Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies, the son of a stone carver in Aachen, Germany. In Berlin he reinvented himself, adding his mother’s maiden name Rohe and the Dutch van der, since German law barred adopting von without documented nobility. From 1908 to 1912 he apprenticed in the studio of Peter Behrens alongside Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, designing ornamented neoclassical homes, until World War I convinced him and his peers that ornament was a lie. His 1921 all glass skyscraper proposal for Friedrichstrasse, the Barcelona Pavilion, the Villa Tugendhat, and the Barcelona chair created with Lilly Reich defined a new skin and bones architecture.

The story darkens in the 1930s. As director of the Bauhaus he moved it to an abandoned Berlin telephone factory that the Gestapo raided in 1933, and he joined the Reich Culture Chamber, entered competitions with swastika decorated designs, and signed a manifesto supporting Hitler before leaving for the United States around 1937. In Chicago he rebuilt the architecture program at the Illinois Institute of Technology, fought Dr. Edith Farnsworth over her glass house by the Fox River, and set the template for the modern tower with 860 to 880 Lake Shore Drive and New York’s 1958 Seagram Building. He died on August 17, 1969, and was buried in Graceland Cemetery under a plain black granite slab.

• Why Mies translates to something close to lousy or wretched in German
• His three step IIT curriculum: craft first, then planning, and theory last
• The purely decorative bronze mullions on the Seagram Building that critics called a crime of ornament
• The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, finished in 1968, with its hovering cantilevered steel roof
• Robert Venturi’s reply to less is more: less is a bore