Mies van der Rohe

Barcelona Pavilion 1929

The German national pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International

Exhibition. Built from glass, travertine and different kinds of marble,
the Pavilion was conceived to accommodate the official reception
presided over by King Alphonso XIII of Spain along with the German
authorities.
After the
closure of the
Exhibition, the
Pavilion was
disassembled
in 1930.
It was recreated in its original form and on the same
site in 1981-1986 by the Barcelona City Council.
“Every physical element has been distilled to its
irreducible essence. The interior is
unprecedentedly transparent to the surrounding
site, and also unprecedentedly uncluttered in
itself. All of the paraphernalia of traditional living –
rooms, walls, doors, interior trim, loose furniture,
pictures on walls, even personal possessions –
have been virtually abolished in a puritanical
vision of simplified, transcendental existence.
Mies had finally achieved a goal towards which
he had been feeling his way for three decades."
 Mies van der Rohe
Farnsworth House 1946
• In Europe, before World War II, Mies emerged as one of the most
innovative leaders of the modern movement, producing visionary
projects for glass and steel and executing a number of small but
critically significant buildings.

• In the United States, after 1938, he transformed the architectonic

expression of the steel frame in American architecture and left a
nearly unmatched legacy of teaching and building.
 “In its simplest form architecture is rooted in entirely
functional considerations, but it can reach up through all degrees of
value to the highest sphere of spiritual existence into the realm of pure
art.”
The architecture of the house represents the ultimate
refinement of Mies van der Rohe’s minimalist
expression of structure and space.
 Mies van der Rohe
• Furniture
 Mies van der Rohe
• Seagram Building 1958 International style

•The Seagram Building (and the Lever House,

which sits just across Park Avenue) set the
architectural style for skyscrapers in New York
for a several decades.
•It appears as a simple bronze box, set back
from Park Avenue by a large, open granite
plaza.
•Mies did not intend the open space in front of
the building to become a gathering area, but it
developed as such, and became very popular
as a result
Seagram Building,
New York, 1958
"structure is spiritual" and "less is more."

Mies wanted a complete

regularity in the appearance of the building.
 Following these premises, the Seagram Building
is meant to confirm Mies' assertion that when
modern industrialized building technology is
truthfully expressed, architecture becomes
transcendent.
He believed that the more a building was pared to its
essential structural and functional elements, and the
less superfluous imagery is used, the more a
building expresses its structure and form.
"Skyscrapers reveal their bold structural pattern
during construction. Only then does the
gigantic steel web seem impressive. When the
outer walls are put in place, the structural
system, which is the basis of all artistic design,
is hidden by a chaos of meaningless and trivial
forms...
Instead of trying to solve old problems with
these old forms we should develop new forms
from the very nature of the new problems.
We can see the new structural principles
most clearly when we use glass in place of the
outer walls, which is feasible today since in a
skeleton building these outer walls do not carry
weight.
The use of glass imposes new solutions."
 In 1919 Mies van der Rohe designed the first project of a series of five famous unbuilt crystal towers on a site near
the Friedrichstrasse station. The competition entry named "Honeycomb" symbolized the dawning of a new culture,
where the use of steel and glass allowed a building to have a surface that is more translucent than solid. With this
project it seemed that Mies van der Rohe has introduced a new expressive shape that apparently owed nothing to
history.
The Lake Shore Drive
Apartments, Chicago,
photographed in 1955
Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago,
Illinois. completed 1956.

Arts Club interior

Recognizing the need, Charles Eames said, is the
primary condition for design. Early in their careers
together, Charles and Ray identified the need for
affordable, yet high-quality furniture for the average
consumer -- furniture that could serve a variety of uses.
For forty years the Eameses experimented with ways to
meet this challenge, designing flexibility into their
compact storage units and collapsible sofas for the
home; seating for stadiums, airports, and schools; and
chairs for virtually anywhere.
Charles & Ray Eames
"What works is better than
what looks good," Ray said.
"The looks good can
change, but what works,
works."

The aluminum chair's

concept formed the basis of
the office's 1962 Eames
Tandem Sling Seating, an
institutional multiple-seating
system designed for
Washington's Dulles
International Airport.
The Eameses' molded-plywood chair was their first attempt to
create a single shell that would be comfortable without padding
and could be quickly mass-produced
The expensive metal-stamped chair was replaced by a low -cost
fiberglass reinforced plastic chair.
Inspired by trays, dress forms, baskets, and animal
traps, the Eames Office investigated bent and welded
wire mesh as the basis for furniture designs.
The wire-mesh chair, like the fiberglass chair, was a uni-
shell design. The shell could be adapted to various base
configurations and upholstery types
The Eameses' molded-plywood chair was their first attempt to create a
single shell that would be comfortable without padding and could be
quickly mass-produced