Mies Van Der Rohe

D-16-AR-01
Mies Van Der Rohe

 Introduction
 Career
 Philosophy
 Barcelona pavilion
 Fransworth House
 Seagram Building
 Criticism
 Introduction:
 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (March 27, 1886 – August 17, 1969) .
 He is regarded as one of the pioneers of modernist architecture.
 He worked in his father's stone carving shop and at several local
design firms before he moved to Berlin, where he joined the office
of interior designer Bruno Pa.
 He began his architectural career as an apprentice at the studio
of Peter Behrens from 1908 to 1912, where he was exposed to the
current design theories and to progressive German culture.
 He worked alongside Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, who was
later also involved in the development of the Bauhaus.
 He is often associated with his fondness for the aphorisms, "less is
more" and "God is in the details’’.
 CAREER
 At age 15 he was apprenticed to several Aachen architects.
 He become an apprentice with Bruno Paul, a leading furniture
designer.
 At age of 21 he got job in office of peter Behrens.
 the Deutscher Werkbund, advocated “a marriage between art and
technology.”
 a new design tradition that would give form and meaning to machine-
made things, including machine-made buildings.
 n 1930 Mies was appointed director of the Bauhaus, which had moved
from Weimar to Dessau in 1925.
 In 1937 Mies moved to the United States.
 Mies served as the school’s director for the next 20 years, and, by the
time he retired in 1958. (Illunos Institute of Technology.
 philosophy
 Mies van der Rohe's 'Less is More' seems to
succinctly define a modernist ethic. What's
less well known however, is that van der
Rohe wasn’t actually the originator of the
phrase.
 The pithy observation was, in fact, given its
first airing by Peter Behrens, a godfather
figure to the young Mies who he drafted in
to work on aspects of the AEG Turbine
Factory in Berlin, between 1907 and 1910.
 Mies was to return to the phrase again and
again, effectively making it his own, referring
to his later efforts to reduce and distil
buildings and their components into simple
forms in which art and technics - geometry
and matter.
 philosophy
 Mies first called his designs for steel-and-
glass skyscrapers and horizontally-oriented
houses and pavilions "skin-and-bones"
architecture due to their minimal uses of
industrial materials, definition of space, along
with the rigidity of structure, and their
transparency. His architecture promotes the
dissolution between interior and exterior
and the negation of feeling completely
enclosed. Instead, they encourage maximum
flexibility in their spatial configurations,
which for Mies meant that they maximized
their spatial utility.
 Mies' buildings often emphasize their own
singularity relative to their surroundings,
putting themselves - and through their
transparency, their inhabitants - on view.
This makes many of them, such as the
Barcelona Pavilion, ideal for public functions.
BARCELONA PAVILION
 BARCELONA PAVILION
 Mies' German Pavilion for the 1929 World's Fair in Barcelona.
 It constitutes Mies' most succinct statement in the reduction of a building to the
minimal requirements to define space: a handful of columns elevated on a platform
juxtaposed with asymmetrically-arranged opaque and transparent wall planes,
supporting a flat roof.
 It functioned during the fair as simply a reception space for dignitaries, as the
Weimar government had other space for actual exhibits.
 There is an extreme emphasis on horizontality, the platform of travertine (a
common stone used in ancient classical monuments.
 Steel columns are chrome-plated, and the interior is ornamented solely with a red
curtain, while the colored onyx walls are cut to expose the diamond pattern - all of
which recalls an attention to refinement and craftsmanship that is balanced with the
building's clear machine-made qualities. It therefore exemplifies the visual form of
Mies' famous dictum, "Less is more."
 It was the most progressive building constructed at the exposition, contrasting
sharply with the rather old-fashioned neo-Baroque structures that dominated the
grounds.
Fransworth House
Fransworth House
 Fransworth House
 In 1946 and 1951, Mies van der Rohe designed and built the Farnsworth House.
 The glass pavilion is raised six feet above a floodplain next to the Fox River,
surrounded by forest and rural prairies.
 The highly crafted pristine white structural frame and all-glass walls define a simple
rectilinear interior space, allowing nature and light to envelop the interior space.
 A wood-panelled fireplace (also housing mechanical equipment, kitchen, and toilets)
is positioned within the open space to suggest living, dining and sleeping spaces
without using walls.
 No partitions touch the surrounding all-glass enclosure.
 Without solid exterior walls, full-height draperies on a perimeter track allow
freedom to provide full or partial privacy when and where desired.
 The building influenced the creation of hundreds of modernist glass houses.
 The house is an embodiment of Mies' mature vision of modern architecture for the
new technological age: a single unencumbered space within a minimal "skin and
bones" framework.
Seagram Building
 Seagram Building
 The building stands 515 feet (157 m) tall with 38 stories, and it is one of the most
notable examples of the functionalist aesthetic and a prominent instance of
corporate modern architecture.
 One of the style's characteristic traits was to express or articulate the structure of
buildings externally.
 It was a style that argued that the functional utility of the building’s structural
elements when made visible, could supplant a formal decorative articulation; and
more honestly converse with the public than any system of applied ornamentation.
 A building's structural elements should be visible, Mies thought.
 Mies used non-structural bronze-toned I-beams to suggest structure instead. These
are visible from the outside of the building, and run vertically, like mullions,
surrounding the large glass windows.
 This method of construction using an interior reinforced concrete shell to support a
larger non-structural edifice has since become commonplace.
 As designed, the building used 1,500 tons of bronze in its construction.
 Seagram Building
 On completion in 1958, the $41 million construction costs of Seagram made it the
world's most expensive skyscraper at the time, due to the use of expensive, high-
quality materials and lavish interior decoration including bronze, travertine, and
marble. The interior was designed to assure cohesion with the external features,
repeated in the glass and bronze furnishings and decorative scheme.
 The gray topaz glass was used for sun and heat protection, and although there are
Venetian blinds for window coverings they could only be fixed in a limited number
of positions so as to provide visual consistency from the outside.
 The detailing of the exterior surface was carefully determined by the desired
exterior expression Mies wanted to achieve. The metal bronze skin that is seen in
the facade is nonstructural but is used to express the idea of the structural frame
that is underneath