Mies van der Rohe: Disciplinarian for a Confused Age

LOOK up—and anywhere in the U.S. the building, if it is relatively new, and certainly if it is of steel, will bear traces of Mies van der Rohe. In a time of confusion, he was a purist. In an era of innovation, he was a disciplinarian. He found shapes for the new possibilities of glass and steel, and the architecture of the world has never been the same since. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who died in Chicago last week at the age of 83, never realized the extent of his fame. "It is bad to be too famous," he once remarked. "Greek temples, Roman basilicas arid medieval cathedrals are significant to us as creations of a whole epoch rather than as works of individual architects. Who asks for the names of these builders?"

Succeeding generations will know Mies' name, and perhaps even apply it to the epoch. Mies laid down a fundamental creed of honest structure. Skin-and-bones architecture, he called it. Born in 1886 in Aachen, Germany, he received no formal architectural education. But he learned from his father, a master stonemason, to value the particular heft and quality of pure materials. One of his first jobs consisted of designing stucco ornaments for a local architect—"full-size details of Louis XIV in the morning, Renaissance in the afternoon." The experience left him with a lasting disdain for the falseness of decoration and a lasting relish for the honesty of materials. His buildings sprang from them, not from any abstract notion of forms.

Glass Prototype. He considered glass, and in 1919 designed a 20-story all-glass office tower for Berlin which, though never built, is the admitted prototype of all the great glass-and-metal skyscrapers that followed. He considered concrete, and in 1922 designed an office building with the continuous strip windows that are now a near cliche. He considered the room as a planning unit and concluded that it could be dispensed with, proving his contention in his famed German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. Since then, his low buildings have been characterized by a single floating roof, their spaces divided by freestanding, often movable walls that became the essential unit of his interior planning.

His favorite of these was the Illinois Institute of Technology's Crown Hall, where the giant, 220-ft.-wide roof, suspended on four trusses, hovers almost weightlessly over the huge inner space.