between industry and craft were enhanced by his association with the Deutscher Werkbund, which he would serve as vice president from 19261932. Through the Werbund Mies would complete one of his most important early works. He was selected to coordinate the Weissenhofsiedlung a multi building project organized by the Werbund to manifest, in three dimensions and at full scale, the most novel architectural thinking of the day as it related to the problem of housing. The Siedlung displayed the ideals of the Neues Bauen the New Architecture- was espoused by its German, French and Dutch designers. White cubic buildings punctured by simple openings and ribbon windows, and whose forms, devoid of traditional ornament and clear historical precedents, and materials suggested machinemade parts and structural systems. Three years after the Siedlung opened in Stuttgart, Mies commenced another directorship, this time at the Bauhaus school in Dessau, which under his leadership saw the ascension of architecture and interior design as well as the redefinition of other creative disciplines in relation to them. Such reflected the centrality of architecture to the schools mission as described by its former director, Walter Gropius, to unify art and technology. Yet Mies also meant to redefine this goal. He believed that this era dictated that art and technology were already one and the same. It was not the architects task to impose himself on the task of uniting art and technology but rather to acknowledge and articulate their complete unification. In both his approach to architectural design and education, Mies reflected his understanding of the zeitgeist-driven new age and the architects role in it. Both Mies approach to architectural education and the architectural character of the Weissenhofsiedlung that he oversaw would be instrumental in defining the impact of what would be termed the International Style upon its dissemination in the United States.
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Increasing pressure from the National Socialist Party (and general political tensions) lead to the final demise of the Bauhaus in 1933 and later to Mies departure from Germany in 1938. In America he soon became director of the Armour Institute of Technology, now the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). The practice he had established in Germany, which by the 1930s was largely defined by expensive country houses, flourished in this new environment. Americas strong economy, rich field of patronage, growing cities and booming construction industry coalesced into an environment rich for architectural innovation. For three prosperous decades and until the time of his death, Mies lived in Chicago and enjoyed a thriving practice, most of it in the service of booming American capitalism. During that time Mies designed dozens of prominent projects around the world, many of them in the Chicago area, through which he perfected the style for which he remains best known. In terms of planning be it for a school, office, gallery or apartment block Mies reduced interior elements to the smallest number, pulling them toward the center and leaving the remainder of the interior as unobstructed as the most minimal structural, heating and plumbing necessities would allow. His allegiance to the idea that he termed universal space would allow the use of a building to change across the years, accommodating the building to the demands of the twentiethcentury life, and allegedly allowed for extreme flexibility of use to determine the arrangement of functions at the Lakeshore Drive Apartments, Crown Hall, Berlin Gallery or the Farnsworth House. The diverse range of building types share the aesthetic/structural appeal which mark them as Miesian: carefully detailed structural steel cages support curtain walls that envelop geometrically pure volumes, from long low exhibition halls, galleries and university buildings to tall slender apartment slabs and office towers. In spite of the particular building type, Mies expressed clear tectonic arrangements through a clear and consistent language, a reductive yet sophisticated approach to design summarized in his equally sparing (and famous) verbal observation Less is more. Distinctive to his new context, this approach did not spring immediately full-grown from Mies head upon his arrival in the U.S. He seems to have made use of virtually every architectural current available to him, including the buildings of his earliest experience. At first consideration, the heavy Carlingian building of Aachen would seem the antithesis of Mies mature style, yet he recalled the lessons learned in the early years: I remember seeing many old buildings in my home town when I was young. They were mostly very simple, but very clear. I was impressed by the strength of these buildings. They did not belong to any epoch; they had been there for a thousand years and were still impressive, and nothing could change that. All the great styles passed, but they were still there. They did not lose anything and they were still as good as on the day they were built. The influence such general considerations of structural clarity and astylar timelessness is a hallmark of Mies designs from the 1930s to the 60s. Other early experiences make their marks as well. He had already experimented with abundant drapes and expanses of glass during the early Expressionists towers and in country villas; his handling of brick and stone recollects sensibilities gained from his family of masons and the strong buildings of his youth in Aachen. Mies adopted the newly available products of the American steel industry through a consideration of construction principles that he had studied generally in vernacular German dwellings in wood as well as stone-vaulted structures of the Romanesque period, and quite specifically in the clear, and carefully finessed, trabeated classicism of Schinkel. These varied strains of early influence are brought together in the Farnsworth House, which encapsulates each of Mies mature architectural principles.
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Unlike Wright and Le Corbusier, his peers in the pantheon of Master Builders whose later works were too individualistic and particular to spawn new schools of architecture, Mies late buildings generated a legion of followers. Many of them skillfully adapted his principles into their own interesting works, among them Philip Johnsons own Glass House (New Canaan Connecticut, 1949), the Inland Steel Building by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (principal designers Bruce Graham and Walter Netsch, Chicago, 1956-57) and more recently, the Museum of Contemporary Art by Josef Paul Kleihues (Chicago, 1991-96). Such buildings carry on not only the tradition of Mies general aesthetic and construction principles, but also the labored manner of perfecting details, selecting materials and exercises related to scale and site. Unfortunately for Mies reputation, as well as the built environment, architects of inferior skill reduced the carefully finessed elements of his (and his peers) work and replicated them in mindnumbing numbers across America and around the world. The proliferation of such buildings prompted Tom Wolfe, just one of a growing number of detractors which grew in the last quarter of the twentieth-century, to sniff at the monotony of row upon Mies van der Rohe of tall, bland office buildings. Increasingly, International Style projects were condemned for cultural irrelevance and tedious self-reference. By 1966 such detractors had their own manifesto, in which Robert Venturi aimed square at Mies and his famous three-word dictum as the bulls-eye of the problem: The doctrine less is more bemoans complexity and justifies exclusion for expressive purposesMies exquisite pavilions have had valuable implications for architecture, but their selectiveness of content and language is their limitation as well as their strength[and in the hands of others] blatant simplification means bland architecture. Less is a bore.

It was perhaps natural that Mies, as a central figure in the architectural movement that had dominated architectural discourse at mid-century and shaped the new urban environment, became the lightning rod for attacks against the International Style, and that he maintains his role as its greatest practitioner. Castigated by critics and celebrated by devotees, Mies and his work maintain significance. Some seventy years after his arrival to these shores, he continues to inspire debate among historians, critics, architects and the general public. The strong reactions his work has drawn from all sides indicates its power and sustained importance in American and modern architecture, and the richness it affords to those who consider the capacity for achievement in almost nothing.

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