As director of the Bauhaus, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe summed up in one sentence the achievement of his main predecessor at the job: “The best thing Gropius has done was to invent the name Bauhaus.”1 He made the slight not just because Gropius left the Bauhaus without adequate financing. Mies was a fighter, and few people brought on his pugilistic instincts more than Gropius. Mies had first encountered the man whose job he eventually assumed well before the Bauhaus was founded. Back then, Gropius was a well-heeled playboy, versed in horsemanship and good clothing and the other privileges of upper-class life, while Mies himself was still suffering as a complete outsider who didn’t have a mark more than his meager earnings at the Berlin architecture office where he slaved away after hours and Gropius left work early. Not only did Mies harbor a lifelong resentment of his colleague who grew up on easy street, but he also never considered Gropius a top-level architect.
Sergius Ruegenberg, Caricature of Mies with Model of Glass Skyscraper, ca. 1925. Mies was a man of few words. He labored over every detail and nuance of his buildings and expected his students to do the same. The student who drew this was the same person whom Mies asked to burn the papers showing his pre-modernist past.
The man who started his life as Maria Ludwig Michael Mies dressed up his background as best he could. Whereas Josef Albers embraced his humble origins and made them central to his identity, Mies invented a new self. Born in Aachen in 1886, he was the son of Amalie Rohe—there was no “van” or “der”—and Michael Mies; Mies van der Rohe’s name, which he assumed when the Bauhaus was in Weimar, was one of his most elegant artistic creations.
Ludwig’s father was eight years younger than his mother. They were both Catholic, and he was their fifth and last child; he had two older brothers and two older sisters. Ludwig’s paternal grandfather was a marble carver, and his father was a stonemason. It was an upbringing with few luxuries.
Michael Mies put the children to work at a young age. This was a necessity. Early in Ludwig’s childhood, Michael’s business, which had briefly flourished in the early 1890s, suffered financial reverses and went into such a sharp decline that it became impossible to pay workers’ wages. For All Saints’ Day, when people wanted grave monuments, Ludwig was given the task of carving the letters on them. He would in time develop a keen instinct for the finer things in life, but he learned the tough truths of stone first.
His mother, meanwhile, took him to mass almost every Sunday in the impressively grand but splendidly simple Palatine Chapel, built by Charlemagne around A.D. 800, when he made Aachen the capital of his growing empire. The clarity of its design impressed Ludwig; so did the power of balanced forms and harmonious proportions to suggest a totally different universe from the one he knew at home. He needed that domain of mental escape, for family life only got tougher as he approached adolescence. At age fifteen, Ludwig had to drop out of school to become an unpaid apprentice in construction work. His main jobs were to lay bricks and deliver coffee to the other workers. The idea was for him to get sufficient training so he could earn money, but when his parents stopped supporting him when he was sixteen, the builders still would not pay him for his work.
Forced to look elsewhere, Ludwig landed himself a job as a draftsman in a stucco factory. He quickly discovered that he had only just begun to harden himself to life’s difficulties. His boss, annoyed because of an error the sixteen-year-old had made in a drawing, threatened him physically. Ludwig told his employer, “Don’t try that again,” and walked out.2 The employer sent for the police, who agreed that such behavior was intolerable for a youth and went to apprehend the ruffian at his parents’ home. Ludwig’s brother met the uniformed officers at the door and argued that Ludwig had no obligation to return. Members of the Mies family put up strong arguments, and the police retreated, but shortly thereafter, Ludwig had a second encounter with the law. Inebriated, he mounted a large monument of Kaiser Wilhelm I and hopped into the saddle next to the emperor. This time when a policeman came he charged Ludwig. But the young man was too drunk to get down and be taken to jail. Again, Ludwig’s brother, who was on the scene and somewhat more sober, came to his rescue. He persuaded the policeman to go with him to get a ladder. By the time they returned, Ludwig had managed to scramble down and flee.
He remained in Aachen a bit longer, without further encounters with the law, and took odd jobs with some local architects, for whom he did whatever was asked of him. Then he made an even greater escape than his flight from the emperor’s saddle: he took a train to Berlin. It was 1905; he was nineteen.
LIKE ALBERS, who would be born two years later in nearby Bottrop, Mies was magnetically attracted to the sophisticated world of the capital. But while Albers would go to Berlin to advance his education and then return to his birthplace to work, Mies never went home again. Once he had tasted the pleasures of cosmopolitan life, he would not forsake them. And while both of these men from working-class backgrounds would marry sophisticated and wealthy Berliners, for Mies the marriage was merely a stepping-stone into a milieu he craved, while Albers’s alliance would be lifelong, enduring even after Anni’s family lost everything after the rise of the Nazis.
The first thing Mies did in forging his new life was to go to work for the architect Bruno Paul. He also took up printmaking. One day he was in the process of chiseling a woodcut when an elegant young woman approached his supervisor in the print workshop and said she hoped she might find a young artist who could design a birdbath for her.3 The supervisor did not suggest Mies, who might have executed as well as designed it, but the project for her garden was so successful that the woman came back to the supervisor saying that she and her husband were now looking for a young architect whom they could hire to design a house for them in the wealthy suburb of Neubabelsberg. The printmaker, knowing that nineteen-year-old Mies worked for Bruno Paul as well as in the print shop, recommended him. The woman, Frau Riehl, invited Ludwig Mies to dinner that evening.
Mies’s colleagues instructed him that he would be expected to dress formally. He rushed frantically “to all the desks in Paul’s office, borrowing money from anyone I could find so that I might buy a frock coat.” He also bought a cravat, which he later decided was completely wrong: “some wild yellow thing, totally out of place.”4
Mies van der Rohe later described that first encounter with the haut monde. He saw himself as having been a total rube, the ultimate provincial lad in the big city. He felt like a clumsy intruder as he observed the man ahead of him, in tails and covered with medals, gliding gracefully across the parquet. Mies had the impression that, as the host smoothly greeted one guest after another, he stuck out as a bumpkin.
In the following days, however, he showed no lack of mettle. Herr Riehl was enthusiastic about the neophyte, but Frau Riehl was not. Mies managed to convince her of his merits. Then, once he had secured the job, and Bruno Paul suggested he do it in the office under Paul’s guidance, Mies vetoed the idea. That decision cost him his day job, but allowed him to complete his first architectural commission on his own.
The house was not remarkable, but it was a decent start. By the time the twenty-six-year-old Ludwig Mies was photographed on the Riehl house veranda, his attire was impeccable, his wing collar and understated cravat and pinstripe trousers as correct as his cutaway. It did no harm that he had the face of a young prince. Mies was one of those people whose handsomeness opened doors, and who knew how to put his assets to good use.