Miesian Architecture

Miesian architecture is the style associated with the German American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who lived from 1886 to 1969 and became one of the most influential figures of postwar modernism after emigrating to the United States and leading the architecture school at what became the Illinois Institute of Technology. Mies summarized his own design philosophy in the phrase less is more, pursuing a radical minimalism built from exposed steel structural frames, expansive glass curtain walls, and open, largely unpartitioned floor plans that treated interior space as a single flexible volume rather than a set of fixed rooms. His Farnsworth House outside Chicago, completed in 1951 as a nearly all glass steel framed weekend retreat, and the Seagram Building in New York, completed in 1958 in partnership with Philip Johnson, are the style's two most cited built statements, the latter widely imitated in the bronze and glass corporate office towers built across American cities through the 1960s. Miesian architecture is generally treated as the purest, most doctrinaire expression of the International Style's steel and glass vocabulary in the postwar decades.