Word: mieses
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No utopian, Mies pursued rather luxurious ideas about appropriate modern style. It was his insistence on exquisite materials and craft that made his best work sublime rather than plain or mean. The pavilion in Barcelona was the apotheosis of posh Miesian austerity: slender chrome-plated columns, travertine floors, slabs of...
A year later in Berlin, Mies met Architect Philip Johnson, then 24. And it was Johnson to whom Mies owed much of his latter-day American fame and fortune. Johnson organized an exhibit of modernist work at MOMA in 1932, co- authored a book on the movement and mounted a...
Mies, meanwhile, was taking the logic of the empty architectural box to its unnatural extreme in the U.S. His campus for the Illinois Institute of Technology is a grove of steel ectoskeletons, essentially giant one-room buildings. The Farnsworth House (1951), a planar H-beam box floating over a floodplain...
The MOMA exhibit does show off Mies' absolute strengths. Like Sir Isaiah Berlin's hedgehog, he had one big idea, and he thought it all the way through. No architect since has done work of such internal coherence. The openness of buildings like Farnsworth is bracing. His best designs have...
Moreover, at MOMA one does not see any work of Mies' legion of followers, the modern architects who have remade and ravaged downtowns from Los Angeles to Riyadh. Mies was personally taciturn, but his vision was evangelical. He claimed that he had the answer, that his modern style was an...