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He found a warm welcome when he finally left for the States in 1938, thanks in part to the proselytizing of the architect and provocateur Philip Johnson. As its final director, he dissolved the Bauhaus in 1933 when its independence became untenable, despite taking a perhaps excessively apolitical stance towards the Nazi regime. Political and financial pressures increasingly stymied Mies’s career in the 1930s. Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.

Mies’s was not an austere, functionalist modernism, but a cerebral and spiritual pursuit of an architectural essence. Both were perfect in proportion, exquisite (and expensive) in materials, with subtle classical echoes.

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Both utilised free plans, fluid spaces, transparency, asymmetry, freestanding walls and (at this stage) understated exposure of structure. The German-American architect had established his reputation in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, in large part due to two unassailable icons – the German Pavilion for the Barcelona International Exposition of 1929, and the Tugendhat House in Brno, begun that same year. So, in the 1950s, Mies van der Rohe was, to all intents and purposes, the Western world’s leading architect. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois, 1951 Image Credit: Victor Grigas - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. Gropius’s reputation was on the wane, his post-war output suggesting he was a better educator than architect – a man who had “overrun his prophecy”. Le Corbusier was firmly lodged at the top of the genius tree, but his quest for universal forms and increasingly expressive leanings made him a risky proposition. Frank Lloyd Wright was too old, too difficult, too idiosyncratic and insufficiently “modern” to be considered the profession’s leader. Who stood astride that profession at the time? Publications of the time rattled off the same, short list – Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius, the last three based in the States. And not through the enforcement of an official style: “Design must flow from the architectural profession to the government, and not vice versa”. Now, its federal buildings were to forge their own way, to “embody the finest contemporary American architectural thought”. The latter had been the modus operandi of institutional architecture from the country’s foundation right through the American Renaissance and even beyond.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Federal Center, Chicago, 1964–75 Image Credit: Esther Westerveld from Nieuwkoop, Nederland - Federal Center Plaza (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) - Chicago IL, CC BY 2.0, Courtesy of Wikimedia CommonsĪt this peak of national vitality and confidence, America understood that the time had come – in architecture as in national life – to lead, not merely to follow. This text is short, direct and strangely moving, declaring that an architectural style and form must be adopted for federal buildings that will “provide visual testimony to the dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability of the American Government”. This tribute to an idealised Athens, and to its democratic principles, was adopted as a model for post-war American architecture, and Kennedy’s invocation was cited at the start of the original “Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture”, issued in 1962. He also included a stirring quotation from Pericles’ oration on the dead of the Peloponnesian War, in which the Athenian statesman proclaims of his city: “We do not imitate – for we are a model to others”. Kennedy gave an address to its legislature, famous for the line “of those to whom much is given, much is required”. On leaving Massachusetts to take up the presidency in 1961, John F. Portrait of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 1934 Image Credit: Hugo Erfurth, MKG Sammlung Online, Courtesy of Wikimedia CommonsĪt the time, however, America had a very different take on what the country, and its architecture, could learn from Athens.

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