OFICIO+arch

09/08/2024

09/08/2024

[1956/1958] SEAGRAM BUILDING
NEW YORK/ NY/ UNITED STATES
CONCEPT> MIES VAN DER ROHE
ARCHITECT OF RECORD> PHILIP JOHNSON
SHORT FILM> © HAGLEY DIGITAL ARCHIVES®

DESCRIPTION
The Story of a Building tells the story of the construction of the iconic Seagram Building on Park Avenue in New York City. The 14-minute film from 1958 provides a detailed look at the design and construction of a building hailed by publisher Henry Luce as a "20th century revolution in architecture."

The beautifully shot and composed film was sponsored by the Copper and Brass Research Association but the producer of the film is unknown. Very little information could be found about the intent or potential audience for it's creation. Even though we have limited context for its making, it stands as an important document about the rise of trendsetting addition to New York City's skyline.

© 2024 Hagley Digital Archives

09/08/2024

[1954/1958] SEAGRAM BUILDING
NEW YORK/ NY/ UNITED STATES
CONCEPT> MIES VAN DER ROHE
ARCHITECT OF RECORD> PHILIP JOHNSON
AXONOMETRIC> © FUNDACIÓ MIES VAN DER ROHE®

[1886/1969]
MIES VAN DER ROHE/
BIOGRAPHY

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, original name Maria Ludwig Michael Mies, (born March 27, 1886, Aachen, Germany—died August 17, 1969, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.), German-born American architect whose rectilinear forms, crafted in elegant simplicity, epitomized the International Style of architecture.

TRAINING AND INFLUENCE
Ludwig Mies (he added his mother’s surname, van der Rohe, when he had established himself as an architect) was the son of a master mason who owned a small stonecutter’s shop. Mies helped his father on various construction sites but never received any formal architectural training. At age 15 he was apprenticed to several Aachen architects for whom he sketched outlines of architectural ornaments, which the plasterers would then form into stucco building decorations. This task developed his skill for linear drawings, which he would use to produce some of the finest architectural renderings of his time.

In 1905, at the age of 19, Mies went to work for an architect in Berlin, but he soon left his job to become an apprentice with Bruno Paul, a leading furniture designer who worked in the Art Nouveau style of the period. Two years later he received his first commission, a traditional suburban house. Its perfect ex*****on so impressed Peter Behrens, then Germany’s most progressive architect, that he offered the 21-year-old Mies a job in his office, where, at about the same time, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier were also just starting out.

Behrens was a leading member of the Deutscher Werkbund, and through him Mies established ties with this association of artists and craftsmen, which advocated “a marriage between art and technology.” The Werkbund’s members envisioned a new design tradition that would give form and meaning to machine-made things, including machine-made buildings. This new and “functional” design for the industrial age would then give birth to a Gesamtkultur, that is, a new universal culture in a totally reformed man-made environment. These ideas motivated the “modern” movement in architecture that would soon culminate in the so-called International Style of modern architecture.

In Berlin Mies was influenced by Behrens’ emulation of the pure, bold and simple Neoclassic forms of the early 19th-century German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. It was Schinkel who became the decisive influence on Mies’s search for an architecture of Gesamtkultur. Throughout his life, the elegant clarity of Schinkel’s buildings seemed to Mies to embody most perfectly the form of the 20th-century urban environment. Another decisive influence was Hendrik Petrus Berlage, a pioneer of modern Dutch architecture, whom Mies met in 1911. Berlage’s work inspired Mies’s own love for brick, and the Dutch master’s philosophy inspired Mies’s credo of “architectural integrity” and “structural honesty.” With regard to structural honesty, Mies would eventually go further than anyone else to make the actual rather than apparent or dramatized supports of his buildings their dominant architectural features.

IN BETWEEN WARS
During World War I Mies served as an enlisted man, building bridges and roads in the Balkans. When he returned to Berlin in 1918, the fall of the German monarchy and the birth of the democratic Weimar Republic helped inspire a prodigious burst of new creativity among modernist artists and architects. Architecture, painting, and sculpture, according to the manifesto of the Bauhaus—the avant-garde school of the arts just established in Weimar—were not only moving toward new forms of expression but were becoming internationalized in scope. Mies joined in several modernist architectural groups at this time and organized many exhibitions, but there was virtually nothing for him to build. His foremost building of this period—an Expressionist memorial to the murdered communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, dedicated in 1926—was demolished by the N***s.

Mies’s most important work of these years remained on paper. In fact, these theoretical projects, rendered in a series of drawings and sketches that are now in the New York Museum of Modern Art, foreshadowed the entire range of his later work. The Friedrichstrasse Office Building (1919) was one of the first proposals for an all steel-and-glass building and established the Miesian principle of “skin and bones construction.” The “Glass Skyscraper” (1921) applied this idea to a glass skyscraper whose transparent facade reveals the building’s underlying steel structure. Both of these building designs were uncompromising in their utter simplicity. Other theoretical studies explored the potentials of concrete and brick construction, and of de Stijl form and Frank Lloyd Wright concepts. Few unbuilt buildings surpassed them in the variety of ideas and in their influence on the development of the architecture of the time.

This influence was apparent at the first postwar Werkbund exposition at Weissenhof near Stuttgart in 1927. The exhibition consisted of a housing demonstration project planned by Mies, who had by then become the Werkbund’s vice president. Europe’s 16 leading modernist architects, including Le Corbusier and Mies himself, designed various houses and apartment buildings, 33 units in all. Weissenhof demonstrated, above all, that the various architectural factions of the early postwar years had now merged into a single movement—the International Style was born. Though not a popular success, the exposition was a critical one, and Europe’s elite suddenly began to commission modern villas, such as Mies’s Tugendhat House (1930) at Brno, now in Czech Republic.

Perhaps Mies’s most famous executed project of the interwar period in Europe was the German Pavilion (also known as the Barcelona Pavilion), which was commissioned by the German government for the 1929 International Exposition at Barcelona (demolished 1930; reconstructed 1986). It exhibited a sequence of marvelous spaces on a 175- by 56-foot (53.6- by 17-metre) travertine platform, partly under a thin roof, and partly outdoors, supported by chromed steel columns. The spaces were defined by walls of honey-coloured onyx, green Tinian marble, and frosted glass and contained nothing but a pool, in which stood a sculptural n**e, and a few of the chairs Mies had designed for the pavilion.

These cantilevered steel chairs, which are known as Barcelona chairs, became an instant classic of 20th-century furniture design.
In 1930 Mies was appointed director of the Bauhaus, which had moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925. Between N**i attacks from outside and left-wing student revolts from within, the school was in a state of perpetual turmoil. Though not cut out to be an administrator, Mies soon won respect as a stern but superb teacher. When the N***s closed the school in 1933, Mies tried for a few months to continue it in Berlin. But modern design was as hopeless a cause in Hitler’s totalitarian state as was political freedom. Mies announced the end of the Bauhaus in Berlin late in 1933 before the N***s could close it.

MIES IN AMERICA
Four years later, in 1937—again after working mainly on projects that were never built—Mies moved to the United States. Soon after he arrived in the country, he gained an appointment as director of the School of Architecture at Chicago’s Armour Institute (later the Illinois Institute of Technology). Mies served as the school’s director for the next 20 years, and, by the time he retired in 1958, the school had become world-renowned for its disciplined teaching methods as well as for its campus, which Mies had designed in 1939–41. A cubic simplicity marked the campus buildings, which could easily be adapted to the diversified demands of the school. Exposed structural steel, large areas of glass reflecting the grounds of the campus, and a yellow-brown brick were the basic materials used.

The many commissions that his architectural office received after World War II gave Mies unique opportunities to realize large-scale projects, among them several high-rise buildings that are conceived as steel skeletons sheathed in glass curtain-wall facades. Among these major commissions are the Promontory Apartments in Chicago (1949), the Lake Shore Drive Apartments (1949–51) in that city, and the Seagram Building (1956–58) in New York City, a skyscraper office building with a glass, bronze, and marble exterior that Mies designed with Philip Johnson. These buildings exemplify Mies’s famous principle that “less is more” and demonstrate, despite their austere and forthright use of the most modern materials, his exceptional sense of proportion and his extreme concern for detail. The International Style, with Mies its acknowledged leading master, reached its zenith at this time. The United States in the 1950s had a faith in material and technical progress that seemed similar to the earlier German notion of Gesamtkultur. Miesian-influenced steel-and-glass office buildings appeared all over the United States and indeed all over the world.

Also during this period, Mies applied his modernist aesthetic to three more-intimate structures, the Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois (completed 1951), the Robert McCormick House in Elmhurst, Illinois (completed 1952; now part of the Elmhurst Art Museum), and the Morris Greenwald House in Weston, Connecticut (completed 1955). These were to be his only examples of domestic architecture in the United States.

LATE WORK
In the 1960s Mies continued to create beautiful buildings, among them the Bacardi Building in Mexico City (1961); One Charles Center office building in Baltimore (1963); the Federal Center in Chicago (1964); the Public Library in Washington, D.C. (1967); and, most Miesian of all, the Gallery of the Twentieth Century (later called the New National Gallery) in Berlin, dedicated in 1968. A heavy man, badly plagued by arthritis, Mies continued to live alone in a spacious apartment in an old building near Lake Michigan in Chicago until his death in 1969. The IBM Building (1972), in Chicago, was completed after his death.

Although Mies attracted a great number of disciples, his indirect influence was perhaps of even greater importance. He is the only modern architect who formulated a genuinely contemporary and universally applicable architectural canon, and office buildings all over the world echo his concepts. His work eventually came under criticism in the 1970s for rigidity, coldness, and anonymity, but it was Mies’s declared choice to accept the nature of 20th-century industrial society and express it in his architecture.

© 2024 Fundació Mies van der Rohe

09/08/2024

[1954/1958] SEAGRAM BUILDING
NEW YORK/ NY/ UNITED STATES
CONCEPT> MIES VAN DER ROHE
ARCHITECT OF RECORD> PHILIP JOHNSON
PHOTOGRAPHY> © ESTO® EZRA STOLLER

DESCRIPTION
The high-rise building, as it developed in the United States during the very early twentieth century, was a response to the increasing demand for city-centre space and was made possible by rapid technological developments.

By the end of the nineteenth century it had become possible to construct entire buildings using frames of wrought iron and then steel. This meant that buildings could rise high and fast and possess open-plan interiors that were well-lit and adaptable. Combining the technology of structural frames (with metal later supplemented by reinforced concrete) with the fast and reliable elevator, electric power, and strong plate glass meant that the modern high-rise tower had arrived, in the process introducing a new way of living and working in cities.The new high-rise building type – rooted in metal-frame construction pioneered during the Industrial Revolution in late eighteenth-century Britain and first developed in the United States in Chicago in the late 1880s – developed erratically during the first half of the twentieth century, typically with metal frames clad in masonry skins of various styles, usually ornamented, as with the Chrysler Building. Arguably the skyscraper reached artistic maturity only in 1958 with the completion of the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, New York, designed by Mies van der Rohe. It was, and in certain ways remains, virtually the last word in skyscraper design.

One of the most compelling aspects of Mies’ Seagram design is that he made virtues out of the constraints surrounding high-rise construction while at the same time realizing the aesthetic potential of the building type.

Mies had been at the forefront of high-rise architecture, evolving radical ideas for sheer towers of steel and glass while working in Germany before the Second World War. In the United States he developed these ideas, notably and initially at the Lake Shore Apartments in Chicago, which were completed in 1951.

But it is at the Seagram that all the aims and ideas of the urban high-rise for commercial use come together in near-perfection. The steel and glass tower possesses tremendous elegance, with its details a direct result of the demands of the material and construction techniques used. There are no overt references to history and no superfluous ornaments. Unlike earlier skyscrapers, the Seagram does not pose as an over-stretched palazzo with a top ‘cornice’ and spire, a central shaft of repetitive floors, and a podium. Instead it is pure reflective wall, with the entrance distinguished in the most subtle manner by a portico-like display of steel columns. This entrance is a clue to Mies’ aesthetic. Direct reference to history is, of course, eschewed, as is any form of ornament, but Mies’ building is nonetheless rich in historical influence – although of a highly subtle, almost abstract sort. This influence is mostly represented through the use of traditional systems of proportions, used to unite elements of the building with the building as a whole. Or, as with the portico-like columns of the porch, details allude to ancient classical prototypes.

Also temple-like, but in response to planning laws, the tower is set within its own small square, free-standing to be seen in the round, offering wonderful views, and able to enjoy maximum natural light.

In Chicago Mies experimented with cladding the steel frame within a curtain wall of glass. Having no structural role beyond supporting its own weight means that a curtain wall can have minimal structural components, such as the frames carrying the sheets of glass, leaving maximum area for the glazing. The idea was not entirely new, but at the Seagram the system was refined to produce a shimmering skin of amazing sophistication and sleekness with slender steel mullions of the smallest possible dimension.

Inside, the functional and artistic advantage of Mies’ structural system is immediately clear. The interior is open, with no structural walls beyond those enclosing the central service core. Light floods in through the floor-to-ceiling glazing of the curtain wall and the space can be used in virtually any way desired.

Although minimal in detail, the interior has dignity and beauty – and this is to do with proportion. The effect is particularly obvious in the entrance hall, where Mies achieves elegance in a simple manner: the fully glazed walls offer views out and let maximum light in. As Mies said, in reference to a line in an 1855 poem by Robert Browning, ‘less is more’.

Cruickshank D. A History of Architecture in 100 Buildings. Harper Collins UK., 2015.

09/08/2024

© THE NEW YORK TIMES™
https://www.nytimes.com/

[2013] BUILDING SEAGRAM>
A PERSONAL STAMP ON THE SKYLINE
BOOK REVIEW> MARK LAMSTER
PHOTO> SEAGRAM BUILDING IN NEW YORK>
© ESTO® EZRA STOLLER

“It is beautiful, isn’t it?” Tapping a shaft of white marble in the lobby of the Seagram Building, the bespoke modern tower she willed into being more than 50 years ago, Phyllis Lambert was as close to wistful as her rather unsentimental constitution would allow. “I consider I was born when I built this building,” she said.

Designed by the architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, the Seagram Building was an instant classic upon its 1959 dedication and was once described by the critic Herbert Muschamp in The New York Times as “the millennium’s most important building.”

Ms. Lambert’s book, “Building Seagram,” being released next week by the Yale University Press, is something of a joint biography: a history of this stately Park Avenue landmark that many consider the pinnacle of postwar architecture in New York, rendered through the lens of her vivid memories of its invention and of her privileged early years as the daughter of the liquor baron Samuel Bronfman, who founded the Seagram distilling empire. The book reveals many new details about a building that remains among the most studied of the modern era.

Though it now seems an implacable and timeless monument, a bronzed monolith standing resolutely behind its well-proportioned plaza, the tower’s existence was by no means ordained. In June 1953 Ms. Lambert was a 26-year-old recently divorced sculptor living in Paris, a self-imposed exile from her native Montreal and from her domineering father.

It was then that she reeled off a missive to her father, a response to his own letter outlining plans for a New York skyscraper. She was not impressed with the undistinguished modern box his architects proposed and let him know: “This letter starts with one word repeated very emphatically,” she wrote, “NO NO NO NO NO.”

Seven more pages followed, in which Ms. Lambert alternately scolded, cajoled and lectured her father on architectural history and civic responsibility. There was “nothing whatsoever commendable” in the proposed design, she wrote. “You must put up a building which expresses the best of the society in which you live, and at the same time your hopes for the betterment of this society.”

Sitting at a corner table in the Grill Room of the Four Seasons, the Seagram Building restaurant that inspired the phrase “power lunch,” Ms. Lambert, still unyielding at 86, laughed with unguarded pleasure at the nerve she demonstrated 60 years ago. “When I read it now I think, ‘Wow, it’s amazing,’ ” she said of her letter. “I was thinking the whole thing through as I wrote.”

Her father was impressed enough by her passion to invite her back from Paris, thinking she could, as she writes, “choose the marble for the ground floor,” a task he thought would assuage her. But Ms. Lambert was not content to play a subservient role. “When I come to the U.S. it will be to do a job and not to sit around the St. Regis making sweet talk,” she wrote to her mother, Saidye.

She got her chance and eventually won the title director of planning for the project, along with a $20,000 salary. Determined to choose an architect who would “make the greatest contribution to architecture,” she recalled, she was referred to Philip Johnson, who was leaving his post as director of the architecture department at the Museum of Modern Art to devote himself fully to his fledgling architectural practice.

Together they made a shortlist of candidates. In one memorable afternoon they sorted the contenders with Eero Saarinen in the living room of Johnson’s Glass House, in New Canaan, Conn., now a landmark but then still new. Saarinen later tossed himself into the mix, proposing a tower similar to the one he would deliver to CBS for a site just a few blocks away. He was rejected, as were Marcel Breuer, Pietro Belluschi, Walter Gropius, Louis Kahn, Paul Rudolph, I. M. Pei and Minoru Yamasaki. One prominent architect Ms. Lambert did not have to worry about was Frank Lloyd Wright. He had already put himself forward for the job (among his proposals was a 100-story tower) only to be dismissed by Seagram executives as ungovernable.

That left two options: Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French modernist, and Mies, who had moved to Chicago from Germany in 1938. Ms. Lambert chose Mies, whose career Johnson had championed for decades. Mies, in turn, made Johnson a partner, and put him in charge of much of the interior work. “Mies forces you in,” Ms. Lambert wrote in October 1954. “You might think this austere strength, this ugly beauty, is terribly severe. It is, and yet all the more beauty in it.”

That severity represented an aesthetic about-face for the Seagram company, then with headquarters in the flamboyant Art Deco Chrysler Building. One of Ms. Lambert’s more amusing revelations in the book is that Seagram’s offices there were designed by a young Morris Lapidus, future maestro of Miami kitsch.

Mies and Johnson were in some respects unlikely architects for the Jewish Bronfman family, in that both had checkered histories during the 1930s. While Mies had been apolitically opportunistic in Germany, Johnson was a fascist and anti-Semite. The Bronfman family had its own past to contend with. “The fortune was started or hugely advanced by the sale of liquor into the United States during Prohibition,” said Daniel Okrent, author of “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.”

Ms. Lambert is somewhat evasive on that subject, but she writes that the “stigma” of that past was on the minds of Seagram executives, who were concerned that they might have trouble finding renters for a building owned and occupied by a liquor company.

But first they had to build it, a task that required all the backbone Ms. Lambert revealed in her initial letter to her father. That meant, in May 1955, staring down a conference room packed with some 30 builders, all men, who questioned the feasibility of Mies’s plans. “I only had one thing in mind, and that was making sure Mies built the building he wanted to,” she said. “When you’re young, you’re very clear about what’s right and what’s wrong.”

She was uncompromising in her defense of Mies’s vision, even after he returned to Chicago when New York State authorities claimed that he lacked the proper qualifications to practice architecture. When a contractor tried to dissuade her from using an expensive brick bonding technique because it would be hidden from view, she channeled the aphoristic Mies, countering, “God would know.” (The building’s structural integrity, in any case, was assured by its chief engineer, Fred Severud, who was later an author of a cold-war primer on safety titled “The Bomb, Survival, and You.”)

Carol Willis, the founding director of the Skyscraper Museum in New York, said the Seagram Building gave “a modernist corporate identity to a city that was changing from stone to glass.”

That transformation did not come cheaply. While Mies averred “Less is more,” that was not a philosophy he applied to the budget. The highly customized building cost about $36 million, an astronomical sum at the time, and then incurred what was effectively a luxury tax from the state, an imposition that became the subject of a protracted legal fight. In a 1964 editorial, The Times described this “tax on architectural excellence” as nothing less than a “catastrophe.”

There were other frustrations. In 1958 Ms. Lambert commissioned Mark Rothko to create a series of murals for the Four Seasons. He began work but backed out and then vented to a reporter that he had only accepted the job with “malicious intent,” so he could make paintings so disagreeable as to spoil the appetites of the restaurant’s fat-cat patrons. (The episode became the subject of the Broadway play “Red.”) Ms. Lambert puts little stock in Rothko’s rant. “He had this religious feeling about his work,” she said, and simply didn’t want it hanging where it would serve merely as decoration. “I kind of understood his point.”

Other artists Ms. Lambert tried to enlist were Brancusi and Picasso. Brancusi treated her to Champagne in his Paris studio, where he kept a gong over his bed. Nothing came of the visit. She recruited Picasso to create a suite of sculptures for the Four Seasons. She met him for lunch at his studio in Cannes, and he charmed her by forming animal shapes from pieces of bread. But the meeting came to nothing, a failure Ms. Lambert, who had sharp features and bright eyes, attributed to the jealousy of Picasso’s lover Jacqueline Roque. “That was what we all assumed,” she said. “I was a very pretty young lady.”

She did get her Picasso, however. “Le Tricorne,” a stage curtain he created in 1919 for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, has been a Four Seasons signature since the restaurant opened in 1959. Ms. Lambert purchased it from an independent dealer for $50,000.

Even as ownership has passed from the Bronfman family’s control, Ms. Lambert has watched over the building. A set of design standards established in 1979 as part of a complex lease-back agreement stipulated everything from the positioning of venetian blinds to the continued “policy of genial permissiveness” regulating its landmark plaza. “It has to be maintained properly, and that’s a lesson I hope people have learned,” she said. The building became a New York City landmark in 1989.

Ms. Lambert later became an architect herself, studying under Mies at the Illinois Institute of Technology. In 1979 she founded the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, where she lives in a historic building with two bouviers des Flandres. Her singular devotion to architecture inspired a 2007 documentary, “Citizen Lambert: Joan of Architecture.”

“When she got the Seagram Building built, it was the first time you really realized that architecture brought something to the city that didn’t exist,” said the architect Ricardo Scofidio, a partner in the firm Diller Scofidio & Renfro, which redesigned the Brasserie, the Seagram’s less rarefied restaurant, in 2000. “It really turned the city around, and for architects it suddenly raised their status in the eyes of clients.”

Musing on her accomplishments between bites of tuna tartare Ms. Lambert betrayed a clear sense of satisfaction. “You come down the street and you see this building and it’s just fantastic,” she said. “I was just so passionate about what had to be done.”

© 2024 The New York Times Company

09/08/2024

© THE NEW YORK TIMES™
https://www.nytimes.com/

[1969] IN MEMORIAM>
MIES VAN DER ROHE/ ARCHITECT
TEXT> ALDEN WHITMAN
PHOTO> SEAGRAM BUILDING IN NEW YORK>
© ESTO® EZRA STOLLER

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a man without any academic architectural training, was one of the great artist-architect-philosophers of his age, acclaimed as a genius for his uncompromisingly spare design, his fastidiousness and his innovations.

Along with Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, the German-born master builder who was universally know as Mies (pronounced mees) fashioned scores of imposing structures expressing the spirit of the industrial 20th century.

"Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space," he remarked in a talkative moment. Pressed to explain his own role as a model for others--a matter on which he was shy, as he was on most others--he said: "I have tried to make an architecture for a technological society. I have wanted to keep everything reasonable and clear--to have an architecture that anybody can do."

A building, he was convinced, should be "a clear and true statement of its times"--cathedrals for an age of pathos, glass and metal cages for an age of advanced industrialism.

He thought the George Washington Bridge in New York an outstanding example of a structure expressing its period, and he used to go to admire it whenever he visited the city.

"It is the most modern building in the city," he remarked in 1963.
He was fond of the bridge because he considered it beautifully proportioned and because it did not conceal its structure. Mies liked to see the steel, the brick, the concrete of buildings show themselves rather than be concealed by ornamentation. A 20th-centrury industry building had to be pithy, he believed.

Influence on Colleagues
Mies's stature rested not only on his lean yet sensuous business and residential buildings, but also on the profound influence he exerted on his colleagues and on public taste. As the number of his structures multiplied in the years since World War II and as their stunning individuality became apparent, critical appreciation flowed to him in torrents, and his designs and models drew throngs to museums where they were exhibited. It became a status symbol to live in a Mies house, to work in a Mies building, or even to visit one.

The Mies name had already been established among architects long before he came to the United States in 1937. In 1919 and 1921 in Berlin he designed two steel skyscrapers sheathed in glass from street to roof. Although the buildings were never erected, the designs are now accepted as the originals of today's glass-and-metal skyscrapers.

Ribbon Windows
In 1922 Mies introduced the concept of ribbon windows, uninterrupted bands of glass between the finished faces of concrete slabs, in a design for a German office building. That has since become the basis for many commercial structures.

Mies, in 1924, produced plans for a concrete villa that is now regarded as the forerunner of the California ranch house. He is also said to have foreshadowed the return of the inner patio of Roman times in an exhibition house built in 1931; to have started the idea of space dividers, the use of cabinets or screens instead of walls to break up interiors; and to have originated the glass house, with windows and glass sliding panels extending from floor to ceiling to permit outside greenery to form the visual boundaries of a room.

Apart from simplicity of form, what struck students of Mies's buildings was their painstaking craftsmanship, their attention to detail.

"God is in the details," Mies liked to say.
In this respect the buildings reflected the man, for Mies was fussy about himself. A large, l***y man with a massive head topping a 5-foot, 10-inch frame, he dressed in exquisitely hand-stitched suits of conservative hue, dined extravagantly well on haute cuisine, sipped the correct wines from the proper goblets, and chained-smoked hand-rolled ci**rs.

Gold Chain for Watch
For a man so modern in his conceptions, he had more than a touch of old-fashionedness. It showed up in such things as the gold chain across his waistcoat, to which was attached his pocket timepiece. Rather than live in a contemporary building or one of his own houses--he briefly contemplated moving to a Mies apartment but feared fellow tenants might badger him--he made his home in a high-ceilinged, five-room suite on the third floor of an old-fashioned apartment house on Chicago's North Side. The thick-walled rooms were large and they included, predictably, a full kitchen with an ancient gas range for his cook.

The apartment contained armless chairs and furniture of his own designs as well as sofas and wing chairs--in which he preferred to sit. The walls were stark white; but the apartment had a glowing warmth, given off by the Klees, Braques and Schwitterses that dotted its walls. Paul Klee was a close friend, and Mies's collection of Klees was among the finest in private hands.

Mies's chairs were almost as well known as his buildings, and they were just as spare. He designed his first chair, known as the MR chair in 1926. It had a caned seat and back and its frame was tubular steel. There followed the Barcelona chair, an elegant armless leather and steel design of which the legs formed an X; the Tugendhat chair, an armless affair of leather and steel that resembled a square S; and the Brno chair, with a steel frame and leather upholstery that looked like a curved S.

The bottoms of all these chairs were uniformly wide, a circumstance that puzzled furniture experts until one of them asked Mies for an explanation. It was simple, he said; he had designed them with his own comfort in mind.

Recognition After 50
Mies did not receive wide public recognition in the United States until he was over 50 years old. Up to 1937 he lived in Germany, where he was born, at Aachen, on March 27, 1886. Emigrating to Chicago, he had to wait for the postwar building boom before many of his designs were translated into actuality. At his death, examples of his work were in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Des Moines, Baltimore, Detroit, Newark, New York, Houston, Washington, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Montreal, Toronto and Berlin. All his buildings were dissimilar, although the same basic principles were employed in each.

The principles centered in a gothic demand for order, logic and clarity.

"The long path through function to creative work has only a single goal," he said, "to create order out of the desperate confusion of our time."

One Mies structure, accounted among his outstanding ones, is the 38-story dark bronze and pinkish-gray glass Seagram Building on Park Avenue between 52d and 53d Streets. The building, which was designed in association with Philip C. Johnson, has been called by appreciative critics the city's most tranquil tower and "the most beautiful curtain-wall building in America." It emphasizes pure line, fine materials and exact detailing outside and in. Special attention was paid to the room numbers, doorknobs, elevator buttons, bathroom fixtures and mail chutes, as well as the furniture.
The building's grace is enhanced by its being set in a half-acre fountained plaza of pink granite. It was begun in 1956 and completed two years later at a cost of $35-million. It was, at the time, the city's most costly office building.

Not everyone who gazed upon it or watched its extruded bronze aging was convinced of its beauty. Acerbic nonarchitectural critics pointed out that the tower rises 520 feet without setbacks and that it is unornamented. It is too spare, they said. One likened it to an upended glass coffin.

The Seagram Building ranked third in Mies's offhand list of his six favorites, chosen to illustrate his most notable concept--"Less is more." (By this Delphic utterance he meant achieving the maximum effect with the minimum of means.)

First on the list was the Illinois Institute of Technology's Crown Hall. This is a single glass- walled room measuring 120 feet by 220 feet and spanned by four huge trusses. The structure appears to do no more than to enclose space, a feeling reinforced by its interior movable partitions. It was one of 20 buildings that Mies designed for the school's 100-acre campus on Chicago's South Side. Crown Hall is as good an example as any of Mies's "skin-and-bones architecture," a phrase that he once used to describe his point of view.

The Chicago Federal Center, Mies's largest complex of high- and low-rise buildings, was his second favorite. He considered its symmetry symbolic of his lifelong battle against disorder.
Another Chicago creation was fourth--two 26-story apartment house towers at 860 and 880 Lake Shore Drive that overlook Lake Michigan. The facades are all glass. Tenants had to accept the neutral gray curtains that were uniform throughout the buildings and that provided the only means of seeking privacy and excluding light. No other curtains or blinds were permitted lest they mar the external appearance. (He was also the architect of the Promontory Apartments in Chicago, in which he used brick and glass in an exposed concrete frame.)

Mies's fifth favorite was a project for a Chicago convention hall, a place for 50,000 people to gather in unobstructed space under a trussed roof 720 feet square. The project never materialized.
The final pet on the architect's list was the since-destroyed German Pavilion at the 1929 International Exposition at Barcelona. It was, one critic said, "a jewel-case structure employing the open planning first developed by Frank Lloyd Wright that combined the richness of bronze, chrome, steel and glass with free-standing walls."

In addition to the Seagram Building, the architect was represented in the New York area by the Pavilion and Colonnade Apartments, both in Colonnade Park, Newark. He also devised a master plan for a 21-acre development in New Haven.

Mies's most recent building, the National Gallery in Berlin, opened last September. It is a templelike glass box set on top of a larger semibasement, and serves as a museum.

Although many accolades were bestowed on Mies for these and other works, there were also brickbats. "Unsparing," "grim," the work of "barren intellectualism" and "brutal in its destruction of individual possessions and the individual" were some of the terms his detractors used.

"Less is less," they said, turning his aphorism against him.

Taught by Mason Father
Ludwig Mies, who added the "van der Rohe" from his mother's name because of its sonority, learned the elements of architecture from his father, a German master mason and stonecutter, and from studying the medieval churches in Aachen.

At times, friends recalled, he would describe with unrestrained enthusiasm the quality of brick and stone, its texture, pattern and color.

"Now a brick, that's really something," he once said. "That's really building, not paper architecture."

For him the material was always the beginning. He used to talk of primitive building methods, where he saw the "wisdom of whole generations" stored in every stroke of an ax, every bite of a chisel.
His students in the United States and Germany had to learn the fundamentals of building before they could start to consider questions of design. He taught them how to build, first with wood, then stone, then brick and finally with concrete and steel.
"New materials are not necessarily superior," he would say. "Each material is only what we make it."

At Aachen Mies attended trade school and became a draftsman's apprentice before setting off for Berlin at the age of 19 to become an apprentice to Bruno Paul, Germany's leading furniture designer.
Two years later he built his first house, a wooden structure on a sloping site in suburban Berlin. Its style was 18th century.

In 1909 Mies apprenticed himself to Peter Behrens, then the foremost progressive architect in Germany, who had taught Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius. Mies was put in charge of Behrens's German Embassy in St. Petersburg, Russia.

House Never Built
Going to the Netherlands in 1912, Mies designed a house for Mrs. H. E. L. J. Kroller, owner of the renowned Kroller Muller collection of modern paintings, near The Hague. He set up a full- scale canvas and wood mock-up on the site to assure perfection, but the house was never built.

Mies returned to Berlin in 1913 and opened his own office, but with the outbreak of the war in 1914 his life was dislocated for four years in the German Army, during which he built bridges and roads in the Balkans. After the war, with his own style coming into definition, he directed the architectural activities of the Novembergruppe, an organization formed to propagandize modern art, and became one of the few progressive architects of the time to employ brick.

Often he would go to the kilns to select one by one the bricks he wanted. He used them for the monument (now destroyed) to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the German Communist leaders; for suburban villas for wealthy businessmen; and for low-cost housing for the city of Berlin.

From 1926 to 1932 he was first vice president of the Deutscher Werkbund, formed to integrate art and industry in design. He directed the group's second exposition, the Weissenhof housing project erected in Stuttgart in 1927.

The peak achievements of Mies's European career were the German Barcelona pavilion and the Tugendhat house in 1930. A. James Speyer, a critic for Art News, extolled them both as "among the most important buildings of contemporary architecture and the most beautiful of our generation." The pavilion consisted of a rectangular slab roof supported by steel columns, beneath which free-standing planes of Roman travertine, marble, onyx and glass of various hues were placed to create the feeling of space beyond. The Tugendhat house permitted space to flow in a similar fashion.

In 1930 Mies took over direction of the Bauhaus, a laboratory of architecture and design in Dessau, Germany. It was closed three years later after the N***s attacked the architect as "degenerate" and "un-German."

At the urging of a New York architect who was a close friend, Philip C. Johnson, Mies emigrated to the United States to head the School of Architecture at the Armour (now Illinois) Institute of Technology in Chicago. He retired from the post in 1958.

As a teacher Mies did not deliver formal lectures, but worked, seminar fashion, with groups of 10 or 12 students. His method of teaching, according to a former student, was "almost tacit." "He was never wildly physically active, and he did not do much talking," this student recalled, adding that Mies, sitting Buddha-like, would frequently puff through a whole cigar before commenting on a student sketch.

Abandoning the Beaux Arts system based on competition for prizes, Mies sternly told his students: "First you have to learn something; then you can go out and do it."

He was not one to tolerate self-expression among his students. One of them once asked him about it. Silently he handed the student a pencil and paper. Then he told her to write her name. This done, he said: "That's for self-expression. Now we get to work."
Another former student thought of Mies as "a great teacher because he subjects himself to an extraordinary discipline in thinking and in his way of working, and because what he is teaching is very clear to him."

Mies himself was quite confident of his influence.
"I don't know how many students we have had," he said a couple of years ago, "but you need only 10 to change the cultural climate if they are good."

Mies was well-to-do, but not wealthy. He received the usual architect's fee of 6 per cent of the gross cost of a building, but he was not a very careful manager of his income, according to his friends. He was considered generous with his office staff and on spending for designs that were unlikely to see the light of day.
The architect received three noteworthy honors--the Presidential Freedom Medal and the gold medals of the Royal Institute of British Architects and of the American Institute of Architects. He was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

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