Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies, was born on 27 March 1886 in Aachen. Before moving to Berlin, he worked in his father's stonemasonry. In Berlin, he then joined the studio of interior designer Bruno Paul, and between 1908 and 1911 worked as an apprentice under Peter Behrens, where he began his career as an architect and where he encountered the latest theories of design and modern German culture. With Behrens, he had the opportunity to work alongside Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, who would later also contribute to the development of the Bauhaus. While still an associate of Behrens, Mies served as the construction manager of the German embassy in St. Petersburg.

Mies began his independent career as an architect by designing upper-class houses. He sought to return to the purity of the Germanic tradition of the early 19th century. He admired Karl Friedrich Schinkel, a Prussian classical architect of the early nineteenth century. He liked the large proportions, the regularity of rhythmic elements, the attention to the relationship between art and nature, and the composition using simple cubist elements that were typical of Schinkel. He rejected the eclectic and cluttered traditional styles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as irrelevant to modern times.

He was behind the emergence of an architectural style characterized by the utmost purity and simplicity that influenced the entire twentieth century. He referred to the architecture of his buildings as "bone and skin" architecture. He sought a rational approach to guide the creative process of architectural design, but above all he was interested in expressing the spirit of the modern age. Mies is often associated with his short aphorisms "less is more" and "God is in the details". Among his most famous buildings are the Barcelona Pavilion from 1929 and the Villa Tugendhat in Brno from 1930.