Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Born as Maria Ludwig Michael Mies, he changed his name after World War I. Van der Rohe was his mother's name. He was trained as a designer and built the first house in Potsdam in 1907. In the next year he started to work for Peter Behrens. That was also his first contact with Walter Gropius, who worked there as well. According to the time he focussed on a style called Reformstil in Germany. After World War I he focused on more modern constructions and a reduction to easy forms. In 1922 he draw several plans for a glass tower. Since 1925 he came up with the plans with housing estates in Berlin and Stuttgart and several houses. His most striking buildings of the interwar period are the Barcelona Pavilion in Barcelona (1928) and the Villa Tugendhat in Brno (1929). 

Between 1930 and 1932 he was the director of the famous Bauhaus School in Dessau. In those years he did not design buildings.

With the Nazi regime in Germany he became an unbeloved architect and in 1937 he emigrated to the US. In Chicago he opened his own office in 1939 and teached at the Armour Institute. In the USA he designed many offical buildings, in 1967 also again in Germany the Neue Nationalgalerie.

Sources

• Wikipedia Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
• www.bauhauskooperation.de Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
• Mies van der Rohe, 2016