Designer who said less is more

Home News. Image tools Email image Save image Pin image. Less is more Made famous by the designer and architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe , the dictum, Less is More came to define the brave, utopian ideals of modernist design and architecture. Discover content from our architecture and design magazines. Subscribe to FX. The aphorism is one of the most used and abused in design and architecture.

Detlef Mertins, author of an exceptional monograph on the master architect, reveals how it came about and what it meant to him. As far as architectural aphorisms go, Mies van der Rohe's 'Less is More' seems to succinctly define a modernist ethic. The pithy observation was, in fact, given its first airing by Peter Behrens, a godfather figure to the young Mies who he drafted in to work on aspects of the AEG Turbine Factory in Berlin, between and Mies confessed that he had "learned the great form" from Behrens, the quest for which had become a leitmotif for art at the turn of the century, promising to unify all modes of cultural expression.

As recounted by the late Detlef Mertins in the exceptional monograph Mies , the year-old van der Rohe recalled designing the glazing of the west, courtyard elevation of the AEG Turbine Factory, which is considerably more utilitarian in character than the grand street elevation. There was nothing to do on this thing. In , Mies took over from Hannes Meyer as director of the Bauhaus —the school founded by and most commonly associated with its founder Walter Gropius—serving as its leader until it was forced to close in under pressure from the Nazi government.

In , the work of Mies formed a cornerstone of the Museum of Modern Art 's exhibition on "The International Style" curated by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, an exhibition that not only reinforced Mies' role as a leader of the modernist movement, but also brought the movement itself to a wider, more international audience.

After the closure of the Bauhaus and the continued rise of the Nazis in Germany, Mies found work in his home country increasingly difficult. He eventually decided to emigrate to the United States in , where he settled in Chicago and became the head of the Illinois Institute of Technology. During his 20 years at IIT, Mies developed what became known as "the second Chicago school of architecture," a style of simplified, rectilinear high-rise buildings exemplified by projects such as Lakeshore Drive and the Seagram Building.

Alongside this new skyscraper typology, he also continued to develop his low-slung, pavilion typology that he first tested in projects like the Barcelona Pavilion—with his entirely transparent Farnsworth House , completed in , probably the most enduring example in the United States.

At times, Mies was also able to combine both of these typologies into one composition, as he did in the three-building complex of the Chicago Federal Center.