Mechanical Study, Design Drawing

1929

The German Pavilion at the Barcelona exposition

He directed the construction of the German Pavilion at the international exposition — at once a pavilion and an exhibit in its own right: in place of ornament it relied on clear geometry and the reflective properties of polished travertine, onyx, glass and water, and the load was carried not by walls but by freestanding steel supports, so that the space flowed freely. He also created the “Barcelona” furniture collection for it; the project brought him worldwide fame.

1932

The Bauhaus driven out of Dessau; Mies moves it to Berlin

Since 1930, at the request of his colleague and competitor Gropius, he had directed the faltering Bauhaus; in 1932 the Nazis forced the school to leave its campus in Dessau and Mies moved it to an abandoned telephone factory in Berlin.

April – July 1933

The Gestapo raid and the closing of the Bauhaus

In April 1933 the Gestapo raided the school, and in July, because the Nazis had made its continued operation untenable, Mies and the faculty “voted” to close the Bauhaus.

1937–1938

Emigration to the United States

His modernist designs of glass and steel were not considered suitable for state buildings by the Nazis, and in 1937 or 1938 Mies reluctantly followed Gropius to the United States, where he accepted a residential commission in Wyoming and then an offer to head the department of architecture of the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago.

1940

The Armour Institute becomes IIT: Mies stays

When the Armour Institute merged with the Lewis Institute in 1940 to form the Illinois Institute of Technology, Mies stayed to head its architecture department and was hired to design the new buildings and master plan of the campus; he replaced the traditional École des Beaux-Arts curriculum with a three-step education — from the crafts of drawing and construction through planning skills to the theory of architecture.

1946–1951

The Farnsworth House and the dispute with the client

He designed and built for Dr Edith Farnsworth a weekend retreat outside Chicago — a glass pavilion by the Fox River with a white steel frame and all-glass walls, raised six feet above a floodplain. The house took a while to be built because of underlying issues between Mies and Edith Farnsworth — a complex relationship, partly personal and partly about the design — and back-and-forth legal disputes followed.