Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969)

History

Less is more.
– Mies van der Rohe

1954 turned out to be as important to Mies as the year he came to America in 1938. He was comfortably ensconced in IIT and had begun building the neighboring residential skyscrapers to his landmark Chicago buildings of 860/880 Lake Shore Drive in Chicago.

Few architects achieve lasting fame with one building but his next project in New York City would land in the history books and propel his name to the pantheon of the world’s greatest artists.

Seagram Building

In 1954, the daughter of Seagram Distilleries’ CEO, Samuel Bronfman, received her father’s letter in Paris enclosing a photograph of the designer, Charles Luckman, proudly posing with a hulking model for a headquarters building Bronfman had planned to build on New York’s Park Avenue. Horrified at its clunkiness for such a prominent site, the daughter, Phyllis Lambert, a sculptor studying in a French art school, persuaded her father to let her choose a better architect.

After interviewing some of the greatest names in contemporary architecture, she found Mies van der Rohe. Together, they created one of the most elegant skyscrapers ever built. A simple bronze monolith standing back from the masonry canyons of New York City and since surpassed in height by its neighbors, its timeless presence still evokes a certain awe among other architects. Mies with Phyllis Lambert and Seagram model circa 1954

In 1955, Mies and structural engineer Fred Severud began to build a 39-story five-bay-wide bronze tower set 90 feet back from the front lot-line of the previously unbroken stone and brick cliffs comprising Park Avenue. The break in the wall of the more traditional buildings – and unlike the “wedding cake” massing of contemporary construction in the 1950s – made Seagram seem (in the 2001 words of Phyllis Lambert) “...like an unprecedented opening in the city’s fabric.”

His usual steel was reserved for the skeleton but Mies had secured enough bronze for the curtainwalls to fill a large museum with sculptures. His plan from the start (as was Lambert’s) was to make the building into a kind of monument.

However, to shave the building into a thin slab, he performed an optical trick by recessing the tower’s back portion into a stiffening “spine” of only three windowed structural bays wide and one opaque bay of 27-foot-nine-inches deep seen only from its side views on 52nd and 53rd Streets. He also clothed the spine’s North and South walls of diagonal steel braces in 38 floors of dark green Serpentine marble. This made the tower’s plan into a “T” shape unlike the box-like skyscrapers going up in the next few years.

Seagram Building “spine” and “bustle” circa 1958

Seagram Building plan detail

Seagram Building at night

To otherwise increase its rentable floorspace, a ten-story “bustle” whose bottom five floors stretched to both side street lot-lines is attached to its eastern backside. It held the Four Seasons restaurant and bar on its plaza level and office square footage less dependent on window space above that. The bustle’s top five floors are recessed by one bay on each end. The tower and its bustle sit on a pink Swenson granite podium with two reflecting pools edged by long benches of Antico Verde marble flanking the entrance approach from Park Avenue.

The steel was noisily riveted at the factory but its assembled larger segments were quietly bolted together on the site. Like the construction of Chicago’s 860/880 buildings, the New York fire code required encasing the vertical columns of a multi-story steel skeleton in concrete jackets. However, in order to emphasize the metallic nature of its supporting structure – and similar to the Chicago residential towers – Mies pre-wrapped the concrete-covered corners in metal plates instead of wooden formwork. And like the Esplanade of 1953-55, he hung a curtainwall of floor-to-ceiling topaz gray plate glass, flat metal soffits, and applied “I” beam mullions.

By 1956, Philip Johnson was free from his Museum of Modern Art duties and instead of quietly moonlighting on the project (though he’d been working with the architect since they’d both signed a contract with Seagram in October 1954), joined Mies full-time as a design partner primarily in charge of its interior decoration. Philip Johnson and Mies with model of Seagram Building circa 1955

Because the tower was mostly see-through, its interior was as important to Mies as its exterior. Johnson showcased the building’s nighttime lantern-like appearance with 11½ feet of wall-to-wall “luminous” light panels in the ceiling all the way from the hallways to the windows. Its uniformity during the day was emphasized with the installation of venetian blinds with three stops showing them either totally closed, halfway up, or completely open.

Its interior luxury was apparent in Roman travertine and walnut walls, office and elevator doors reaching to the ceiling, and curtains in the Four Seasons restaurant in its “bustle” made of catenary swags of aluminum chains fluttering above its air conditioning units. All furniture in restaurant, lobby, and most office spaces consisted of Mies’ own Brno and Barcelona chairs. Opening in 1958, the tower’s extreme setback on a podium was game-changing. And in 1961, it also led to the amending of the 1916 zoning laws to encourage new buildings in the city to provide public space and light by giving developers the rights for ten extra square feet in their structures for every one-square-foot of plaza. Seagram Building Plaza

It proved an aesthetic disaster. Despite New York’s next crop of windswept and barren open spaces surrounding blank, faceless towers, the approach became the new look of the corporate world. Every city now has “poor-man’s-Mies” structures sitting in endless concrete paved plazas ruining downtowns globally.

And the bronze-clad and opulent Seagram Building’s high quality also equated to a higher yearly property tax bill, certainly discouraging further visible aesthetic reaches by developers all too afraid of an equal “punishment.” Lambert went on to become a practicing architect and, in 1979, founded the Canadian Center for Architecture. “Distillers Corporation-Seagram Ltd” ceased to exist through a series of corporate buyouts, and the contents of the Four Seasons Restaurant were auctioned off in 2016 to record prices. It may stand shorter than its surrounding skyscrapers now, but the Seagram Building itself still exists with its original name on Park Avenue and in architectural history books everywhere. Seagram Building today

Lafayette Park

In 1949, the Fair Housing Act provided funds for “slum clearance” and Detroit wasted no time in bulldozing its Black Bottom neighborhood near downtown. When the initial mixed-income plan of dozens of towers designed by Minoru Yamasaki collapsed, Herbert Greenwald and Mies (who brought in his Bauhaus/IIT compatriot, Ludwig Hilberseimer) stepped in by 1955 to outline a more middle-class income (read White) project there.

Ultimately built with reinforced concrete skeletons, the first of three 21-story towers covered in a bright aluminum curtainwall and 186 low-rise townhouses of steel and glass were set in Alfred Caldwell’s leafy parkland in 1959. Unfortunately, only one side of the “Pavilion” high-rise overlooked Caldwell’s greensward with the other prospect overlooking an asphalt parking lot and street. But the two later high-rises of 1963 (called “Lafayette Towers”) sat in a more obvious park and flanked a parking garage with more picturesque grass and trees planted on top. Like any architectural office, there were many projects which, for one reason or another, remained unbuilt. Among them in 1957 alone were the Ron Bacardi Administration Building in Santiago, Cuba, 39-story Battery Park Apartments along the waterfront in Lower Manhattan, and the regional Seagram Building on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Lafayette Towers Detroit 1955-63

Colonnade Park

Newark, New Jersey, also redeveloped the site of the low-income Christopher Columbus Homes into the middle-income Colonnade Park, a set of three concrete cage, aluminum curtainwall 21-story high-rises developed in 1958 as Mies’ last completed project with Herbert Greenwald. Joseph Fujikawa was put in charge of the design for the entire project.

The two high-rises toward the east were renamed “Pavilion Towers” and set in parkland on its east and a parking lot to the west. But the enormous, twin lobby “Colonnade Apartments” overlooks the Olmsted Brothers’ 1895-designed Branch Brook Park within Newark’s most historic area.

Colonnade Apartments Newark 1958-60

Colonnade Apartments floorplan

Colonnade Apartments rendering

Had the 1934 Brussels Pavilion at 729.6-feet-square or the 1954 Chicago Convention Hall at 720-feet-square been built, they would have resulted in the largest Mies van der Rohe buildings. But the Colonnade Apartments at 446x66-feet is certainly the longest of all Mies built structures and its lengthy rows of concrete legs were painted white (unlike the gray painted Pavilion supports). Its central hallway spine would have been dizzyingly long had it not been blocked halfway by a fire stair.

Bacardi Office Buildings

The chairman of the Bacardi Rum Corporation, José Bosch, found Chicago’s Crown Hall to be in sync with his thinking and in 1957 had commissioned Mies to design the company’s headquarters building in a similar look in its 1862 birthplace of Santiago de Cuba. But it wasn’t the first time the company had depended on architecture to promote “sophistication” in its brand, employing Neo-Classicism for its 1928 Santiago museum and Art Déco for its 1930 Havana office building.

But Santiago’s location on the southern coast of Cuba is subtropical and its almost continuous humidity would have wreaked havoc on steel. Both Mies and his accompaniment on the trip, Gene Summers, remarked that the sun, also, beat down with such ferocity that deep overhangs to mitigate the heat completely changed the architect’s approach. The Bacardi design also needed thicker reinforced beams in the center and a slightly suspended ceiling panel to camouflage the swelling. Bacardi Santiago model 1957

As New York’s Seagram Building and its steel construction was in the news nearly daily, Bosch may have been pleased that Mies’ design was the exact opposite of his competition in presenting a whitish concrete canopy-like structure supported by two tapering columns per side over one recessed glass enclosed story that was more akin to his 1929 Barcelona Pavilion.

Ironically, though Bosch had supported the revolution, the new Castro regime had nationalized all of Bacardi’s Cuban assets and buildings just as the company was constructing a new Mies regional headquarters outside of Mexico City. Since a Santiago structure was no longer viable, its design was filed away for future use and the suburban Mexico City building became the new administrative offices of the entire brand until 1965.

Bacardi Mexico City model 1957

Designed and built from 1957 to 1961 and situated just down and off a major highway, the 52-meter-long one-story Bacardi Mexico City building of black steel on 24 “H” beam columns sitting on a Mexican travertine base was literally elevated one level to keep the roof plane from being so visible to approaching cars. The entry into a double-height, glass-walled room on the platform is marked by two opposing floating staircases leading up to the principal floor.

The open plan envisioned by Bosch as leading to more crosscurrents of thought, devolved into petty administrative secrecy by moving decision-making into hidden corners behind mahogany dividing walls.

Federal Center

In 1959, Mies had been awarded the opportunity to take the lead in the design (along with three other firms) of the new federal complex in downtown Chicago. He and office architect Gene Summers designed a group of buildings to replace a single domed granite and marble federal courthouse that had presided over its site at Dearborn and Adams since the turn of the 20th century. In the program were three separate buildings: a 368-foot-long courthouse slab of 30 stories on the east side of Dearborn, and on the site itself, an office tower of 42 stories, a single-story post office building and open plaza that were constructed over a number of years.

The Henry Ives Cobb federal building (1898-1905) remained in place throughout the construction of what was named the Dirkson Building across Dearborn until the Cobb building was finally demolished in 1965. And the 21 courtrooms on the upper 12 stories of the 30-story slab (built above the elevator banks servicing the lower floors) slowly received use as the old building’s courtrooms were shut down. The two largest two-story courtrooms occupied the top of the building. Chicago Federal Center site plan 1959-1973

After the remnants of Cobb’s courthouse were cleared away, construction commenced on the 42-story office building on the south end of the now open site. Both high-rises utilized concrete fireproofing on their steel girder frames with curtainwalls of gray/black steel and the same topaz gray plate glass he used in New York’s Seagram Building. The elevator banks were faced with the same dark gray granite as the lobby floors and plaza appearing both judicially sober and somewhat somber in the cold, overhead lighting.

As the office building reached its upper limits, the one-story post office of 197-feet-square was built to the north and both were finished in 1974. Though it used the same 4-foot-8-inch module of the skyscrapers (apparent by the joints in the Rockville granite floors, sidewalk, and outdoor plaza), its structural bay dimension of 65-feet-4-inches is far bigger than the skyscrapers’ of 28-feet-square.

Chicago Federal Center Post Office 1959-74

Calder Flamingo stabile 1974

Perhaps the most astonishing visual is Alexander Calder’s shocking vermillion 53-foot stabile, “Flamingo,” appearing to walk on the outdoor plaza beneath the black skyscrapers. Obviously, built of riveted and welded steel and incongruously biomorphic against a backdrop of cool Miesian mathematics, this 1973-74 sculpture was the first artwork commissioned by the GSA (clients of the Federal Center itself) for the “Percent for Art” program.

1960s Mies’ severe arthritis made him delegate much of the work for many commissions to others in his office. Joseph Fujikawa, Gene Summers, Ludwig Hilberseimer, and several other trusted lieutenants in the Mies van der Rohe architectural firm handled the details for buildings as diverse as a library in Washington, D.C., office buildings, skyscrapers, and classrooms in Des Moines, Baltimore, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and even balconied apartments with a service station in Montreal. There were unbuilt designs for Miami, Kansas City, New Haven, San Mateo, Seattle, Chicago, Montreal, Frankfurt, Berlin, London, and Essen, Germany. Washington D.C. MLK Library 1961-65

Toronto-Dominion Centre

However, a few projects interested him enough to give the jobs his full attention. What at first glance strongly resembles Chicago’s Federal Center with a single-story pavilion at the feet of two skyscrapers, was built, instead, for commercial as opposed to governmental purposes. Because one of the clients, Toronto-Dominion Bank, had partnered with the giant Fairview real estate firm, the complex was probably destined to be a “money machine” from the start.

Phyllis Lambert, the Director of Planning and proxy client for New York’s Seagram Building was also born a Bronfman, the owners of Fairview real estate. After SOM’s Gordon Bunshaft produced a rejected design of a 60-story tapered concrete tower incorporating the bigger retail banking floor on the bottom, Lambert steered Mies van der Rohe toward the commission as lead architect with two other firms in 1963. Mies then made his office employee, Peter Carter, the Project Architect.

The single-story banking pavilion at 150-feet-square is a smaller dimension than Chicago’s Post Office of 197-feet-square. But its more luxurious green Tinian marble counters and tall service shafts, English oak partitions and cores and “waffle-grid” roof/ceiling of 4.6-foot-deep plate girders, and infill of luminous 10-foot lighting panels make it probably one of Mies’ most stunning interiors. Toronto-Dominion Banking Pavilion 1963-69

Placing a bigger banking facility apart from the skyscrapers was a particular Mies method to avoid the compromise of both functions. As to the towers: by now, the Mies structural system of a metal curtainwall and corner wrapping of the fireproofed or totally concrete skeleton for high-rises was the norm since 1953 and the construction of Chicago’s Esplanade Apartments. This time, however, encasing steel skeletons by a layer of concrete like Chicago’s 860/880 and Federal Center towers wasn’t a necessary step.

Cages of steel supported both towers and diagonal bracing was placed on the exterior walls behind their two-story mechanical floor screens apparent visually in the windowless belts wrapping both. Each high-rise (56-story Toronto-Dominion Bank Tower and 44-story Royal Trust) is nearly identical to the other save for the taller bank tower. All buildings sat on St. John’s granite in a five-foot module and both towers have travertine veneered elevator banks. But underneath those spotted gray pavers of the platform are three floors of shopping and two of parking as downtown Toronto has long learned to live underground as the harsh winter weather also dictated its architecture. Toronto-Dominion Centre 1968

The original Toronto-Dominion Centre opened in 1967-68-69 (respectively as the buildings opened) while four new non-Mies skyscrapers have been built over the years making it a six-tower complex. Its construction was a refinement of Mies’ building methods for clear-span (banking pavilion) and high-rise (office towers) structures but it also ignited a building war of sorts between rival banks that turned Toronto’s skyline into an increasingly tall forest of skyscrapers.

Westmount Square

Mies’ idea for a “superblock” of mixed uses incorporating residences, stores, restaurants, and offices was finally proposed in 1964 but looks to have been disruptively placed. Inserted into a leafy, low-rise portion of Montreal two miles from downtown, the development of three black 21-story high-rises on 5-foot-3-inch-square travertine pavers atop three levels of parking and an imposing three-level black anodized aluminum covered office structure definitely changed the character of the bucolic, upscale suburb.

The three high-rises (all constructed from reinforced concrete skeletons) may have the same number of floors but the single office tower is taller from more substantial 3-foot-1-inch-thick floors than the 1-foot-1-inch-thick concrete waffle grid of the apartment ceilings. Each building has veneered travertine elevator cores and the same 23-foot height of the ground level lobbies. Westmount Square model 1965

The developer adhered to a marketing survey and Westmount’s zoning allowance that built on the 3.56-acre site to open in 1967. But that zoning may have been influenced by resident Samuel Bronfman, the head of Seagram distilleries (Mies’ client for the Seagram Building in New York) and principal funder of Westmount Square.

The affluent suburb had been a leading English-speaking thorn in the side of French-speaking City of Montreal for decades. However, the separate town of Westmount had been annexed to the larger city in a “mega-merger” of the surrounding 27 towns and their suburbs in 2002. But when the recalcitrant merged cities then decoupled from Montreal in 2006, it left Westmount to again revert to an independent civic structure that, despite the development of other big city high-rises, had here and there retained its 1890s look of small-town charm.

Of course, Mies (and his affiliated architects) cannot be blamed for the massive puncture in the suburb’s fabric. That distinction can be laid at the feet of the developers and zoning board. But the power of architecture proves that its very size can alter everything around it and the Westmount Square project is “Exhibit A” in that delicate balance.

Mansion House Square

This unbuilt London financial district design of 1967 seemed to appeal to Mies, like those who commented on its proposal in 1968, to be primarily a way to open up the dense urban area. Underneath the eight-acre site of Victorian buildings constructed on an ancient duke’s land was a “tube” stop at an unmoving diagonal angle.

The chance to square-off the blocks (another building to be demolished had been built on the second) with an open space of Cornish Granite pavers would have let Christopher Wren’s St. Stephen Walbrook Church of 1672-79, George Dance the Elder’s 1739-52 Mansion House (residence of the Lord Mayor of London), and Sir Edwin Lutyens’ 1924-37 Midland Bank building finally be seen. Mansion House Square plan circa 1967

Mies directed Englishman Peter Carter to be project architect. The client, Lord Rudolph Palumbo (father of Peter, who would later buy Mies’ Farnsworth House from Edith Farnsworth in 1972), wanted to replace the 1870 Neo-Gothic Victorian building with a modernist tower and add plantings of trees and benches to both blocks. To justify the money spent, a 20-story steel cage high-rise was to house the offices of Lloyds Bank. And like a miniature Seagram Building, it was to have a curtainwall of bronze metal and gray glass.

Its long design gestation (working drawings were finished by 1985) also gave time for 1970s critics to delay its impending construction. By the 1980s, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher went on the record despising its appearance but it was probably Prince Charles who may have actually killed it in his most famous criticism, called the “Carbuncle” speech. In a talk to RIBA in May 1984, he said, “It would be a tragedy if the character and skyline of our capital city were to be further ruined and St. Paul’s dwarfed by yet another giant glass stump, better suited to downtown Chicago than the City of London.” Mansion House Square London photomontage circa 1967

What the ultimate winner of the site lacked in height, it more than made up for in colorful flamboyance. Perhaps the last “Postmodern” structure, a horizontally striped pink and yellow limestone with angled green glass office building, Number 1 Poultry was finally constructed there in the mid-1990s. Started in 1985 and completed in 1997, James Stirling’s seven-story structure was built by Rudolph’s son, Lord Peter Palumbo. And its rooftop restaurant ascended to a mere 80 feet.

Ironically, the nearby “City” financial district has since grown with numerous skyscrapers likened to juke boxes, cheese graters, walkie-talkies, and pickles more than three times the height of Mies van der Rohe’s only London design.

New National Gallery

Considered by Mies to be his final building, it was fitting, perhaps, that this museum was built in Berlin where the architect began his career.

Despite Mies’ longtime assertion that “form” was only the result of the design program and not the objective for architecture, ever since the unbuilt Cuban Bacardi building and its hovering plane overhanging a glazed recess sat in an office drawer, he’d thought it would make a fine museum.

He pulled the design out of his files in 1960 when commissioned to design a small museum for the 19th century collection of Georg Schaefer in Schweinfurt, Germany. Schaefer was the father-in-law of Mies’ handsome young grandson, Dirk Lohan. When both Schaefer and the city of Schweinfurt pulled out of the project, the architect used the same design for the bigger Berlin museum. New National Gallery Berlin 1962-68

Applying the identical building form in 1962, Mies designed a simple structure in steel, albeit to gigantic proportions (5,000 square meters or 53,820 square feet). But unlike the Bacardi Building’s hovering roof of concrete, the uniform steel grid of ceiling/roof of the Berlin building was totally flat and left exposed covered only in crisp black aluminum.

Its 214-foot-square roof assembled from a web of nearly six-foot-deep plate girders was assembled in large sections and lifted in one piece (Mies saw the entire six-hour operation on April 5th, 1967) on eight steel columns (with little apparent tapering) 27.9 feet high and 95 feet apart. The single main hall, meant for temporary exhibitions, is bigger than the Toronto banking pavilion at 166-feet-square but like it, there are two service stacks veneered in green Tinian marble and two English oak faced cores. Curators have often complained that the 27,000-square-foot hall is too big and too glassy to properly showcase delicate works. Floor-to-ceiling drapes have sometimes been drawn and, like Mies’ Cullinan Hall of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, they’ve resorted to suspending giant floating walls on which small paintings are then hung. New National Gallery Berlin 1962-68

The main hall is paved in a polished gray granite and to prevent slight sagging of the 60-foot corners of the roof, each was designed to extend five centimeters higher than the edge centers. Cambers on top of the corners and in the middle of the entire roof deflected slight deformation when finished and the total hovering plane appears totally flat.

Staircases (and one discreet elevator) lead underneath to a warren of traditional gallery spaces for the permanent collection and mostly windowless offices. The underground galleries housed in its large undercroft comprise Cubist, Expressionist, Surrealist, and of course, Bauhaus masterpieces. Only the depressed Western sculpture garden side is sunny with floor-to-ceiling windows. New National Gallery interior 1968

The museum, only a part of a gigantic Kulturforum of diverse galleries, symphony halls, and a library opened in 1968 in what was then West Berlin. But Mies’ almost over-powering pavilion tells today’s architectural historians that looking at the building from afar can be almost more important than looking out from inside.

Decline

Mies died of esophageal cancer on August 17th, 1969. Many years of cigar smoking were most likely the cause but Mies had been debilitated by severe arthritis for at least ten years and rarely left his wheelchair in all the time that followed.

One of his daughters, Georgia, had joined Marianne (Waltraut had died in 1959) to stay with their father. Lora Marx was also at his side during his final days and though Mies had earlier thought a marriage entanglement with her would stifle him, he had concluded that it would not and he half-heartedly proposed to her near the end. She declined. Lora Marx and Mies circa 1950s

Two months after the families’ small service at Graceland Cemetery’s chapel and where he would forever lie, a bigger gathering comprising dozens of students and friends assembled at IIT’s Crown Hall to listen to tributes and the same Bach-playing cellist.

Legacy

For someone to embroider a new name for himself at 35 (late for an artist) and care more for exhibitions than architectural clients, it’s obvious he was trying to prove a point.

Similarly, in the final edit of the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe film, his early vernacular houses that may have taught him how to build were left on the cutting room floor. Though he rarely acknowledged the houses, it is his modernist buildings he would be remembered for that are “dateless” and certainly speak with the loudest voice anyway.

Unlike Frank Lloyd Wright, who was more than happy to write volumes and speak incessantly in interviews about old wounds and current grudges, Mies preferred to remain silent. If Wright was Picasso furiously painting in his many diverse periods, Mies was Matisse, incubating a carefully worked-out method over decades and contemplating for long periods over each brushstroke. His theoretical glass skyscrapers of the early 1920s were indeed breakthrough designs but it was his low clear-span structures that not only were his favorite forms but more clearly reveal to the architectural historian that Mies van der Rohe along with his student and employee, Myron Goldsmith, appear to have invented the steel “exoskeleton” for building construction. Friedrichstrasse rendering 1921

Of course, seeing beauty in structure goes back to before the Chicago School of Architecture; the earlier ship-building techniques of medieval half-timber constructions; even the Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages. However, Mies brought it into the 20th century. His persistence on using that simple concept for his own buildings is why his modernist structures were the nucleus of the “Second Chicago School of Architecture.”

Some critics have said his modernist works were too cold and austere and weren’t symbolic of the house or office or school. But they were certainly symbols of their “epoch” as he had always taught since his first studies of Germany’s medieval buildings.

Barcelona Pavilion 1929 (far left) and rebuilt in 1986 (near left).

And more than a few of his students, when confronted with Mies’ black palette, have said, “Well, the people provide the color and chaos.” Although, this may not be true regarding his results as Mies operated with an architectural grid behind his eyes and designed his world to live up to it.

The industrial age Mies lived in, with its endless parallel tracks in mathematical railway yards and steel factories untouched by an aesthetic hand, were bound to be seen through the lens of an artist. The applied “I” beams and inside-out steel architecture were merely his abstraction of the “design free” construction of massive rail yards and coke ovens around him.

During the 1920s, he would expound on a new brand of Modernism in short stentorian columns in architecture magazines or trade ideas with like-minded modernist friends. But it was only in 1930, when he headed the Bauhaus and lectured to note-taking students about modern building, that he would verbally discuss his own concepts in detail with a younger audience. Much has been made of his alleged “motto” of “Less Is More.” In truth, there is no written record of him actually saying it. However, just like Peter Behrens had whispered it to him long before, he may very well have done so verbally to his students in the Bauhaus and IIT classes or to his firm’s architects. But it’s really only important when others are talking about his buildings. G magazine cover June 1924

Actually, the historian is hard-pressed to find much that he has written and his verbal Bauhaus and IIT teaching will forever remain transitory, live performances only.

Like all acting coaches, painting instructors, and creative writing classes teach, this is the essence of most good art. Much like traditional Japanese building, fewer components were always better than many to Mies. He may have reputedly first heard the phrase “Less is More” over his shoulder while at the drafting board in 1909 by his architect boss but it was always percolating in his brain.

The same thing could be said of his slightly less famous aphorism, “God is in the details” (though it’s been attributed to Gustave Flaubert in the 19th century). Whether or not Mies van der Rohe actually wrote them down, his architecture can be distilled into an aesthetic equation from both quotes: “Almost nothing” construction...plus sparingly used luxurious materials...plus the details of a building treated with perfection...figuratively prove that less can indeed be more. Tugendhat House/Mies/Seagram photocollage circa 2015

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