Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

And his resume reads like the greatest hits list of American landmarks.

The Rookery, the Reliance Building, the Robie House, Unity Temple, Taliesin West, plus a stack of Mies van der Rohe buildings.

What's less well-known is how he got there.

A history degree from Brown, a stint as a carpenter of Vermont, a formative year living in Denmark in a reconstructed Iron Age house, which led to an instinct for hand-on material history that has defined his whole career.

That was Renzo Piano.

Was there some step in the process where he had to demonstrate that what he was suggesting was in fact just as economical or not much more expensive than a conventional curtain wall cubic kind of building? Mies van der Rohe kind of building? No, I think at

some point the, you know, the client just wants something to show off.

It's like your kid that scores a touchdown.

I was fortunate enough to dine at the Four Seasons and appreciate the light and the vision that he carried through in that restaurant.

The pools, what structurally had to be done with Mies van der Rohe, and the chains.

Well, the pool, when he first walked into the space...

There was a beam in the middle of the room, and he said, the beam's got to go.

And they got Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's people together with his people.

The rest of the building is already

topped

Yeah.

So, you know, I went to IIT in Chicago and it was kind of the built around the philosophies of Mies van der Rohe and sort of this Miesian modernism.

It's sort of an ultra pragmatist.

And I think that always sort of struck a chord with me.

So do you do different things? They do very different things, yes.

Like, for instance, if you're going to the vast collection of old masters, you're going to do something different than going to a Mies van der Rohe pavilion, you know.

Do you feel that there are different rhythms, if you like, to your museum visiting?

Yes, I mean, I love the Kupferstichkabinett in the Gemäldegalerie.

Combine that with...

You know, there were Corbusier posters around the house, Mies van der Rohe books everywhere, Frank Lloyd Wright manuscripts.

I mean, I grew up with this idea of design.

My dad, when he was drawing, he would also draw villages and their doorways and the houses.

How did they renovate it? They'd been flat.

They'd been sort of Mies van der Rohe, sort of sixties, modern before then.

They just sat there flat, and so the renovators came along and put little gables.

shopping malls, so that each little shop in the mall now has a gable.

Like in Germany, when I went in the early 90s, right after the wall had come down, there's a beautiful Bauhaus building.

It's the Kunstmuseum designed by Mies van der Rohe.

And it was housing... you Kiefer exhibition and Kiefer's paintings are so heavy as we know and so they had to reinforce the building some gazillion I think you know like a hundred million dollars to reinforce it for the Kiefer but maybe not quite that much because it is the early 90s but still it was an astronomical amount of money to reinforce that building to hold all the Kiefer's it was exquisite by the way if you want to have a retrospective in your own slime Kiefer And it's in a Mies van der Rohe building in Berlin as the wall is coming down.

It just can't get better.

You know, it's got all the symbolism that is there for his work.

Des fois, ça peut être ça, un petit rideau de lin, ça peut être super intéressant, mais ça meuble un espace.

Puis comme architecte, tu sais, Mies van der Rohe, là, il les imposait, ses rideaux, tu sais.

Fait que c'est pas anodin, c'est pas, c'est pas quelque chose-

C'est ça, t'es, t'es comme, t'es comme une dualité.