Word: rohe
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...when Gropius was appointed as head of the architectural program, the International style received in one stroke the legitimacy it had previously lacked in the United States. True, during this time it was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, another refugee from the Nazis and a former student of Gropius, who would design the greatest edifices of Modernism according to his famous formula "less is more." But it is doubtful that his buildings would have been so rapidly acclaimed without the implicit approval of Gropius and the Harvard name...
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's life was well timed. He was born at the right moment (100 years ago next month) and in the right place (prosperous middle Europe) to lead the radical transformation of architecture during the 1920s and '30s. He left his native Germany just ahead of probable persecution by the Nazis, arrived in Chicago just as his austere vision was catching on among U.S. architects and developed his pragmatic skyscraper design just as the war ended and corporate America found itself instantly in need of such a prototype for acres of new high-rise office space...
...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 reconstructing his perfect building, the cool, absolutely confident German Pavilion built for the 1929 International Exposition. And now at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, always Mies' most important institutional propagandist, Architecture and Design Director Arthur Drexler has assembled the ultimate Mies exhibit: doodles, sketches, renderings, building models, photographs, furniture...
...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 Frank Lloyd Wright. Well into the decade, however, Mies the modernist was not scrupulously practicing what he preached: a neo-Georgian country house appeared as late...
...year's most attractive new suburban campus serves students of hamburger merchandising. It is McDonald's training school and lodge at Oak Brook, Ill. The low-slung, palatial brick-concrete-and -limestone structures were designed by FCL Associates, the successor firm of Modern Master Mies van der Rohe...