Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe
(1886 - 1969)
Born in Abi–La-Chapelle in 1886, he transferred after his studies in Berlin and become the pupil of Behrens, later opening his Architectural studio.
At the start he was inspired by Schinkel, who reconciled the Neo-classical style with the modern technology of the time. After the First World War he turned to an independent conception thanks to his partecipation in the “November Group”, an avant-garde group of artists committed to cultural renewal.
In 1930 he actively look apart in the “Bauhaus”, but, unlike Gropius , he was not attracted by social and urban planning themes, but by a purely idealistic rationalism in which the work of the art is an absolute without the relationship to the surrounding reality.
Mies Van Der Rohe felt himself to be an architect in the traditional sense of the term. An artist who stood up to science and technique, forcing them to produce beauty, refusing to become a simple industrial-technician or urban-sociologist. All his researches revolved around the theme of skyscrapers and bold buildings in glass and steel. These were mass produced repetitors of standardised elements in which rationalist belief was brought to the maximum result and become a categorical imperative, a moral duty first, even before a way of thinking.
Though his most ambititious ideas were never built, they brought him much fame and in Germany he was commissioned to do many important designs such as building the Weissenhof suburb in Stuttgart in 1927 and the pavillion for the Universal Exhibition in Barcellona in 1929, defined as an architectural masterpiece and one of the most importnant creations of XX century.
He emigrated to the United States in 1938 and settled in Chicago where he devoted himself to teaching and the creation of important architecture such as the buildings of “Illinois Institute of Technology”, the Seagram Building in New York, buildings for the Museums in Houston, Texas, and residential skyscrapers in New York.
He died in Chicago in 1969, after having received full recognition at world level for his work.