Born Mar. 27, 1886, in Aachen (now in the Federal Republic of Germany); died Aug. 17, 1969, in Chicago, USA. German architect, who worked in the USA from 1938. One of the leaders of functionalism (1920’s); he advanced the idea of “universal architectural form” (1950’s).

Mies van der Rohe received no formal architectural training. In 1905 he went to Berlin, where he was an apprentice with B. Paul (until 1907) and later worked with P. Behrens (1908–12). From 1930 to 1933, Mies was the director of the Bauhaus in Dessau. Between 1938 and 1958 he headed the School of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

From 1910 to 1920, Mies worked in a neoclassicist style, as reflected by the Perls House in Berlin (1911). His familiarity with the buildings of F. L. Wright and H. P. Berlage greatly influenced his subsequent work. Between 1919 and 1924 he presented a series of experimental designs (including glass skyscrapers), in which simple curtain walls are combined with expressive interior spaces. In 1926, Mies designed an expressionistic monument to K. Liebknecht and R. Luxemburg in Berlin. In the following year he directed the Werkbund exhibition (housing demonstration project) in Stuttgart, where he designed the general plan of the settlement of Weissenhof. Mies’ rationalistic model of a dwelling with a steel frame and a free internal plan served as the prototype for buildings that became popular in many countries during the 1930’s.

Under the influence of the Dutch De Stijl group, Mies subsequently turned his attention to formal aesthetic problems relating to the development of spatial systems whose individual parts, owing to a free general plan, form a continuous dynamic whole (the German pavilion at the International Exposition in Barcelona, 1929; the Tugendhat House in Brno, 1930).

Among Mies’ major works in the United States is the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago (1942–58). The idea of universal form, that is, a single interior space providing the maximum number of possibilities for any subsequent change in the interior, was first put into practice in the Farnsworth House in Piano (Illinois, 1946–50). The School of Architecture at the Institute of Technology (1952–56) resembles a pavilion. The rectangular building has unpartitioned interior space and is enclosed by glass panels; its flat roof is hung from an exposed steel framework.

The high-rise buildings designed by Mies van der Rohe are simple geometrical forms; their glass curtain walls are partitioned by a continuous rectangular metal grid. The overall appearance of the buildings does not as a rule depend on their intended use. Variations of a single architectural motif appear in the Lake Shore Drive (1950–51) and Commonwealth Promenade (1957) apartments in Chicago, the Seagram Building in New York City (1958), and the Toronto Dominion Center (Canada, 1967). The simplicity of the forms of these structures is made possible by complex technical devices and, at times, contradicts the functional purpose. Mies’ last major design was the New National Gallery in West Berlin (1968), a prismatic glass-enclosed building, on a powerful base and roofed by a ribbed steel slab.

Mies’ search for forms suitable for any function led him to reject the progressive functionalist ideas that he had developed earlier in the 1920’s. He related his own aesthetic concepts to the philosophical school of neo-Thomism. In the abstractness of simple geometrical forms, the clarity of the right angle, exposed structure, and economy of expressive means (the principle of “less is more”), he saw the embodiment of an “absolute idea” and the path toward creating eternal aesthetic values. Mies greatly influenced American and Western European architects in the 1950’s and 1960’s.