Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

During his military service in 1917, he fathered a son outside his marriage.

In 1925, he began a relationship with designer Lilly Reich that ended when he moved to the United States.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was born on 27th March, 1886, in Aachen, Germany. He helped his father, who was a master mason and owned a small stonecutter’s shop. Mies never received any formal architectural training.

At 15, he apprenticed under several Aachen architects where he sketched outlines of architectural designs. This practice developed his skill for linear drawings, which he would use to produce some of the finest architectural designs.

At 19, he joined as an apprentice to Bruno Paul, a leading furniture designer.

His first project was a traditional suburban house. Its perfect execution impressed Peter Behrens, then Germany’s most progressive architect. He offered the 21-year-old Mies a job in his office.

He became member of the ‘Deutscher Werkbund’, an English-German Association of Craftsmen. Here he established ties with likeminded artists and craftsmen. The Werkbund’s members’ vision of new design tradition of using machine-made things, including machine-made buildings, gave birth to a ‘Gesamtkultur’. These ideas soon culminated in the so-called International Style of modern architecture.His thought process was influenced by Behrens, Hendrik Petrus Berlage, a pioneer of modern Dutch architecture and German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

During World War I, Mies was enlisted and looked after the construction of bridges and roads in the Balkans.

He returned to Berlin in 1918, joined several modernist architectural groups and organized many exhibitions. But he did not have any projects in hand. His only building of this period was a memorial of murdered communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, dedicated in 1926, which was demolished by the Nazis.

His most important work of these years remained on paper. In fact, these theoretical projects turned in a series of drawings and sketches that are now in the ‘New York Museum of Modern Art’, foretell the entire range of his later work.

‘The Friedrichstrasse Office Building’ built in 1919, was one of the first proposals for an all steel-and-glass building.

‘The Glass Skyscraper’ (1921) applied his idea of a glass skyscraper whose transparent facade reveals the building’s underlying steel structure. Other theoretical studies explored the potential of concrete and brick construction.

He created his footprint in the architectural world through design of ‘Friedrichstrasse Office Building’. Although it was never built, Mies's design remains one of the most important structures in 20th century architecture. It established the Miesian principle of ‘skin and bones’ construction: a skyscraper made entirely of glass and steel. For the Friedrichstrasse architecture competition, Mies ignored several rules dictated in the guidelines and presented a radical concept to the committee. The design didn't win; much less receive an official mention. However, decades later, this style has come to dominate corporate architecture.

His most famous executed project of the interwar period was the German Pavilion (also known as the Barcelona Pavilion), which was commissioned by the German government for the ‘1929 International Exposition’ at Barcelona (demolished 1930; reconstructed 1986). It exhibited a sequence of marvelous spaces on a 175- by 56-foot travertine platform, partly under a thin roof, and partly outdoors, supported by chromed steel columns. The spaces were defined by walls of honey-coloured onyx, green Tinian marble, and frosted glass and contained nothing but a pool, in which stood a nude sculptural, and a few of the chairs he had designed for the pavilion. These cantilevered steel chairs, which are known as Barcelona chairs, became an instant classic of 20th-century furniture design.