Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe (Mies) was born in Germany in 1886. At the age of 19 he moved to Berlin, and started working with the art nouveau architect and furniture designer Bruno Paul. Over the next 10 years he studied the works of Frank Lloyd Wright and Karl Friedrich Schinkel. By 1912, he had his own studio in Berlin.
In 1927 Mies designed one of the design community’s most famous buildings, The German Pavilion at the International Exposition in Barcelona Spain. In it contained one of interior design’s most famous chairs, the Pavilion Chair. The Pavilion had a flat roof supported by columns, while the interior was constructed of glass and marble.
Mies is one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture, Mies, like many of his post war contemporaries, 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 austere but elegant spaces. He developed the use of exposed steel structure and glass to enclose and define space, striving for architecture with a minimal framework of structural order, balanced against the implied freedom of open space.
He called his buildings "skin and bones" architecture. He sought to create a rational approach that would guide the creative process of architectural design, and is known for his use of the aphorisms “less is more” and "God is in the details".
Mies was Director of the Bauhaus School from 1930-1933. In 1937 he moved to Chicago where he became the Head of the architecture department at the Illinois institute of technology. During the next 15 years of his career, he designed skyscrapers for nearly every major American city.
