Mies van der Rohe architecture - Term Paper Example

Mies is known for the spiritualization of technique and he was an architect with the special ability to reduce all the problems of his character to the essential simplicity of his architecture. Significantly, the modern style in architecture commonly referred to as High Modernism was introduced in United States of America mainly by Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. Mies van der Rohe worked as the director of Germany’s most famous design school, Bauhaus, during 1930-33 and he started applying the Modern architectural style to his works.

The liberal members of the Bauhaus such as Mies and Gropius found their way in due course to America when it was disbanded by the Nazis and they reworked the modernist architecture in the 1940s and 50s. As a proponent of the modern architecture, Mies defined interior spaces with modern materials like industrial steel and plate glass in his mature buildings. One of the characteristic features of his style of architecture is that it made use of minimal framework of structural order and he is the most important architect of the modernist and late-modernist architecture.

Significantly, Mies van der Rohe is highly recognized for his skin and bones style architecture and his modernist architecture is esteemed for its plain surfaces and straightforward rectangular shapes which was adapted to the corporate skyscrapers, apartments, and university buildings. As E. C. Relph maintains, “his plans were simplicity itself. All the buildings were arranged in lines and at right angles, and their basic form was that of a carefully proportioned cube expressing the structure of steel columns and beams as perfectly as possible.

The slogan Mies invented to express his design philosophy was ‘Less is More’.” (Relph, 191) Therefore, it is fundamental to maintain that the modernist architecture style introduced by Mies has been noted for simplicity and the skin and bones style achieved grand success in modern architecture. This paper makes a profound analysis of Mies van der Rohe architecture in order to realize how his work relates to ‘modernism’ we can appreciate today. Born as the son of a stonemason, Mies van der Rohe received practical experience in construction during the early stages of his life and his later architecture style proved to be the milestone in modernist architecture.

Soon he became Germany’s most important architect of his time and severed as the director of Bauhaus where he applied his Modernist architectural principles to his works. Whereas his early designs as an independent designer show the influence of Schinkel, he rapidly grew into a Modernist architect with original designs and styles, and his concept of a transparent skyscraper marked a new step towards Modernism. However, due to the scantiness of material science and construction techniques, it took more time for him to establish as the leading proponent of High Modernism.

In 1938, he became the head of the architectural school at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and he redefined Modern architecture with a string of important commissions in the following years. “The elevated glass cube of the Farnsworth House (1950) in Plano, Illinois, took ideas of open, simple interior spaces to their extreme. The pristine steel and glass tower of the Lake Shore Drive Apartments (1951) in Chicago were hailed as perfect new renditions of this building type, and the Seagram Building (1958) in New York was viewed as the prototypical new skyscraper.”