Word: mieses
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Indeed, it almost seems that he invented modernism all at once. During 1921 and 1922 he proposed on paper two grand, denuded glass skyscrapers, a pair of unassailable abstract objects oblivious to everything but their own technological prowess. The drawings of the two buildings, on display at MOMA, are oversize...
Even his passing, in 1969, came in the nick of time. The American architect Robert Venturi had just published his influential rejection of less-is-more Miesian modernism ("Less is a bore," Venturi punned), and younger colleagues were starting to grumble that the inspirational rigor of the International Style had...
But that was last year. Apparently the time has now come to rethink the last two decades of revisionism, to rehabilitate Mies posthumously. The definitive biography has just appeared, a wise, readable book by Franz Schulze titled simply Mies van der Rohe (University of Chicago; $39.95). Barcelona has nearly finished...
Like many of his generation in Europe, Mies was proudly glum, an earnest young Spenglerian. The present cycle of civilization was tapped out, it seemed to him. Sweat and serendipity were anachronisms; the future looked to be a matter of machines and bureaucracy. "The individual is losing significance," Mies wrote...
He also invented a new surname by appending Rohe, his mother's maiden name. (Less is more be damned: in German, mies means lousy, more or less.) Mies van der Rohe, invigorated by Weimar Berlin, spent most of the 1920s designing gorgeous industrial exhibits and handsome, blocky villas descended from...