Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies (March 27, 1886 – August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect.

Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe was born in Aachen, Germany. He worked in the family stone-carving business before he joined the office of Bruno Paul in Berlin. He entered the studio of Peter Behrens in 1908 and remained until 1912, where he was exposed to the current design theories and to progressive German culture, working alongside Walter Gropius and Le Corbusie.

His talent was quickly recognized and he soon began independent commissions, despite his lack of a formal college-level education. A physically imposing, deliberative, and reticent man, Ludwig Mies renamed himself as part of his rapid transformation from a tradesman’s son to an architect working with Berlin’s cultural elite, adding his mother’s more impressive surname “van der Rohe”.

He began his independent professional career designing upper class homes in traditional Germanic domestic styles. Under Behrens’ influence, Mies developed a design approach based on advanced structural techniques and Prussian Classicism. He also developed a sympathy for the aesthetic credos of both Russian Constructivism and the Dutch De Stijl group. He borrowed from the post and lintel construction of Karl Friedrich Schinkel for his designs in steel and glass.

After World War I, Mies joined his avant-garde peers in the long-running search for a new style for a new industrial age. The weak points of traditional styles had been under attack by progressive theorists since the mid-nineteenth century, primarily for the application of historical styles to modern building types.
Their mounting criticism of the historical styles gained substantial cultural credibility after the disaster of World War I, widely seen as a failure of the old order of imperial leadership of Europe. The classical revival styles were particularly reviled by many as the architectural symbol of a now-discredited aristocratic system. Progressive thinkers called for a completely new architectural design process guided by rational problem-solving using modern materials, rather than the application of classical facades onto predetermined forms.

Mies worked with the magazine G which started in July 1923. He made major contributions to the architectural philosophies of the late 1920s and 1930s as artistic director of the Werkbund-sponsored Weissenhof project and He joined the avant-garde Bauhaus design school as their director of architecture, adopting and developing their functionalist application of simple geometric forms in the design of useful objects.

After 1933, Nazi political pressure soon forced Mies to close Bauhaus, the government-financed school. Hhis style was rejected by the Nazis as not “German” in character. Frustrated and unhappy, he left his homeland reluctantly in 1937 as he saw his opportunity for any future building commissions vanish, accepting a residential commission in Wyoming and then an offer to head an architectural school in Chicago, Illinois.

One of the benefits of taking this position was that he would be commissioned to design the new buildings and master plan for the campus. All his buildings still stand there, including Alumni Hall, the Chapel, and his masterpiece the S.R. Crown Hall, widely regarded as Mies’ finest work, the definition of Miesian architecture.

In 1944, he became an American citizen. His 30 years as an American architect reflect a more structural, pure approach towards achieving his goal of a new architecture for the 20th Century.
Between 1946 and 1951, Mies van der Rohe designed and built the Farnsworth House, a weekend retreat outside Chicago. The glass pavilion is raised six feet above a floodplain next to the Fox River, surrounded by forest and rural prairies. The house has been described as sublime, a temple hovering between heaven and earth, a poem, a work of art.

Mies then designed a series of four middle-income high-rise apartment buildings, the 860/880 and 900-910 Lake Shore Drive towers on Chicago’s Lakefront.
These towers, with façades of steel and glass, were radical departures from the typical residential brick apartment buildings of the time.

In 1958, Mies van der Rohe designed what is often regarded as the pinnacle of the modernist high-rise architecture, the Seagram Building in New York City.
Using the Seagram as a prototype, Mies’ office designed a number of modern high-rise office towers, notably the Chicago Federal Center, which includes the Dirksen and Kluczynski Federal Buildings and Post Office (1959) and the IBM Plaza in Chicago, the Westmount Square in Montreal and the Toronto-Dominion Centre in 1967. Each project applies the prototype rectangular form on stilts and ever-more refined enclosure wall systems, but each creates a unique set of exterior spaces that are an essential aspect of his creative efforts.
During 1951-1952, Mies’ designed the steel, glass and brick McCormick House, located in Elmhurst, Illinois. The house has been moved and reconfigured as a part of the public Elmhurst Art Museum.

Mies’s last work was the Neue Nationalgalerie art museum, the New National Gallery, in Berlin. Considered one of the most perfect statements of his architectural approach, the upper pavilion is a precise composition of monumental steel columns and a cantilevered roof plane with a glass enclosure. The simple square glass pavilion is a powerful expression of his ideas about flexible interior space, defined by transparent walls and supported by an external structural frame.

His architecture, with origins in the German Bauhaus and western European International Style became an accepted mode of building for American cultural and educational institutions, developers, public agencies, and large corporations.

Famous for his dictum ‘Less is More’, Mies attempted to create contemplative, neutral spaces through an architecture based on material honesty and structural integrity. Over the last twenty years of his life, Mies achieved his vision of a monumental ‘skin and bone’ architecture. His later works provide a fitting denouement to a life dedicated to the idea of a universal, simplified architecture.

Mies designed modern furniture pieces using new industrial technologies that have become popular classics, such as the Barcelona chair and table, the Brno chair, and the Tugendhat chair. His furniture is known for fine craftsmanship, a mix of traditional luxurious fabrics like leather combined with modern chrome frames, and a distinct separation of the supporting structure and the supported surfaces, often employing cantilevers to enhance the feeling of lightness created by delicate structural frames. During this period, he collaborated closely with interior designer and companion Lilly Reich.

Mies died in Chicago, Illinois in 1969.