About Mies Van Der Rohe

An innovative architect in 1920's and 1930's Germany, Mies was the last director of the Bauhaus, a seminal school in modern architecture. After Nazism's rise to power, and with its strong opposition to modernism, which lead also the closing of the Bauhaus itself, Mies emigrated to the United States. He accepted the position to head the architectural school at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

Mies sought to establish a new architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their own eras. He created an influential twentieth-century architectural style, stated with extreme clarity and simplicity. His mature buildings made use of modern materials such as industrial steel and plate glass to define interior spaces. He strove toward an architecture with a minimal framework of structural order balanced against the implied freedom of unobstructed free-flowing open space. He called his buildings "skin and bones" architecture. He sought an objective approach that would guide the creative process of architectural design, but he was always concerned with expressing the spirit of the modern era. He is often associated with his quotation of the aphorisms, "less is more" and "God is in the details".