Mies van der Rohe : An Architect in His Time

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) was a German-born American architect and designer whose work in Europe and North America has had an enduring influence on modern and contemporary architecture worldwide. During his sixty-year career, he fundamentally rethought architectural types that shaped modern life, including the office building, apartment building, and private home. True to his alleged dictum “less is more,” Mies van der Rohe’s style is characterized by utmost simplicity, elegance of materials, and radical formal and functional innovation, as exemplified by such iconic projects as the Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, and the Seagram Building in New York.

In this book, renowned architectural historian Dietrich Neumann presents a new, critical look at Mies and complicates the established narrative about him. Diverging from the reverential posture of many existing accounts, Neumann insists on the importance of the contemporary context—social, political, and architectural—for understanding the architect’s life and work. The book draws on many overlooked archival and primary sources to demonstrate how and why Mies’s designs were shaped and received, foregrounding contemporary critics’ responses and the work of Mies’s collaborators and peers.

It presents several previously unknown buildings, projects, and furniture designs and challenges long-established interpretations of key works. Comprehensively illustrated and covering the entirety of Mies’s career, this ambitious book is the most substantial account to date of the life and work of one of the most important architects of the twentieth century.