Art: Mies van der Rohe: Disciplinarian for a Confused Age

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The Barcelona pavilion, a low-slung one-story jewel brilliantly combining such elegant materials as travertine, Tinian marble, gray glass, onyx and steel, was Mies' first major public building to demonstrate many of these concepts. It immediately established its designer as a master. The following year he replaced Walter Gropius as the director of the Dessau Bauhaus, only to close up the experimental workshop three years later in protest against Nazi restrictions. In 1938, an invitation to head the school of architecture at the Armour Institute (since renamed the Illinois Institute of Technology) led Mies to Chicago and the full flowering of his genius. "He always said he would have created the same things if he had stayed in Germany," says Mies' grandson, Architect Dirk Lohan, "but personally I believe that the special climate and pace of Chicago helped him to create what he did."

"God in Details." Very probably it did. With its assortment of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, the city was certainly receptive to architectural innovations. For its part, the institute not only gave Mies free rein to organize his school but asked him to design a 22-building complex for its campus. In the years that followed, Mies designed dozens of landmark structures in cities around the world, each distinguished by structural economy, elegant materials and an absolute perfection of detail. "God is in the details," Mies would say, and he spared no pains to achieve that perfection.

When no existing furniture quite matched the modern grandeur of his Barcelona pavilion, he designed his own tables, stools and chairs in leather, steel and glass—which have since become classics in themselves. For Manhattan's Seagram Building, in its muted bronze and pink-glass majesty the country's most handsome office building, he had a mock-up made of the bronze mullions that hold the vertical windows in place. They are H-shaped in cross section, and Mies elaborately studied the dimensions of their outer edge for the shadow line it would cast on the enclosed windows and how it would relate to the whole 38-floor-high vertical scale. An added ith of an inch, translated into bronze, projected to the building's full height, and multiplied by all the mullions involved, might mean added thousands of dollars in construction costs. Mies was unintimidated. As one of his friends said recently, he insisted on simplicity, no matter what it cost.

He was equally demanding of the building's occupants. Each day, as darkness falls, all the ceiling lights in the Seagram offices automatically turn on at a set intensity, so that the building will stand against Manhattan's evening skyline just as Mies planned that it should. Similarly, any tenant moving into his apartment houses on Chicago's Lake Shore Drive has to accept the gray fiberglass curtains that Mies specified for their floor-to-ceiling windows. A bon vivant who enjoyed fine-tailored suits, gourmet food, and huge cigars, Mies once contemplated moving into his own building, then decided to remain in his oldfashioned, high-ceilinged apartment nearby. Visitors there found it characteristically spartan, decorated simply with black leather settees and easy chairs and a superb collection of Paul Klee's paintings lining the white walls.