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

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The Most Good. "At its best, architecture touches and expresses the very innermost structure of the civilization from which it springs," Mies said. "I have tried to make an architecture for a technological society. I have wanted to keep everything reasonable and clear —to have an architecture that anybody can do." To a large extent, he succeeded. Summarizing his achievement in a speech some time ago, Architect Philip Johnson said: "Le Corbusier invents, invents magnificently and, as at Ronchamps, makes a new shape of monument for the world to admire. Mies purifies and purifies till, as at Seagram, he makes the paradigm for America's tall building. I don't want to be interesting, I want to be good,' he liked to say. Ronchamps is more amazing; Wright's Guggenheim far more extraordinary; but the Seagram Building may perhaps be the most 'good.' "

In one sense, Mies was in a state of momentary eclipse at his death. His lessons by now have been so absorbed into architectural thought that the young have often felt impatient at the Mies formulas, the "less is more," the implicitly arrogant demand to produce something more spare, more pure. Mies' discipline is demanding, and except in his hands, a confining one. No one can build a better Seagram Building. And by its very austerity, Mies' esthetic provides no vocabulary for a whole city landscape—a topic that obsesses most young architects, who talk not of individual buildings but of "reshaping the urban environment." A city, or even an avenue lined with Seagram Buildings would be a desolation.

Austere Standard. Mies' vocabulary is one of yes and no, of the perfect and the imperfect. There is little room for adjectives or adverbs, and in the face of this unrelenting demand, lesser architects boggle or, refusing the challenge completely, invent a different vocabulary of their own.

Mies' death closed one of architecture's more glorious chapters. Along with Frank Lloyd Wright, the arch individualist who pioneered an organic approach to space, Le Corbusier, the daring gambler with expressive form, and Walter Gropius, the dogged exponent of functionalism—all dead now—he had shaped the buildings of the 20th century. Whoever successive generations may follow, or aspire to emulate, they must take Mies into account. He set down principles and raised standards for construction from which there can be no retreat.