German-born architect Mies van der Rohe was one of the directors of the influential Bauhaus school in the years before World War II. He was born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies and later renamed himself “van der Rohe” as an effort to distance himself from his family heritage and grow his personal design brand. One of van der Rohe’s most iconic contribution to home design is the Barcelona chair (see more below).
Ludwig Mies changed his name in an attempt to transform himself from a merchant’s son to an architect and an appealing figure in Berlin’s high society. “Van der” stood for “von”, a nobiliary particle restricted to those of true noble lineage. And “Rohe” was his mother’s maiden name. His independent professional career began with him designing upper-class homes.
He began his architectural career as an apprentice at the studio of Peter Behrens from 1908 to 1912, where he was exposed to the contemporary design principles and liberal German culture. He worked beside Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, who was later also a crucial part of the development of the Bauhaus.
After World War I, while still designing traditional neoclassical homes, Mies began new experimental work. Along with his avant-garde peers, he began the search for a new style, one more suitable for the modern industrial age.
Traditional styles were being questioned by the progressive theorists since the mid-nineteenth century, primarily due to the contradictions of covering modern construction technology with a facade of embellished traditional styles.
After the war, progressive thinkers called for a completely new architectural design process guided by rational problem-solving and an exterior expression of modern materials and structure, forgetting what they considered the superficial application of classical facades.
While maintaining his traditional neoclassical design practice, Mies began to carry out visionary projects that, though often unbuilt, ascended him to fame as an architect capable of creating in unison with the spirit of the emerging modern culture. Distinctly dropping ornament completely, Mies made a dramatic modernist debut in 1921 with his remarkable competition proposal for the faceted all-glass Friedrichstraße skyscraper, followed by a taller curved version in 1922 named the Glass Skyscraper.
He continued with a series of innovative projects, completing in his two European masterworks: the temporary German Pavilion for the Barcelona Exposition in 1929 (a 1986 restoration is now built on the original site) and the elegant Villa Tugendhat in Brno, the Czech Republic, finished in 1930.
He joined the German vanguard, working with the progressive design magazine G, inaugurated in July 1923. He became famous as the architectural director of the Werkbund, organizing the prominent Weissenhof Estate model modernist housing exhibition. He was also one of the founders of the architectural organization Der Ring. He joined the Bauhaus design school as their director of architecture, embracing and developing their functionalist utilization of simple geometric forms in the design of beneficial objects. He worked as the Bauhaus school’s last director.
Like many other avant-garde architects of the era, Mies based his architectural mission and principles on his knowledge and understanding of ideas developed by theorists and critics who reflected on the declining significance of traditional design styles.
Mies found fascination in the use of simple rectilinear and planar forms, clean lines, simple use of color, and the expansion of space around and beyond interior walls expressed by the Dutch De Stijl group.
The design theories of Adolf Loos found depth with Mies, particularly the ideas of substituting elaborate applied artistic embellishment with the straightforward display of intrinsic visual qualities of materials and forms. Loos had stated that arts and crafts should be entirely autonomous of architecture, that the architect should no longer manage those cultural components as the Beaux-Arts principles had determined. Mies also admired his ideas about the greatness that could be found in the anonymity of contemporary life.
Mies was fascinated with the free-flowing spaces of inter-connected rooms that contain their outdoor surroundings, as shown by the open floor plans of the Wright’s American Prairie Style. American engineering structures were also held up as representative of the beauty possible in functional development, and American skyscrapers were considerably appreciated.
His furniture is best known for fine craftsmanship, a mix of traditional luxurious fabrics like leather coupled with modern chrome frames, and a well-defined separation of the supporting structure and the supported surfaces, often using cantilevers to heighten the feeling of lightness created by refined structural frames.
The aforementioned Barcelona chair, was created alongside Lilly Reich, a German modernist designer. The chair was originally designed for the German Pavilion for the International Exposition of 1929, hosted by Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.
The chair was originally designed to accommodate Spanish royalty and was inspired by furniture used by the wealthy in ancient Rome. This means the chair deviates from the vision behind the Bauhaus collective.
Bauhaus was about innovation and purpose, which would eventually lead to mass production, but the Barcelona chair was royal, expensive, and luxurious from the moment it was created.
The chair is the trademark item in the Barcelona Collection, which also includes the Barcelona table, daybed, and ottoman.
