Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969)

America

God is in the details.
– Mies van der Rohe

The American landscape changed Mies’ architecture. Rather than courtyard walls just yards from outside of those floor-to-ceiling windows designed for some of his 1930s houses, there were mountain ranges miles away or bucolic rivers and forests to be viewed. And for his house in Wyoming, the fireplace was transformed from a mere European utility into a prominent “hearth” that became, along with the more expansive view, one of its central features.

But as his houses were few, schools and office buildings assumed a bigger position. America’s industrial environment, as well, with its endless railways and gigantic factories appears to have propelled Mies’ steel-centric designs into a more prominent starring role.

Chicago, in particular, offered Mies seemingly limitless flat and gridded blocks like the very regulated graph paper that mirrored his creative vision. Symmetry, too, primarily for his low clear-span buildings, reflected his early Classical structures and the design balance of his 19th century hero, Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

And in his new country, Mies was finally able to turn his unbuilt 1920s concepts of lantern-like high-rises into pragmatic, constructed skyscrapers.

America

In 1937, on his way to the site of advertising executives Stanley and Helen Resors’ potential house in Jackson Hole, Wyoming that would address those Rocky Mountain views (and remain unbuilt despite dozens of design drawings in the hand of another Mies architect) and as train travel then was broken up into Eastern and Western segments days apart, Mies van der Rohe stopped off in Chicago. On his way back, his train again stopped in Chicago for a layover.

Resor House interior rendering circa 1937-38

Resor House rendering and model 1937

Thanks to snobbish German gossips, Chicago had been seriously put down for its supposed cultural inferiority to Boston and New York City. And indeed Mies even flirted with an Architecture Department chairmanship at Harvard because it had been reported to have a lovelier built environment.

Though this time, like the advanced 19th century buildings of a grittier Glasgow contrasted with the more vernacular buildings of the scenically prettier Edinburgh, Chicago stood head and shoulders above Boston to an architect. His tour of the legendary structures of Sullivan, Jenney, and Richardson, and especially his days-long visit with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin, were all he needed to make up his mind. Wright with Mies circa 1938

What the IIT history tells us is that the head of the search committee of the Armour Institute, Art Déco architect John A. Holabird, Jr., formally offered Mies the position to replace Earl Reed, the previous head of architecture at the 1892 school in 1937. The account doesn’t mention that he had informally floated the idea to Mies in the summer of 1936.

Upon seeing for himself the visual power of Chicago, imagining his own buildings there and looking for a graceful escape from a Europe about to be engulfed in war, Mies accepted the position of the engineering school, moving to America in 1938 and permanently away from Germany and his long-time paramour, Lilly Reich.

IIT

The president of Armour Institute shortly afterward awarded Mies the commission to design an entirely new campus. Though the institute had earlier made plans to bulldoze much of the chosen area for the expansion of Armour, an unspoken reason was to eliminate the Black-belt make-up of what had been Chicago’s earliest White-centric Southside “Gold Coast.”

IIT campus plan 1940

One of the first “Urban Renewal” efforts (before the term was codified), this ultimately led generally to the destruction of an intact neighborhood and specifically Mecca Flats, a glass-covered court apartment building originally built as a hotel for visitors to the World’s Fair of 1893. In July of 1942, President Henry Heald wrote Mies the suggestion that for “aesthetic” and security reasons, perhaps a wall could be made from the bricks of the demolished buildings to be erected around the entire campus? No reply has been found but historical photos and today’s campus shows no wall to have been built.

In 1940, Armour and Lewis Institutes were merged into one school and renamed the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and in 1949, the Institute of Design (the former “New Bauhaus”) joined the school. The original 1919 Gropius-headed Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, had also been born from a merging of two pre-existing schools but Mies, in a sense, had already converted the entire Armour Institute into a new Bauhaus when he took the job. Armour Institute campus photomontage 1938

It may have always taken on the characteristics of a graduate school from his acceptance as there were nearly 1,500 undergraduate degrees recently awarded from the off-campus sites but about twice as many post-graduate degrees awarded at the on-campus portions of Chicago Institution.

After 1940 and the merging of the two institutions, his fame had completely overwhelmed the influence of President Heald, and Mies then acted as its “face.”

For his major campus design (relying on one of his first student/draftsmen, George Danforth), Mies at first proposed in meticulous drawings symmetrical arrangements of structures raised on pilotis or slabs around a central green based on the closure of South Dearborn Street (marked AIT).

When that street closure failed and the institute’s merger and renaming occurred, he redesigned the lineup of ground-hugging buildings seen today (marked IIT). In the end, Mies built 21 structures in a leafy 120-acre Alfred Caldwell landscape (though he designed 34). And, like graph paper, each building is perfectly modular in construction, mathematically subdivided for most of the structural bays to be 24’ x 24’ x 12’. IIT campus south of downtown Chicago circa 2005

What today may seem uncompromisingly box-like was in the 1940s shockingly modern. Precise, externally expressed structures of either steel columns and beams or cosmetic steel wrapped around concrete fire casings were married to tan English and Flemish bond brick infills.

Though the campus was altered from its central green and column-lifted buildings from the Armour to the later IIT plan, South Dearborn was eventually closed to automobile traffic from 31st to 35th Streets and a mere sidewalk pathway through the campus, still called Dearborn Street, now replaces it.

What may have started as a temporary refuge from the constraints of Nazi Germany, His tenure at IIT became Mies’ working home till his resignation in 1958.

Chicago

Though he still couldn’t speak English, Mies felt Chicago would be a comfortable landing pad away from politically inflamed Europe. And its history of architectural innovation would be open to his more technological approach. But until about 1950, his American freelance designs amounted to unbuilt works for a small city museum, a concert hall, drive-in restaurant, and store display. And other than a constructed gallery exhibition, no private clients had been on the horizon.

On December 15th, 1938, “The Architecture of Mies van der Rohe” opened for a month at The Art Institute of Chicago. The Museum of Modern Art had produced “Modern Architecture: The International Exhibition” in 1932 and had opened “Bauhaus: 1919-1928” the week before the Chicago show on December 7th, 1938. Both of the MoMA exhibitions either included the work of Mies or celebrated the Bauhaus, but this was the first exclusively Mies van der Rohe museum show in America. Mies had designed the compact exhibition to also travel to Princeton, St. Louis, and upstate New York. Museum for a Small City interior rendering circa 1941-43

Mies’ first Chicago residences were in hotels but by 1941 he had moved to a surprisingly historicist apartment building at 200 East Pearson Street where he lived until his death in 1969. He had begun a relationship with Lora Marx, the divorced wife of modernist designer Samuel Marx, at the very beginning of 1939 but she had kept her own place apart from him and would stand by his side until his death in 1969.

In 1944, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. However, what America could offer that European royalty or governments could not was private artistic patronage. The National Socialists in Germany were never going to be in sync with Mies’ version of Modernism. And Berlin’s domestic clients, even those unaffected by financial downturns, wouldn’t be enough to support an architectural firm there.

Promontory Apartments

In 1946, 31-year-old Herbert Greenwald returned to his native Chicago from military service during World War II and was looking to make his mark back home. His neighbor, Charles Genther, an architect fresh from starting his own architectural firm, Pace Associates, steered him to real estate development, and with financial backing from the owner of an auto dealership, Greenwald focused on three lakefront sites.

Seeing that the war had limited tourism, he felt a residential high-rise rather than a hotel was a better product for the market for his chosen site in the Hyde Park neighborhood on South Lake Shore Drive. He also wanted a “name” architect to enhance his marketing plans. Greenwald asked Mies van der Rohe to join with Pace and come up with an affordable scheme for the 122 units that would be the architect’s first built skyscraper. Of the two possibilities for the 20 floors of apartments in the 22-story building, the one in steel and glass (drawn by Myron Goldsmith) was too expensive for the lenders and would remain only in drawing form. The other exposed concrete version that was ultimately built provided the right numbers to get a loan for his co-op, Promontory Apartments. Promontory Apartments 1947-49

Herbert Greenwald and Mies circa 1955

Mies with Myron Goldsmith and Joseph Fujikawa at Farnsworth House 1946

Farnsworth House

Mies and Dr. Edith Farnsworth, a physician and academic, attended a dinner party in 1945 and Mies talked to her about building an “almost nothing” house. She soon hired Mies to design one for her on her 9.6-acre neighbor-less Fox River land. However, it was only the design and construction periods that seemed to have been more compelling and “romantic” for her than the actual living in the see-through glass cube.

Farnsworth House 1946-51

He designed (leaning heavily on his associate, Myron Goldsmith) two travertine-paved precast concrete platforms raised on stilts. And like the Barcelona Pavilion, there were eight steel column supports (though placed at the perimeter), glass walls, and a flat ceiling/roof plane. Inside, the “spaces” were divided by walls of primavera that, except for that of the kitchen, stopped well short of the ceiling.

To save money from the original plans, Mies shaved the length of the house from 84 feet down to 77. The ceiling was dropped a foot to nine feet and the width lost two feet from 30 to 28 but the unmodified kitchen became an unwieldy galley of merely four feet wide by virtue of the narrowing and the subsequently thicker backing of the living room fireplace.

For privacy, though any single woman would have questioned the idea, Mies relied on trees screening the uncovered (but for Mies’ shantung silk curtains) glass walls. For its hovering look, the architect bundled the utility pipes into a single stack underneath the elevated kitchen and two bathrooms. Finally, to preserve its “almost nothing” look, there was no mosquito screening for the structure’s outdoor terrace near the Fox River.

The budget ballooned from the original $40,000 to over $74,000 and Farnsworth’s missives went from flowery handwritten near love letters to terse, typewritten messages and the two were barely on speaking terms. After Farnsworth’s letter stating no more money would be forthcoming, Mies sued her. Not to be outdone, she countersued to no avail as Mies won in court.

Though they were now openly warring, Farnsworth moved into the still unfinished house in 1951 and soon complained she had no place to hang her clothes. Mies grudgingly had a workman build her a teakwood cabinet but never walked into one of his most famous houses again. She ignored Mies’ preference for Barcelona stools and Tugendhat, Brno, and MR chairs for less metallic Scandinavian wooden furniture bought from a Chicago friend’s shop. Farnsworth House interior with Miesian furniture circa 2003

Despite Mies’ idea of open living room doors opposite hopper windows in the bedroom area for a cross-breeze effect, the sunbaked glass walls made its summer interior into an oven. Its winter look was frequently marred by condensation running down the inside of its single panes of plate glass.

The plague of mosquitos from the nearby Fox River, and Farnsworth’s pleas for relief, made it necessary to add temporary screening to its open terrace. Designed by a family friend and independent architect, Bill Dunlap, the screen designs were secretly vetted in front of Mies in 1952. They were installed in April of 1952 but when Farnsworth learned of the slight-of-hand, she never spoke to Dunlap again.

The house seen today is more “Mies van der Rohe” than “Edith Farnsworth” as the owner since 2003, The State Landmarks Organization, has replaced Farnsworth’s Scandinavian furniture with a Reich daybed, Barcelona stools, and MR, Tugendhat, and Brno chairs. The porch screening is long gone and the house’s use of an expensive air conditioning system installed by a post-Farnsworth owner has made it possible to close its terrace doors in the summer.

Edith Farnsworth lived in the house for 20 years, sold it, and moved to Italy. When Mies was dying in 1968, his family asked him if they should buy it for him to look out those glass walls at nature. He was reported to have scoffed at the idea.

MoMA 1947

Mies’ cultural significance as “...one of the great architects of modern times...” was certainly bolstered by the September 17, 1947, exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Called “The Architecture of Mies van der Rohe,” the press releases practically gushed about his influence on Modernism. And to further place the museum’s stamp of approval on the architect, the third-floor exhibition galleries were combined into one large visual platform for a show the subject himself mounted.

Most likely championed by Philip Johnson, by then billed as a “consultant to the Department of Architecture” and the writer of the accompanying book, the exhibition comprised giant photomurals of Mies’ exhibition renderings, a mock-up of a typical IIT wall, and an array of his European furniture designs. Included were models of the Farnsworth House, the unbuilt 1930s court houses, and one of his versions of the Wyoming home he had been trying to build for the Resors when he came to America. MoMA exhibit set-up 1947

MoMA exhibition 1947

MoMA Modern Architecture exhibition 1932

Minimalism

Though it’s not known when Mies first used the “Less is More” phrase written in the biography by Philip Johnson for the 1947 museum catalogue, it was reported by the architect that Peter Behrens uttered it to him when Mies was drafting a minor wall of the AEG Turbine building of 1909. However, the phrase had also been written in an 1855 Robert Browning poem and can be traced to an earlier German writer, and Japanese architecture has shown its minimalist aesthetic for at least two thousand years.

After designing a spartan interior and legendary entrance staircase of the fussy East Ontario building of the “Arts Club” gratis for its president, he embarked on the design for a pair of skyscrapers that would cement his reputation.

860/880 Lake Shore Drive

As an artist needs to have a gallery to do the selling, the Greenwald connection proved to be the right mix of developer-to-architect for Mies. In 1949, Greenwald secured the North Lake Shore Drive site he’d looked at during the Promontory search earlier. The triangular plot on the sparsely populated lakefront edge of Streeterville was divided by Mies into two 26-story buildings built with 21-foot structural bays for the 271 apartments.

860 Lake Shore Drive interior construction circa 1950

860/880 exterior wall system 1949-51

The 26-story, 254-foot height was dictated primarily by the zoning requirement for an extra elevator and smoke shafts above that number. And the fact they were linked by a thin canopy meant that to the zoning board, the structures were actually one building. Though larger structural bays were used in later commercial office buildings, the 21-foot-square bay for this and most of his residential towers was thought by Mies to be the right habitable room dimension.

The “860” building at the East Chestnut Street end held four three-bedroom apartments of 1,600 square feet in each of 22 floors or 88 apartments. And the “880” building set at a right angle to the first and bordering East Delaware Place held eight one-bedroom apartments in each of 23 floors or 184 in the building for the co-op/rental structures (the building website says there were 271 apartments originally). Each tenant/owner was to sign a contract for “co-op” ownership in the buildings and the right to “rent” one apartment after the individual bought into the trust.

860/880 Lake Shore Drive 1949-51

860/880 Left Esplanade Right 1949-1955

Mies wanted to emphasize a steel and glass aesthetic but he ran into a major zoning difficulty. Though a steel skeleton was used to build both Lake Shore Drive buildings, the Chicago fire code at the time required 2” of concrete jackets around all 24 columns on each building for fire protection. To maintain the sleek metallic look throughout, and similar to the 1945 construction of his Alumni Hall at the IIT campus, Mies used non-repeating black steel plating for formwork rather than wood for the poured concrete around each floor’s 16 exterior columns which then remained in place.

Bright aluminum window frames holding fixed plate glass over hopper openings were set into to the load-bearing frame and not used as a curtainwall. Then, two-story segments of eight-inch-deep “I” beams welded onto flat metal spandrels were hoisted onto the horizontal structural beams. Later criticism for using the “I” beams as a cosmetic treatment and not for structural purposes, was answered by Mies saying “...it did not look right” without them.

860/880 Lake Shore Drive interior rendering 1949-51

Barcelona Chair 1929

The 17-foot-high lobbies in glass, travertine, Barcelona Chairs, and “X” tables are well behind the ground level supporting columns, giving no visible barrier to the lakefront.

In the marketing phase of 1951, Mies sketched out an apartment at 860 for Herb Greenwald that was never built but did complete a corner apartment there for Pace Associates’ Charles Genther. And before the two buildings were finished, he’d roughly planned out a duplex apartment combining two units for himself on the 21st floor of 880 but dropped his plans for moving in when he realized other tenants might not leave him alone.

When finished in 1951, the buildings were a sensation, recalling Chicago’s 19th century period of structural innovation and the original “Chicago School of Architecture.” But as people were not yet comfortable living without their old-school clutter, its marketing brochures emphasized that any new apartment dweller could use his own historicist antique furnishings as long as all drapes were backed with the same light gray lining for a uniform exterior look.

Crown Hall

As the stellar structure of the IIT campus, Mies created what he considered to be his favorite building in the 1950 design of the S.R. Crown Hall built on the site of the former Mecca Flats. Since his Administration Building and Library had remained unbuilt, he wanted his Department of Architecture (occupying Crown) to be the main visual centerpiece of IIT.

Crown Hall 1950-56

Nearly 30 blocks south of Chicago’s Central Business District and not meant to be a residence for students, its steel structure for an apparent single story was exempt from the concrete fire-proofing required by the fire code. This allowed Mies to showcase the steel externally and also reduce costs by limiting the structural bays from his already established 24-feet-square to 20-feet-square and to lower the ceiling to 18-feet high.

A single story (over a full-floor semi-basement) clear-span structure of 120 x 220-feet, Crown Hall was basically one enormous room. In the construction period, Mies had his structural engineer, Frank J. Kornacker, lightly pin (later weld) four gigantic 120 x 6-foot plate girders (running north/south) on top of eight slender “H” beam columns spaced 60-feet apart and sunk into deep concrete footings. For rigidity, its 220-foot-long roof/ceiling is hung from eleven “I” beams (called roof purlins running east/west) to lock the dead load for a “moment” frame. Crown Hall 1950-56

The clear-span structure is based on his unbuilt 1946 Cantor Restaurant in Indianapolis, whose open roof trusses would have held up the slab for what he called a “Universal Space.” Crown Hall’s 56,000-square-foot room is surrounded by glass walls comprised of 10-foot-high panels of clear plate glass over two milky side-by-side panes of 8-foot-high sandblasted glass panels called “glazed transparency.” Cantor Restaurant model 1946

Keeping the cost to $750,000, Mies poured dark terrazzo floors (leaving more expensive travertine marble to its front steps) and subdivided the main upper room with freestanding oak partitions that could be adjusted for room dimensions. The floor was supported by reinforced concrete square columns downstairs that for the most part were embedded into walls divided for offices and storage.

Its fundraising had only taken in $500,000 when construction began in December 1954. However, Chicago’s wealthy Crown family chipped in the extra $250,000 in 1955 stipulating that the name be S.R. Crown to commemorate their uncle’s (Sol R. Crown) death at 27 in 1921.

Greenwald

Herbert Greenwald was not above using Mies’ name for the 1951 marketing of six concrete-framed apartment buildings called “The Algonquin Apartments” in Hyde Park. Probably actually designed by Pace Associates’ Charles Genther and engineer John Holsman in the late 1940s, Mies most likely went along with the ruse but may have had minimal input. However, he definitely took the lead with Joseph Fujikawa as the managing architect in the 1953 design of 860/880’s next door neighbors, the “Esplanade” apartment buildings at 900 and 910 North Lake Shore Drive (at 29 stories, they are nevertheless the same height as the 26-story 860/880 next door).

Like Promontory Apartments in Hyde Park, the two 1953-55 towers (the southernmost at 900 is twice as big as 860) on the bigger triangular site were built with reinforced concrete skeletons but unlike the 860/880 pair next door sitting on a platform of travertine, the Esplanade duo sat on a narrow pavement of dark granite. And similar to the MoMA-displayed steel version rendering of the Promontory in the 1947 show, the Esplanade at 900/910 wrapped the concrete corner columns in a sheet of black aluminum and used a black (anodized aluminum) “curtainwall” extending away from the concrete frame, becoming the first actual use of that groundbreaking system. 900/910 model 1953-55

Also similar to the Esplanade, the two “Commonwealth Promenade” buildings (originally meant to be four 27-story towers and sometimes called Commonwealth Plaza) were made with concrete skeletons but instead of having curtainwalls of dark anodized aluminum, they were hung with light colored silvery aluminum. Begun in 1953 and finished in 1956, they overlook the sweep of Lincoln Park and the downtown skyline at Diversey Parkway and Sheridan Road. Commonwealth Promenade 1953-56

In 1951, during the finishing of the buildings of 860/880, Mies was commissioned by Robert H. McCormick, Jr., for a glass and steel house in suburban Elmhurst based on one floor of 860/880. McCormick had bought land in the western suburbs and hoped Mies could design housing for it similar to the one the architect built for him.

McCormick house 1951-52

The McCormick House was moved in 1993 to what would be the Elmhurst Art Museum to serve as an administrative wing. By 2018, it was completely opened to the public in an ongoing restoration as the museum’s cornerstone “Mies House.” Elmhurst Art Museum move of Mies House 1993

Greenwald (whose original plan was to live at 860 but instead lived in the penthouse of Commonwealth) and his architect meant to build several high-rises across DeWitt from the 860 building, two residential skyscrapers at 1300 North Lake Shore Drive, and a neighboring lakefront development bordering the Promenade. But in 1959, while he and Mies were planning the luxurious “2400 North Lakeview” building at Fullerton Parkway, the developer was killed in an airplane crash in the East River in New York. His body was never found. McCormick ad for Mies house circa 1951

50x50 House

Mies had been interested in prefabricated housing since 1945 in the “Case Study” residence competition of “Arts and Architecture” magazine. Though he didn’t submit or build one for the project, as a teacher he saw it as a compelling problem for his curriculum at IIT.

Probably inspired by the house for Edith Farnsworth, during 1950 through 1952, Mies used his office architect, Myron Goldsmith, whom he had taught at IIT, to help put into architectonic form the hypothetical “Core House design” (also called by historians the “50x50 House”) for his students. Based on eight 6x6-foot modules per side (it was actually 48x48-feet), Mies and Goldsmith proposed 40x40, 50x50, and 60x60-foot versions. 50x50 House model and drawing 1951

Mannheim National Theatre

For an unbuilt competition entry for the German city’s opera house, this clear-span (free of columns) building of 1952-53 achieved in model form more than if it had actually won. It was most likely a “poetic” response to Chicago’s visible industrial landscape. As a bridge would use the open truss of steel to lift cars hundreds of feet high and thousands of feet long over rivers and factories, this architectural use of seven stainless steel 26-foot-deep trusses was meant to support a roof of 262 x 524-feet.

Mannheim Theatre model 1952-53

An imposing model by Edward Duckett (who made all of the metal models for Mies’ buildings at that time) showed that its simple but magnificent open cavern enclosed in colored glass walls would most likely have been an acoustical nightmare for an opera company. The sound-spill alone from the bigger 1,300-seat theater to the back-to-back 500-seat chamber music hall would have caused the company to rule it out.

Chicago Convention Center

Impressed by the enormous roof trusses of Albert Kahn’s 1937 aircraft assembly building in Baltimore, Mies had proposed an even more gargantuan roof spanning 720 x 720 feet and 85 feet high for a Near Southside convention center (sometimes called Convention Hall) in 1953.

Convention Center drawing and model 1953-54

He used this as a teaching exercise for his graduate students at IIT who made numerous renderings and models. Conceived to house 50,000 under-30-foot-deep two-way trusses, they also created perspective drawings and collages for a wildly expensive green marble-clad version in 1954. Convention Center marble model 1954

Museum of Fine Arts Houston

Again in 1954, Mies was brought to Houston to design the Cullinan Hall addition to the original 1924 building. When deplaning to the city’s stifling heat and humidity, he vowed to design the addition without an outdoor patio. To provide plenty of clear-span space for galleries, his built design was basically a curved Crown Hall, whose eight steel columns and four white painted plate girders fanned out from an imaginary point in front of the old museum building and nestled between its splayed 1926 wings. The walls between the white steel columns were an infill of light brick.

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Cullinan wing 1954-58

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Brown Pavilion 1969-74

Its beautiful exterior was not on view for long, however. By 1961, the new director had deemed the addition as inadequate even though it had opened only in 1958. Mies then was brought back to build another curving extension covering the entire façade of the Cullinan and reaching down to the northern street.

Designed in 1969, the black-painted extension of twelve columns and six plate girders cradling the roof exposed mere slivers of recessed Cullinan doors and windows on each side. It was named the Brown Pavilion in 1970 and opened in 1974.

1954

Little did Mies van der Rohe know that 1954 would be such a pivotal year for his career. He had been celebrated by America’s greatest museums and built a pair of the most radical steel skyscrapers in its most innovative architectural city.

There had only been Frank Lloyd Wright as the sole architect to achieve name recognition to Middle America. Now there were two. He was now one of the most famous architects in the United States but his next project would make him one of the greatest in world history.

Part 3: History