Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe (1886-1969) was born in Achen, Germany. As a young boy he attended a cathedral school, and he also learned practical work like masonry from his father.

When he was nineteen years old he went to Berlin, and there he worked for Bruno Paul, who at the time was a very famous cabinet-maker in Germany. Three years later he moved on and he started working for the famous Peter Behrens, who had also taught famous architects like Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier.

During World War I, Mies Van Der Rohe built bridges and roads in the Balkans, and when the war was over his architectural career started blooming in Germany. He financed a magazine called G, and he was strongly associated with the Novembergruppe; an organization promoting modern art. Mies Van Der Rohe also designed the German pavillion for the International World Exhibition at Barcelona, Spain (1929), and the Trugendhat House in Brno, Czechoslovakia (1930). With elementary compositions, fundamentalism and geometrical purity the European style of architecture reached international fame. The new architecture showed functionalism, something that a lot of people seemed to be craving at that time.

Between 1930-1933 Mies Van Der Rohe was the director of the Bauhaus school of art, but when the Nazis took over Germany he moved to the U.S. in 1938. He soon became the director of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

While in the U.S. he planned the Edith Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois (1950), some of the Lake Shore Drive apartments in Chicago (1951), and together with Philip Johnson he planned the bronze-tingle Seagram building (left) in New York. He also designed the Berlin National Gallery (right) in Berlin, Germany. Next to La Corbusier, Mies Van Der Rohe is considered a twentieth century architectural master.

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