Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) was a German-American architect, born in Aachen. He had no university training: he worked in his father's stone-carving shop, then for the furniture designer Bruno Paul and the architect Peter Behrens (1908-1912). He was the last director of the Bauhaus, from 1930 until it closed in 1933. He moved to the United States in 1937 and the next year became head of architecture at the Armour Institute (later the Illinois Institute of Technology) in Chicago.

His buildings use steel frames, large sheets of glass and a few costly materials such as marble and onyx, in open plans with few interior walls. He is associated with the phrases "less is more" and "God is in the details." The German Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona exposition, demolished in 1930 and rebuilt in 1986, had freestanding stone walls under a flat roof carried on thin chrome-plated columns. The Farnsworth House near Plano, Illinois (1946-1951), is a single glass room raised above the ground on steel columns.

The Seagram Building in New York (1958), designed with Philip Johnson, has bronze I-beams (beams with an I-shaped cross-section) fixed to the outside of its glass walls. Other works include Villa Tugendhat in Brno (1930), Crown Hall in Chicago (1956) and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1968).