Design: His Was the Simplicity That Stuns

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's life was well timed. He was born at the right moment (100 years ago next month) and in the right place (prosperous middle Europe) to lead the radical transformation of architecture during the 1920s and '30s. He left his native Germany just ahead of probable persecution by the Nazis, arrived in Chicago just as his austere vision was catching on among U.S. architects and developed his pragmatic skyscraper design just as the war ended and corporate America found itself instantly in need of such a prototype for acres of new high-rise office space.

Even his passing, in 1969, came in the nick of time. The American architect Robert Venturi had just published his influential rejection of less-is-more Miesian modernism ("Less is a bore," Venturi punned), and younger colleagues were starting to grumble that the inspirational rigor of the International Style had turned to rigor mortis. Death spared Mies both from seeing any of the lush species of postmodernism and from the ignominy of a public rejection in 1985, when British authorities denied a die-hard Miesian builder permission to put up a high-rise that Mies had designed for the City of London.

But that was last year. Apparently the time has now come to rethink the last two decades of revisionism, to rehabilitate Mies posthumously. The definitive biography has just appeared, a wise, readable book by Franz Schulze titled simply Mies van der Rohe (University of Chicago; $39.95). Barcelona has nearly finished reconstructing his perfect building, the cool, absolutely confident German Pavilion built for the 1929 International Exposition. And now at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, always Mies' most important institutional propagandist, Architecture and Design Director Arthur Drexler has assembled the ultimate Mies exhibit: doodles, sketches, renderings, building models, photographs, furniture and even construction materials, all packed into two floors.

Like many of his generation in Europe, Mies was proudly glum, an earnest young Spenglerian. The present cycle of civilization was tapped out, it seemed to him. Sweat and serendipity were anachronisms; the future looked to be a matter of machines and bureaucracy. "The individual is losing significance," Mies wrote in 1924. "His destiny is no longer what interests us." And yet has any individual had a greater impact on architecture, ever, than Mies?

Indeed, it almost seems that he invented modernism all at once. During 1921 and 1922 he proposed on paper two grand, denuded glass skyscrapers, a pair of unassailable abstract objects oblivious to everything but their own technological prowess. The drawings of the two buildings, on display at MOMA, are oversize and dashing, like Mies himself. Designed without particular functions in mind, one without even a hypothetical site, the forms are altogether different from the architecture that preceded them, not merely novel but profoundly new. Neither was to have any obvious top, bottom, entrance or decoration. Mies' visionary high-rise modernism was not just a few years ahead of its time; dreamy, romantic modern buildings like these did not come along until almost a half-century later.