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Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography
"Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography" is a major rewriting and expansion of Franz Schulze's acclaimed 1985 biography, the first full treatment of the master German-American modern architect. Co-authored with architect Edward Windhorst, this thoroughly revised edition features new and extensive original research and commentary and draws on the best recent work of American and German scholars and critics.
Schulze and Windhorst trace Mies's European career in its progression to avant-garde modernism-where his work was materially rich but of modest scale-to his second maturity and world renown in the United States, where he invented a new architectural language of "objective" structural expression. Among the authors' most exciting new discoveries is the massive transcript of the early-1950s Farnsworth House court case, which discloses for the first time the facts about Mies's epic battle with his client Edith Farnsworth. The book reveals new information about his relationships with women, including the nature and breakup of his marriage to the wealthy Ada Bruhn, his close professional and personal ties to the gifted designer Lilly Reich, and new details from a series of illuminating interviews with his American companion, Lora Marx. This edition also gives voice to dozens of architects who knew and worked with (and sometimes against) Mies-many of them from the unique oral history collection of the Art Institute of Chicago's Department of Architecture.
This comprehensive biography tells the compelling story of how Mies and his students and followers created some of the most significant buildings of the twentieth century.
Schulze and Windhorst trace Mies's European career in its progression to avant-garde modernism-where his work was materially rich but of modest scale-to his second maturity and world renown in the United States, where he invented a new architectural language of "objective" structural expression. Among the authors' most exciting new discoveries is the massive transcript of the early-1950s Farnsworth House court case, which discloses for the first time the facts about Mies's epic battle with his client Edith Farnsworth. The book reveals new information about his relationships with women, including the nature and breakup of his marriage to the wealthy Ada Bruhn, his close professional and personal ties to the gifted designer Lilly Reich, and new details from a series of illuminating interviews with his American companion, Lora Marx. This edition also gives voice to dozens of architects who knew and worked with (and sometimes against) Mies-many of them from the unique oral history collection of the Art Institute of Chicago's Department of Architecture.
This comprehensive biography tells the compelling story of how Mies and his students and followers created some of the most significant buildings of the twentieth century.
790 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1986
26 people are currently reading
218 people want to read
About the author
Franz Schulze
88 books7 followersFranz Schulze was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in Illinois, Pekin and Chicago, as his civil engineer father moved to follow employment in the 1930s. Perhaps his interest in art and architecture was stimulated by visiting with his father the 1933-34 Century of Progress Exhibition, Chicago, which he still remembers vividly. After Lane Technical High School in his Chicago neighborhood, Schulze attended Robert M. Hutchins' University of Chicago and graduated in 1945 with a two-year wartime Ph.B. and a strong if somewhat crammed grounding in the classics. He went on to the Art Institute of Chicago's School for his B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees, the latter the terminal degree for academics in studio art. After two years teaching at Purdue University, Schulze, according to his own account, mis-stated his age (as twenty-seven, not twenty-five) to apply for and become art professor and head of the Art Department at Lake Forest College in 1952 (to 1958), succeeding the College's first full-time art professor, Joseph P. Nash (for Nash, see the finding aid for his collection elsewhere in this series of such guides).
Schulze taught at Lake Forest full-time from 1952 through 1991, and is the Betty Jane Hollender Professor of Art, Emeritus. He was a popular teacher, garnering in 1968 the students' Great Teacher award. He organized major, museum-quality exhibitions of art on campus in the 1950s and 1960s that fostered excellent town-gown relations while building student connossieurship. He took emeritus status in 1991 to devote full-time to his work on his 1994-published biography of Philip Johnson. He continued to teach courses occasionally and now participates in some classes.
Notable among his former students are Richard D. Armstrong '71, director of New York's Guggenheim Museum; Peter Reed '77, Senior Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs, of New York's Musuem of Modern Art; Kingston Heath '68, author and Professor of Historic Preservation at the U. of Oregon; and Stephen M. Salny '77, author of books on architect David Adler (Norton, 2001), interior designer Frances Elkins (Norton, 2005), and interior designer Michael Taylor (Norton, 2009).
Schulze is an artist, working on canvas and with charcoal, and has done many portraits, including some of significant Chicago architects, shown in Chicago in 2011. His portraits of his Lake Forest College friends and colleagues provide a valuable chronicle of the campus and town history of the past almost six decades, including College presidents. A show of his drawings took place February 18 through March 26, 2011, at the Printworks Gallery, Chicago.
The artist's work included also graphic design for College publications (Tusitala annual literary magazine), striking publicity for 1950s town-gown Fireside chats, and in the early 1960s a new seal to replace the one in use for over a century. This was the College's emblem through the decade and then again in the mid-1990s.
Schulze began writing art criticism for New York periodicals in 1958 and he has continued this work into the 2000s. He also served as art critic for the Chicago Daily News until it was absorbed into the Chicago Sun-Times in 1978, after which he wrote for that paper. He has written several books and has contributed chapters, introductions and forewords to many more. His own most notable books to date are Fantastic Images (1973), Mies van der Rohe: a Critical Biography (1985), and Philip Johnson: Life and Work (1994). He was the lead author for 30 Miles North, a History of Lake Forest College, Its Town and Its City of Chicago (2000), the institution's first separate;y-published historical volume, and lead co-editor of the well-received 5th ed. of Chicago's Famous Buildings (2003). His soon-to-be published Fall, 2012 titles are listed at the opening of this sketch.
Schulze did not have formal academic training especially in architectural history. He educated himself through his journalism and his teach
Schulze taught at Lake Forest full-time from 1952 through 1991, and is the Betty Jane Hollender Professor of Art, Emeritus. He was a popular teacher, garnering in 1968 the students' Great Teacher award. He organized major, museum-quality exhibitions of art on campus in the 1950s and 1960s that fostered excellent town-gown relations while building student connossieurship. He took emeritus status in 1991 to devote full-time to his work on his 1994-published biography of Philip Johnson. He continued to teach courses occasionally and now participates in some classes.
Notable among his former students are Richard D. Armstrong '71, director of New York's Guggenheim Museum; Peter Reed '77, Senior Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs, of New York's Musuem of Modern Art; Kingston Heath '68, author and Professor of Historic Preservation at the U. of Oregon; and Stephen M. Salny '77, author of books on architect David Adler (Norton, 2001), interior designer Frances Elkins (Norton, 2005), and interior designer Michael Taylor (Norton, 2009).
Schulze is an artist, working on canvas and with charcoal, and has done many portraits, including some of significant Chicago architects, shown in Chicago in 2011. His portraits of his Lake Forest College friends and colleagues provide a valuable chronicle of the campus and town history of the past almost six decades, including College presidents. A show of his drawings took place February 18 through March 26, 2011, at the Printworks Gallery, Chicago.
The artist's work included also graphic design for College publications (Tusitala annual literary magazine), striking publicity for 1950s town-gown Fireside chats, and in the early 1960s a new seal to replace the one in use for over a century. This was the College's emblem through the decade and then again in the mid-1990s.
Schulze began writing art criticism for New York periodicals in 1958 and he has continued this work into the 2000s. He also served as art critic for the Chicago Daily News until it was absorbed into the Chicago Sun-Times in 1978, after which he wrote for that paper. He has written several books and has contributed chapters, introductions and forewords to many more. His own most notable books to date are Fantastic Images (1973), Mies van der Rohe: a Critical Biography (1985), and Philip Johnson: Life and Work (1994). He was the lead author for 30 Miles North, a History of Lake Forest College, Its Town and Its City of Chicago (2000), the institution's first separate;y-published historical volume, and lead co-editor of the well-received 5th ed. of Chicago's Famous Buildings (2003). His soon-to-be published Fall, 2012 titles are listed at the opening of this sketch.
Schulze did not have formal academic training especially in architectural history. He educated himself through his journalism and his teach
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 15, 2023
This book was published in 1985 and I bought it shortly thereafter. The book has been sitting on my bookshelf ever since. Considering that my undergraduate degree is in architecture and my fifth year thesis was in architectural history it should be embarrassing to admit this fact. However, while I did work in that profession for a number of years by 1978 I had switched professions and was practicing law. The reading demands of my new profession made my continuing interest in architecture a secondary importance and this book was shelved and forgotten. My recent inability to replenish my TBR shelf has me scrounging for new reading material and I found this dusty biography of one of the three great architects of the 20th century, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The other two greats are Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Jeanneret aka Le Corbusier. You could give an honorable mention inclusion to this list for Walter Gropius but his body of work just doesn't compare to that of these other colleagues. Now that I had found the book and lacking any immediate alternative I decided to read it. For much of the reading I couldn't help but believe that the book should have stayed hidden on the shelf.
I will begin by stating that unless you have a serious interest in the history of architecture and art this book will probably bore you to tears. It is a biography of a truly great architect, an artist, and it is written by an academic. When an academic writes about a great personage their focus is on what has made this person great. In that regard the author is no exception. The first half of the book, maybe more, is devoted to the evolution of Mies as an architect and the forces that shaped his art. There is very little about Mies' life except as how the facets of his life influenced his artistic development. Once Mies sets out on his adult life we are treated to a history of the evolution of artistic movements in Europe and specifically in Germany and how they impacted Mies both positively and negatively. A reader wanting to know more about Mies will likely feel mislead by the book's title since a history of early 20th century European art movements wasn't what was promised. Further, the book is supposed to be a critical biography and it sure appears that the author is a definite Mies admirer as there seems to be little criticism offered. I was especially surprised by the lack of criticism when Mies's early residential projects were discussed. It was hard to believe these buildings were designed by Mies van der Rohe when you consider what he is known for building in the second half of the century. Mies apparently went from producing classic Georgian 5, 4, and a door dull homes to glass and steel skyscrapers in one monumental career.
The metamorphosis is explained and this, again, may bore the disinterested reader and you wouldn't be alone in that. I was bored too. While it was a field of study for me and an occupation I have little patience with explanations of artistic achievements. To me if an artist has to explain their art then they have failed as an artist. The art is the medium of the artist's communication anything after seeing the art is usually just pseudo-intellectual mumbo jumbo to enhance the ego of the artist. Unfortunately, the author does a great deal of that on behalf of Mies and we could have been spared that. I understand Mies's theory of design even though I may not be a fan. His concept of universal space has great utility and appeal in commercial building but is a total failure in residential use. Mies' Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois is a beautiful work of art but it is not a home that any normal human could live comfortably in for long. Even his swan song construction of the Berlin National Gallery, again while incredibly beautiful, fails in its intended use. The permanent collection of the gallery is in the basement while the monumental open space above is for temporary exhibits that are dwarfed by the scale of the space.
In the second half of the book the author does start to offer legitimate criticisms and point out inconsistency in Mies' work and theories and he also starts to discuss more about Mies the man and how he lived. The author also reveals the criticisms that began to mount as Mies was entering the end stage of his life. Mies failed to understand that architecture like all other arts is an evolutionary process. The architecture Mies espoused was to be accepted as dogma. Mies was critical of Gropius and his encouragement of experimentation while running the Bauhaus. When Mies became the head of the Architecture Department at the Illinois Institute of Technology his theories of architecture were the rule. This stifled creativity and produced a student body of Mies clones that went on to employment in Mies' firm and that of the major architectural firms in Chicago and around the country. These people then filled our urban landscapes with glass and steel high rises and became boring. To quote Robert Venturi using an oft repeated quote of Mies' that has never been verified has having been spoken by Mies, "Less is a bore". An art form grows as the artist grows and growth is usually the result of experiment, trial and error. Gropius, at Harvard while Mies was at IIT, was the better teacher and his students probably became more well rounded artists. This book gives us the story of a life well spent and an art that had its time and its affect and now that time has passed but the affect will endure. Enjoy.
I will begin by stating that unless you have a serious interest in the history of architecture and art this book will probably bore you to tears. It is a biography of a truly great architect, an artist, and it is written by an academic. When an academic writes about a great personage their focus is on what has made this person great. In that regard the author is no exception. The first half of the book, maybe more, is devoted to the evolution of Mies as an architect and the forces that shaped his art. There is very little about Mies' life except as how the facets of his life influenced his artistic development. Once Mies sets out on his adult life we are treated to a history of the evolution of artistic movements in Europe and specifically in Germany and how they impacted Mies both positively and negatively. A reader wanting to know more about Mies will likely feel mislead by the book's title since a history of early 20th century European art movements wasn't what was promised. Further, the book is supposed to be a critical biography and it sure appears that the author is a definite Mies admirer as there seems to be little criticism offered. I was especially surprised by the lack of criticism when Mies's early residential projects were discussed. It was hard to believe these buildings were designed by Mies van der Rohe when you consider what he is known for building in the second half of the century. Mies apparently went from producing classic Georgian 5, 4, and a door dull homes to glass and steel skyscrapers in one monumental career.
The metamorphosis is explained and this, again, may bore the disinterested reader and you wouldn't be alone in that. I was bored too. While it was a field of study for me and an occupation I have little patience with explanations of artistic achievements. To me if an artist has to explain their art then they have failed as an artist. The art is the medium of the artist's communication anything after seeing the art is usually just pseudo-intellectual mumbo jumbo to enhance the ego of the artist. Unfortunately, the author does a great deal of that on behalf of Mies and we could have been spared that. I understand Mies's theory of design even though I may not be a fan. His concept of universal space has great utility and appeal in commercial building but is a total failure in residential use. Mies' Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois is a beautiful work of art but it is not a home that any normal human could live comfortably in for long. Even his swan song construction of the Berlin National Gallery, again while incredibly beautiful, fails in its intended use. The permanent collection of the gallery is in the basement while the monumental open space above is for temporary exhibits that are dwarfed by the scale of the space.
In the second half of the book the author does start to offer legitimate criticisms and point out inconsistency in Mies' work and theories and he also starts to discuss more about Mies the man and how he lived. The author also reveals the criticisms that began to mount as Mies was entering the end stage of his life. Mies failed to understand that architecture like all other arts is an evolutionary process. The architecture Mies espoused was to be accepted as dogma. Mies was critical of Gropius and his encouragement of experimentation while running the Bauhaus. When Mies became the head of the Architecture Department at the Illinois Institute of Technology his theories of architecture were the rule. This stifled creativity and produced a student body of Mies clones that went on to employment in Mies' firm and that of the major architectural firms in Chicago and around the country. These people then filled our urban landscapes with glass and steel high rises and became boring. To quote Robert Venturi using an oft repeated quote of Mies' that has never been verified has having been spoken by Mies, "Less is a bore". An art form grows as the artist grows and growth is usually the result of experiment, trial and error. Gropius, at Harvard while Mies was at IIT, was the better teacher and his students probably became more well rounded artists. This book gives us the story of a life well spent and an art that had its time and its affect and now that time has passed but the affect will endure. Enjoy.
February 15, 2024
An ezcellent biography, written in a surprisingly readable style. Mies architecture is described and analyzed. One would expect the former, this biography also, as advertised, provides the latter. The authors attempt to dig into Mies' personality and motivations. How and why did he design such, for his era, such original architecture? These important questions are answered, providing guidance to non-architects as to how to develop original products/designs in other fields. I'm not going to answer this question. Read the book.
July 18, 2016
A very readable and humanizing portrait of this man who, for most of us, is probably relatively inscrutable. It is challenging reading during Mies' early years in Germany. Unless you read German, a lot of the names and places will challenge you. Likewise, many of Mies' early influences, among architects and artists, were relatively esoteric for me. But upon Mies' immigration to America, I found it much easier to follow.
August 18, 2025
2014 Revised edition. Quite well done, very accessible, and generally even-handed though definitely giving Mies the benefit of the doubt in most situations (but never threatening to become hagiography). The narration has the feel of a (very extended) after-dinner conversation among like-minded colleagues, which is a big part its charm. The Farnsworth section in particular is quite fascinating and easily the best part of the book.
The focus here is very much Mies and the projects he directed; everything else (criticisms, implications, legacy, analysis of the oeuvre &c) is dealt with briefly if at all. For me, this actually removes it from the self-proclaimed "critical" category. Simply admitting Mies and his work have flaws is not sufficient.
Very minor inaccuracy: text refers to the Toronto project as the "Dominion Centre" when it should be "Toronto Dominion Centre" (local: TD Centre), named for the Toronto Dominion Bank.
It's a shame that publishers apparently cannot imagine creating a digital version of a book that differs from the print version. Like just about every other architecture book, this one would benefit immensely from having many more illustrations, something which is not feasible for a print book but hardly impossible for digital.
The focus here is very much Mies and the projects he directed; everything else (criticisms, implications, legacy, analysis of the oeuvre &c) is dealt with briefly if at all. For me, this actually removes it from the self-proclaimed "critical" category. Simply admitting Mies and his work have flaws is not sufficient.
Very minor inaccuracy: text refers to the Toronto project as the "Dominion Centre" when it should be "Toronto Dominion Centre" (local: TD Centre), named for the Toronto Dominion Bank.
It's a shame that publishers apparently cannot imagine creating a digital version of a book that differs from the print version. Like just about every other architecture book, this one would benefit immensely from having many more illustrations, something which is not feasible for a print book but hardly impossible for digital.
March 24, 2025
solid introduction to Mies
I am not an architect, though I am from Chicago, where Mies has left a tremendous impression. With the book “the built Mies van der Rohe” this is an excellent introduction to Mies’s life. I would definitely recommend Alex Beam’s “ broken glass “ too.
I am not an architect, though I am from Chicago, where Mies has left a tremendous impression. With the book “the built Mies van der Rohe” this is an excellent introduction to Mies’s life. I would definitely recommend Alex Beam’s “ broken glass “ too.
April 3, 2013
Gets off to a slow start with the early years, but by the time it gets to the magnificent Barcelona Pavilion, it's fascinating and just keeps getting better. This man invented modern architecture from scratch, it's incredible really. It became fashionable to look down on him for a while, but now we see him for the giant he was. Can't wait to get back to Manhattan and visit the Seagram Building again.
January 18, 2013
As dull as Mies' designs.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews