Mies van der Rohe (Urban Planner)
Introduction
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (Aachen, Kingdom of Prussia, March 27, 1886 - Chicago, Illinois, August 17, 1969)[1] was a German-American architect and industrial designer. Along with Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, he is widely recognized as one of the pioneers of modern architecture.
An innovative architect in Germany during the Weimar Republic, he was the last director of the Bauhaus, a German art and architecture school of modern architecture. With the rise of Nazism to power, which was frontally opposed to the modernity that this school represented, its closure was ordered, and Mies emigrated to the United States. There he accepted the position of director of the school of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
Mies sought to establish a new architectural style that could represent modern times as classicism and Gothic did in their respective eras. Thus, with the collaboration of Lilly Reich, he created an influential architecture typical of the century, presented with extreme clarity and simplicity. His mature projects use modern materials such as industrial steel and large sheets of glass to define interior spaces. He developed an architecture with minimal structures intended to create open spaces that flow without obstacles. He referred to his works as “skin and bones” architecture. He left as a legacy new architectural canons that express the spirit of the modern era and is often associated with the quote of two aphorisms: "less is more" and "God is in the details."
Early years
Maria Ludwig Michael Mies, was born on March 27, 1886, son of Michael Mies and Amalie Rohe, fourth child of a Catholic family.[2] In 1900 he began working in his father's stone workshop, in 1902 he was assigned foreman of a work, and a year later he began working as an ornament draftsman in a plasterer's workshop.
In 1905 he moved to Berlin to collaborate as a furniture designer in Bruno Paul's workshop.
In 1907 he created his first work, the Riehl House. From 1908 to 1911 he worked in the office of Peter Behrens, in which Mies developed an architectural style based on advanced structural techniques and Prussian classicism. He also made innovative designs with steel and glass. In 1911 he designed the Perls House.
In 1912, with great effort, he opened his own studio in Berlin, in that same year he planned a country house for the Kröller-Müller couple in The Hague. During the first years he received very few commissions, but the first works already showed the path that continued during the rest of his career, among those works are the House on Heerstrasse and the Urbig House. In 1913, with his wife Ada Bruhn, he moved to Werder (just outside Berlin). Their daughters Marianne and Waltrani, and later Dorotea, were born there. Until then relations between family and work had been good, but the First World War of 1914-1918 caused Ludwig to be posted to Romania during this period and the family was separated.