Masters of World Architecture: Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

Title

Masters of World Architecture: Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

Authors

Arthur Drexler

Files

Description

From the Back Cover: "LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE was born in Aachen, Germany in 1886. His father was a mason and owned a small stone-cutting shop where as a young boy Mies learned the elements of masonry construction. He received no formal architectural training, but was apprenticed as a draftsman and designer of classical stucco ornament in local architectural offices. Later he went to Berlin and from 1908 to 1911 he worked for Peter Behrens, opening his own architectural office in 1912. After the First World War, Mies, supporting avant-garde art movements and publications, emerged as a strongly original architect. Some of his most daring projects, the glass skyscrapers among them, date from this period in the early 1920's. Later as an official of the Deutscher Werkbund he directed the important Stuttgart Exposition of 1927, in which the most notable European architects participated. His German Pavilion for the Barcelona Exposition of 1929 would have assured him lasting fame if he had never built anything else. He became director of the Bauhaus in 1930 by closed it three years later because of the unfavorable cultural climate in Germany, the reason also why he departed in 1938 to become a permanent resident of the United States. Here he became head of the architectural department of the Illinois Institute of Technology and planned his first extensive project: a new campus for the Institute. Many of the buildings have now been completed. Also in Chicago he has built a spectacular series of glass-wall steel-frame apartment skyscrapers fronting Lake Michigan. The Farnsworth House of 1950, his first private-house commission in the United States, demonstrating his structural ideas on a domestic scale, has occasioned extensive discussion in architectural circles. His Seagram Building is one of the finest examples of a skyscraper in New York or anywhere else. Since his retirement from the Illinois Institute of Technology he has devoted full time to his private architectural practice."

Publication Date

1960

Publisher

George Braziller, Inc.

City

New York, NY

Keywords

Architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright

Disciplines

Architecture

Masters of World Architecture: Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe
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