Skip to footer

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: His five most famous buildings

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe revolutionized architecture. His simple dictum that 'less is more' inspired building designs around the world. No wonder he received a loving Google doodle on Tuesday, his 126 birthday. Want to move past the doodle? Click through our short slideshow for a look Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's best work.

SR Crown Hall and the Farnsworth House

Google
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe got a Google doodle Tuesday for designing many influential buildings, such as the SR Crown Hall, which is illustrated here.

  • By Matthew Shaer

In place of the traditional multi-colored logo, the Google homepage today is emblazoned with an image of the SR Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology, in Chicago. The doodle is an homage to the famed German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who would have turned 126 today. 

Mies van der Rohe, or simply "Mies," as he was commonly known, helped promulgate the phrase "less is more," a minimalist motto he made the core of his clean, spare, striking designs. SR Crown Hall, conceptualized in 1956 and granted National Historic Landmark status in 2001, is among Mies' best known work – Time magazine once called the building "one of the world's most influential, inspiring and astonishing structures."

But Mies designed widely, and by his death in 1969, his "skin and bones" style had become a hallmark of modern architecture. 

Located 60 miles west of Chicago, in the Illinois town of Plano, the Farnsworth House, which was first conceived in 1945 and finally built in 1951, is a symbol of modern design. The house is comprised of long steel beams and floor-to-ceiling glass, making the entire building a kind of prism. "Every physical element has been distilled to its irreducible essence," one historian wrote of the house. "The interior is unprecedentedly transparent to the surrounding site, and also unprecedentedly uncluttered in itself."

1 of 4
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.