DesignerDeco

Mies Van der Rohe

Posted on 17. Feb, 2009 by DesignerDeco in Modern Furniture Designers

One of the pioneers of the modernist movement in architecture and design, Mies Van der Rohe, is surely looked upon as a great luminary who revolutionized living space and design.

The personal life of Mies Van der Rohe

Mies Van der Rohe undertook local designing projects as a young man while still working at his father’s stone-carving shop. After a few years he moved to Berlin to work in Bruno Paul’s interior design firm. Architecture soon captured his interest, and he started as an apprentice for Peter Brehns in the early 1900s. During this period, Van der Rohe collaborated with Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. Van der Rohe also studied the burgeoning design theories of the era as well as German design and style ideas that were progressive in nature.

He headed the Bauhaus School of Design but the school faltered due to the trying times of the war-torn era. The Nazis eventually rejected his designs, stating that they were not German in spirit. Van der Rohe emigrated to the United States and became the head an architecture, school Chicagos’s Armour Institute of Technology.

His forays into designing furniture were also expressions of his modernist approach to design. With the help of partner Lilly Reich, Van der Rohe was able to produce fixtures that became classics of modern design.

The design ethics of Mies Van der Rohe

Van der Rohe was one of the proponents of the modernist approach to design. He headed the Bauhaus School that perpetuated the modern and minimalist approach to interior, furniture, and architectural design. He often described his creations, be they architectural or furniture in nature, as skin and bones designing. Van der Rohe took pride in making exquisite creations out of different materials, combining tubular steel with rich fabrics such as leather and cowhide. For Van der Rohe, the adage, “less is more,” is a principle he followed when designing buildings and furniture.

Popular works of Mies Van der Rohe

Mies Van der Rohe was first known as a skilled architect who constructed buildings using pre-manufactured steel frames set with large panes and sheets of enforced glass. Famous buildings that he designed were the Seagram Building in New York, the Crown Hall and Farnsworth House in the Illinois Institute of Technology, and low-rise buildings for residential use along Lake Shore Drive in Chicago’s Lakefront area.

For his furniture designs, Van der Rohe made pieces that came to be known as the Barcelona, the Brno, and the Tugendhat. The Barcelona was a chrome-plated steel and leather affair that had simple lines and offered reinforced comfort to occupants. The Brno was a successful experiment with cantilevers, while the Tugendhat was a combination of the Barcelona’s seating and the Brno’s structural support.

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