By Dietrich Neumann

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) was a German-born American architect and designer whose work in Europe and North America has had an enduring influence on architecture internationally. During his sixty-year career, he fundamentally rethought architectural types that shaped modern life, including the office building, apartment building, and private home. True to his alleged dictum “less is more,” Mies van der Rohe’s style is characterised by utmost simplicity, elegance of materials, and radical formal and functional innovation, as exemplified by such iconic projects as the Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, and the Seagram Building in New York. In this book, renowned architectural historian Dietrich Neumann presents a new, critical look at Mies and complicates the established narrative about him. Diverging from the reverential posture of many existing accounts, Neumann insists on the importance of the contemporary context—social, political, and architectural—for understanding the architect’s life and work.