Architecture as Language

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a German-born American architect whose rectilinear forms, crafted in elegant simplicity, made him among the most prominent and influential architects of the twentieth century. He was initiated into architecture through masonry, stone carving, stucco decoration, and furniture design before working as an architect in Peter Behrens’ office. Mies Career in Europe In 1905, at the age of 19, Mies went to work for an architect in Berlin, but he soon left his job to become an apprentice with Bruno Paul, a leading furniture designer who worked in the Art Nouveau style of the period. Two years later, he received his first commission, a traditional suburban house. Its perfect execution impressed Peter Behrens, who, at the time, was Germany’s most progressive architect and offered the 21-year-old Mies a job in his office, where, at about the same time, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier were also starting. Perhaps Mies’s most famous executed project of the interwar period in Europe was the German Pavilion (also known as the Barcelona Pavilion). The German government commissioned for the 1929 International Exposition at Barcelona (demolished 1930; reconstructed 1986). It exhibited a sequence of marvelous spaces on a 175- by 56-foot (53.6- by 17-metre) travertine platform, partly under a thin roof and partly outdoors, supported by chromed steel columns. The spaces were defined by walls of honey-colored onyx, green Tinian marble, and frosted glass and contained nothing but a pool, in which stood a sculptural nude and a few of the chairs Mies had designed for the pavilion. These cantilevered steel chairs, known as Barcelona chairs, became an instant classic of 20th-century furniture design. In 1930 Mies was appointed director of the Bauhaus, which had moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925. When the Nazis closed the school in 1933, Mies tried for a few months to continue it in Berlin. But the modern design was as hopeless a cause in Hitler’s totalitarian state as was political freedom. Mies announced the end of the Bauhaus in Berlin late in 1933 before the Nazis could close it.