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MIES VAN DER ROHE

Master of structure
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Biography (18861969)
Architect, born in Aachen, Germany. As a young architect and designer in Berlin, he foreshadowed modern architecture with innovative designs for tubular-steel furniture, such as the cantilevered Barcelona chair (1929), and steel and glass skyscrapers. He directed the Bauhaus, Dessau (19303), which he closed after Nazi threats. Though he had built only 19 buildings, he was internationally famous when he went to the USA (1937), where he founded and directed the architecture department at the Armour Institute, Chicago (later Illinois Institute of Technology) (193858), and designed the institute's master plan and a number of campus buildings. He celebrated contemporary technology and materials, and under his influence skyscraper construction switched from masonry to metal and glass. Following his credo, less is more, his buildings were characterized by accessible, simple designs devoid of applied ornament, and were composed of spaces rather than masses. A founder of the International style, his
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influence on 20th-c architecture can hardly be overestimated. His starkly simple German Pavilion at the International Exposition in Barcelona (1929) crystallized public acceptance of modern architecture. His buildings include the glass Lake Shore Drive Apartments, Chicago (194851), the Seagram Building, New York (19568, with Philip Johnson), and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1958, 1973).

The Barcelona

Pavilion, designed by Ludwig

Mies van der Rohe, was the German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. It was an important building in the history of modern architecture, known for its simple form and extravagant materials, such as marble and travertine. The building stood on a large podium alongside a pool. The structure itself consisted of eight steel posts supporting a flat roof, with curtain glass walling and a handful of partition walls. The overall impression is of perpendicular planes in three dimensions forming a cool, luxurious space.

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Mies designed the Barcelona chair for the pavilion. The Pavilion was dismantled at the end of the exhibition, but a replica has since been built on the same site (1988). The materials Glass, steel and four different kinds of marble (Roman travertine, green Alpine marble, ancient green marble from Greece and golden onyx from the Atlas Mountains) were used for the reconstruction, all of the same characteristics and provenance as the ones originally employed by Mies in 1929. Mies van der Rohe's originality in the use of materials lay not so much in novelty as in the ideal of modernity they expressed through the rigour of their geometry, the precision of the pieces and the clarity of their assembly.

sculpture is reflected not only in the water but also in the marble and glass, thereby creating the sensation that it is multiplied in space, while its curves contrast with the geometrical purity of the building.

The Barcelona chair Mies van der Rohe designed a chair, especially for the Pavilion, consisting of a leatherupholstered metallic profile that over the years has become an icon of modern design. To such an extent, in fact, that the Barcelona chair is still manufactured and marketed today.

Georg Kolbe's sculpture The sculpture is a bronze reproduction of the piece entitled Alba (Dawn) by Georg Kolbe, a contemporary of Mies van der Rohe's. Masterfully placed at one end of the small pond, the
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Plan of barcelona pavilion

Main Campus Master Plan: Crown Hall

S.R. Crown Hall is named for Sol R. Crown, Colonel Henry Crown's brother, who co-founded Material Service Corporation. Colonel Henry Crown was a member of IIT's Board of Trustees. Crown Hall, which houses IIT's College of Architecture, is one of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's greatest masterworks. Mies considered S.R. Crown Hall
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the clearest statement of his philosophy of a universal space building. A masterful melding of architecture and technology, Crown Hall is an early example of a long-span pavilion, a flexible building type Mies also used in his Federal Center Post Office in Chicago and the National Gallery in Berlin. An early example of a large clear-span structure, Crown Hall is a column-free, flexible space, 120 feet by 220 feet, with an 18foot high ceiling in its upper core. Four exterior columns on each side of the building stand 60 feet apart and support four plate girders from which the roof is hung. Through its careful details and clean proportions, the structure of S.R. Crown Hall is also the ornament. Inside the building, free-standing partitions suggest spaces for studios and exhibition. The impact of the teaching and research in the College of Architecture has been worldwide. IIT architecture students and faculty have helped shape the skylines of cities around the globe. The college excels in architectural design and technology as advanced through the design studio. It seeks to instill in its students a sensitivity to the physical and cultural environments and a respect for the past, while fostering the ingenuity necessary to create for the future. Since it opened in 1956, S.R. Crown Hall, with its transparent walls framing a view of one of the world's great skylines, has been an extraordinary place in which to study architecture.

Architectural Icon
S.R. Crown Hall embodies Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's concept of universal space. Rather than designing narrowly for a specific purpose, Mies sought to create a structure that could be adapted to different uses as needs changed over time. He realized this goal by moving all structural supports to the building's exterior wall, thus creating a large clear span structure with 120 x 220 x 18 feet of unencumbered interior space. Mies knew he had achieved something extraordinary with Crown Hall, and he called it "the clearest structure we have done, the best to express our philosophy." Crown Hall was and continues to be a standard for architects everywhere. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2001, several years ahead of its 50th anniversarythe usual requirement for

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federal landmark consideration. It was also declared a Chicago landmark in 1997. IIT's College of Architecture program, also shaped by Mies, educates the world's leading architects and designers, who in turn create many of the world's most innovative structures. With its open spaces and interactive environment, Crown Hall is highly conducive to Mies' approach to the study of architecture. Future architects learn their practice in this landmark building, sometimes called the world's largest and best one-room schoolhouse.

Crown hall ( the architecture school)

The

Farnsworth House,

The Farnsworth House, designed and constructed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe between 1945-51, is a one-room weekend retreat in a once-rural setting, located 55 miles (89 km) southwest of Chicago's downtown on a 60 acre estate site adjoining the Fox River south of the city of Plano, Illinois. The steel and glass house was commissioned by Dr. Edith Farnsworth, a prominent Chicago-based kidney specialist, as a place where she could enjoy nature and engage in her hobbies, playing the violin, translating poetry, and enjoying nature. Mies created for her a 1,500-square-foot (140 m) house that is widely recognized as an iconic masterpiece of modernist architecture. The essential characteristics of the house are immediately apparent. The extensive use of clear floor-to-ceiling glass opens the interior to its natural surroundings to an extreme
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degree. Two distinctly expressed horizontal slabs, which form the roof and the floor, sandwich an open space for living. The slab edges are defined by exposed steel structural members painted pure white. The house is elevated 5 feet 3 inches above a flood plain by eight H-shape steel columns which are attached to the sides of the floor and ceiling slabs. The slabs ends extend beyond the column supports, creating cantilevers. The house seems to float weightlessly above the ground it occupies. A third floating slab, an attached terrace, acts as a transition between the living area and the ground. The house is accessed by two sets of wide steps connecting ground to terrace and then to porch.

Farnsworth House, located in Piano lllinois, 1946

Mies found the large open exhibit halls of the turn of the century to be very much in character with his sense of the industrial era. Here he applied the concept of a unobstructed space that is flexible for use by people. The interior appears to be a single open room, its space ebbing and flowing around two wood blocks; one a wardrobe cabinet and the other a kitchen, toilet, and fireplace block (the "core"). The larger fireplace-kitchen core seems like a separate house nesting within the larger glass house. The building is essentially one large room filled with freestanding elements that provide subtle differentiations within an open space,
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implied but not dictated, zones for sleeping, cooking, dressing, eating, and sitting. Very private areas such as toilets, and mechanical rooms are enclosed within the core. Mies applied this space concept, with variations, to his later buildings, most notably at Crown Hall, his IIT campus masterpiece. The notion of a single room that can be freely used or zoned in any way, with flexibility to accommodate changing uses, free of interior supports, enclosed in glass and supported by a minimum of structural framing located at the exterior, is the architectural ideal that defines Mies' American career. The Farnsworth house is significant as his first complete realization of this ideal, a prototype for his vision of what modern architecture in an era of technology should be.

12 for Lord Peter Palumbo, who bought it from Farnsworth in 1971

Farnsworth House was built in 1951 for $73,000, which

included the cost overruns that resulted in incredibly bitter litigation between Mies and his client, Dr. Edith Farnsworth. Today, Sotheby's in New York estimates the value of the house and its surrounding 58 acres as between $4.5 and $6 million. Sotheby's will be auctioning it off December
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The Seagram

Building

The Seagram Building is a skyscraper in New York City, located at 375 Park Avenue, between 52nd Street and 53rd Street in Midtown Manhattan. It was designed by the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, in collaboration with the American Philip Johnson and was completed in 1958. It is 515 feet tall with 38 stories. It stands as one of the finest examples of the functionalist aesthetic and a masterpiece of corporate modernism. It was designed as the headquarters for the Canadian distillers Joseph E. Seagram's & Sons.

Architecture
This structure, and the International Style in which it was built, had enormous influences on American architecture. One of the style's characteristic traits was to express or articulate the structure of buildings externally. A building's structural elements should be visible, Mies thought. The Seagram building (like virtually all large buildings of the time) was built of a steel frame, from which non-structural glass walls were hung. Mies would have preferred the steel frame to be visible to all; however, American building codes required that all structural steel be covered in a fireproof material, usually concrete, because improperly protected steel columns or beams may soften and fail in confined fires. Concrete hid the structure of the building something Mies wanted to avoid at all costs so Mies used non-structural bronze-toned I-beams
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Farnsworth House

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to suggest structure instead. These are visible from the outside of the building, and run vertically, like mullions, surrounding the large glass windows. Now, observers look up and see a "fake and tinted-bronze" structure covering a real steel structure. This method of construction using an interior reinforced concrete shell to support a larger non-structural edifice has since become commonplace. As designed, the building used 3.2 million pounds of bronze in its construction. On completion, the construction costs of Seagram made it the world's most expensive skyscraper at the time, due to the use of expensive quality materials and lavish interior decoration including bronze, travertine, and marble. The interior was designed to assure cohesion with the external features, repeated in the glass and bronze furnishings and decorative scheme. Another interesting aspect of the Seagram building regards the window blinds. As was common with International Style architects, Mies wanted the building to have a uniform appearance. One aspect of a faade which Mies disliked, was the disordered irregularity when window blinds are drawn. Inevitably, people using different windows will draw blinds to different heights, making the building appear disorganized. To reduce this disproportionate appearance, Mies specified window blinds which only operated in three positions - fully open, halfway open/closed, or fully closed. Seagram Building The building's external faces are given their character by the quality of the materials used - the tinted glass and the bronze 'Ibeams' applied all the way up the building. The Seagram Building is the first bronze-colored skyscraper. Mies had first used similar applied I-beams (but in steel) at his 1951 apartment towers at Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, welded to the outside of the structural columns. 'His purported aim was the stiffening of the frame of each bay, but more important was the creation of a surface texture that relieved the potential monotony of a smooth facade, while
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emphasizing the verticality of the overall form. The architect later explained that he had used the device primarily because, without it, the building simply "did not look right."
Carter Wiseman in Shaping a Nation, 1998

In this Mies was, in the most subtle way, adding ornament to his building, for which he was criticized by the Modernist purists.

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