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In 1913, Mies married Adele Auguste (Ada) Bruhn (1885–1951), the daughter of a wealthy industrialist.

#Martin johnson off grid living professional

He began his independent professional career designing upper-class homes. Ludwig Mies renamed himself as part of his transformation from a tradesman's son to an architect working with Berlin's cultural elite, adding 'van der' and his mother's maiden name 'Rohe' (the word mies means 'lousy' in German ) and using the Dutch 'van der', because the German form ' von' was a nobiliary particle legally restricted to those of genuine aristocratic lineage. Mies served as construction manager of the Embassy of the German Empire in Saint Petersburg under Behrens. He worked alongside Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, who was later also involved in the development of the Bauhaus. 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 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 Paul. Mies was born March 27, 1886, in Aachen, Germany. He is often associated with his fondness for the aphorisms ' less is more' and ' God is in the details'.Ĭlass=notpageimage| Notable buildings in today's Germany: 1 – Weissenhof Estate, 2 – Neue Nationalgalerie, 3 – Haus Lange and Haus Esters, 4 – Riehl House, 5 – Lemke House He sought an objective approach that would guide the creative process of architectural design, but was always concerned with expressing the spirit of the modern era. He called his buildings 'skin and bones' architecture. He strove toward an architecture with a minimal framework of structural order balanced against the implied freedom of unobstructed free-flowing open space.

His mature buildings made use of modern materials such as industrial steel and plate glass to define interior spaces, as also conducted by other modernist architects in the 1920s and 1930s such as Richard Neutra. The style he created made a statement with its extreme clarity and simplicity. Mies sought to establish his own particular architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their own eras. He accepted the position to head the architecture school at what is today the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. After Nazism's rise to power, with its strong opposition to modernism (leading to the closing of the Bauhaus itself), Mies emigrated to the United States. In the 1930s, Mies was the last director of the Bauhaus, a ground-breaking school of modernist art, design and architecture. Along with Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright, he is regarded as one of the pioneers of modernist architecture. He was commonly referred to as Mies, his surname. r oʊ/ MEESS-.- ROH German: born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies March 27, 1886 – August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect.