Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

He was born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies, in Aachen, and learned the weight of materials in his father's stone carving shop before he learned anything about architecture. He never took a degree in it. He drew for local design firms, went to Berlin to work for Bruno Paul, and from 1908 to 1912 apprenticed in the studio of Peter Behrens, where Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier were also passing through, and where he was sent to manage construction of the German embassy in Saint Petersburg. Somewhere in that climb he rebuilt his name: his mother's maiden name, Rohe, and a Dutch van der, because the German von was reserved by law to the nobility. In 1913 he married an industrialist's daughter and began designing houses for rich people.

The reputation was made on buildings that were never built. A faceted all-glass tower for Friedrichstrasse in 1921, a taller curved one in 1922, both on paper, made him the man who could give the industrial age a shape. Then the Villa Wolf in 1926, the Weissenhof housing exhibition he directed for the Werkbund, the German pavilion at Barcelona in 1929 and the Villa Tugendhat at Brno in 1930. In America after 1938 he built the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology, including Crown Hall, then the apartment towers at 860 and 880 Lake Shore Drive and, in 1958, the Seagram Building, whose bronze mullions were deeper than structure required and whose plaza gave away a fortune in Manhattan ground. Two sentences carried the argument: less is more, and God is in the details.

He tried to stay. Mies and Gropius joined the visual arts section of the Reich Culture Chamber, entered early Nazi competitions with designs carrying swastikas, and signed an artists' manifesto backing Hitler's succession to Hindenburg. His Reichsbank design took one of six prizes and Hitler rejected it, though Hitler did like his autobahn service stations. He left in 1937 or 1938, only after the regime ruled glass and steel unfit for state buildings. In America he sued a client. Edith Farnsworth's glass house on the Fox River cost about 74,000 dollars, roughly 10 times the cost of an ordinary house, and in July 1951 he sued for the balance and she countersued for fraud. The trial ran 4,000 pages. In May 1953 the judge found he had acted in good faith and that she had not told the truth.

Esophageal cancer, from the cigars, killed him on August 17, 1969. He was cremated and buried at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago near Sullivan and Burnham, under polished black granite with nothing on it but his name. The style did not survive him well. Robert Venturi had already answered less is more with less is a bore in 1966, and by the 1980s postmodernism had the field. The archive he left the Museum of Modern Art holds some 19,000 drawings, about 1,000 by Lilly Reich, the designer who made the furniture with him and stayed behind in Germany. Preservationists bought the Fox River house at auction in 2003. The museum that runs it now calls it the Edith Farnsworth House.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Barcelona Pavilion building
  Built for one exposition, demolished in 1930, rebuilt on the site in 1986 1929
• Barcelona chair other
  Designed with Lilly Reich and still in production under licence 1929
• Villa Tugendhat building
  Brno, Czechoslovakia 1930
• Edith Farnsworth House building
  Plano, Illinois. Raised above the floodplain, and flooded anyway. 1951
• S. R. Crown Hall building
  The home of the architecture school he ran 1956
• Seagram Building building
  Park Avenue, New York, with Philip Johnson on the interiors 1958

• 1908 aged ~22 Enters Peter Behrens's studio in Berlin Gropius and Le Corbusier worked there in the same years.
• 1913 aged ~27 Marries Ada Bruhn, a wealthy industrialist's daughter Three daughters. They separated in 1918.
• 1921 aged ~35 Proposes an all-glass tower for Friedrichstrasse Unbuilt, and the making of his name.
• 1930 aged ~44 Takes over the Bauhaus as its last director
• July 1933 aged 47 The Bauhaus closes after a Gestapo raid The faculty voted to shut it. The Gestapo had come in April.
• 1938 aged ~52 Takes over architecture at the Armour Institute in Chicago Sources put the emigration at 1937 or 1938.
• 1944 aged ~58 Becomes an American citizen
• May 7, 1953 aged 67 Wins the Farnsworth suit The judge found he had acted in good faith and that his client had been untruthful.
• August 17, 1969 aged 83 Dies in Chicago of esophageal cancer

• Frank Lloyd Wright 1867–1959
  Architect and engineer whose organic architecture, including Fallingwater, reshaped the built environment. studied his Wasmuth Portfolio
• Louis Sullivan 1856–1924
  Architect whose skyscraper designs and “form follows function” principle helped define modern architecture. predecessor in Chicago
• I. M. Pei 1917–2019
  Architect whose monumental modern buildings reshaped American civic and cultural architecture. built in his shadow
• Frank Gehry 1929–2025
  Developed a sculptural architectural language seen in the Walt Disney Concert Hall and other landmarks. reacted against
• Buckminster Fuller 1895–1983
  Popularized the geodesic dome and promoted resource-efficient structural design. contemporary in industrial form