… but were afraid to ask. *You haven’t seen everything until you have seen everything: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. A Critical Biography, New and Revised Edition by Franz Schulze and Edward Windhorst. The University of Chicago Press, 2012 (Paperback 2014).

To be very honest, I can’t be critical about this book. I read the first edition in the mid 1990s as an architecture student, and it left the biggest impression on me. For many reasons… 

First, it is written in such a clear, precise, informed but entertaining manner that, even if you are not an english native speaker (or even an architect) you will enjoy it. The life and times of Mies van der Rohe are linked so much with the 20th Century, the two World wars, the birth of Modernity, the Germany of the 1920’s and America from the 1950’s that one has both history and History merging into a single destiny. 

Second, I had the feeling of being allowed to look over the shoulder of a famous architect and to be able to follow him in his everyday life and praxis. The architects who worked for Mies have been interviewed and their role respected, their role never underestimated (we all should know that to run an office building skyscrapers you need more than 5 people and that authorship becomes a question). This book provides a « view behind the foreground » (to name here the title of a book by René Spitz about the HfG Ulm), an insight in the everyday life of one of the essential architects of Modernity.....Continue Reading

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