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.