Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was one of the founders of modern architecture and gave it the phrase less is more. Born in Aachen in 1886, the son of a stonemason, he had no formal architectural training; he learned drawing in his father's workshop and in local design offices, and joined Peter Behrens's studio in Berlin around 1908, where Gropius and Le Corbusier also worked. He added his mother's name, van der Rohe, to his own in the 1920s as he established an independent reputation. His early projects were unbuilt and enormously influential: glass skyscrapers proposed for Berlin in 1921-22, whose faceted transparent skins had no precedent. The German Pavilion at the Barcelona exposition of 1929 is the key building. A flat roof rests on eight cruciform chromed columns, and the walls — onyx, marble, glass — are freestanding planes that guide movement rather than enclose rooms. Space flows continuously between inside and outside. He designed the Barcelona chair for it. The Tugendhat House in Brno followed on the same principles. He directed the Bauhaus from 1930 until the Nazis closed it in 1933, and emigrated to Chicago in 1938 to head the architecture school at what became the Illinois Institute of Technology, whose campus he designed. In America he developed the steel-and-glass tower: the Lake Shore Drive apartments, and the Seagram Building in New York of 1958, set back from the avenue behind a plaza, with bronze mullions applied to the exterior to express a structure that fire regulations required to be encased. His discipline was extreme — God is in the details, he said. He died in 1969.

• Lived: 1886 CE – 1969 CE
• Nationality: German
• Roles: architect