Mies Van Der Rohe: Critical Essays

Essays by Wolf Tegethoff, Richard Pommer, and Fritz Neumeyer. Interview with James Ingo Freed.

The rich legacy of scholarly and critical reassessments of Mies van der Rohe continues to grow since his centenary in 1986. This book which had its origins in the historic centennial exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, presents four provocative new writings on Mies augmented by 150 illustrations from MOMA's Mies van der Rohe Archive and other sources.

In his insightful introduction, Franz Schulze, author of the acclaimed Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography, discusses the reasons why Mies's art and name evokes such a different response today and compares Mies to Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier in terms of critical fortune.

Wolf Tegethoff traces the maturation of Mies's thought during the 1920s, bringing fascinating new research to his examination of this complex European period. Art historian Richard Pommer examines Mies's political ideology and those of other artists of the modern movement in the Weimar years and the first years of the Third Reich. Fritz Neumeyer addresses the issues of tradition and modernity in Mies's life's work through a detailed analysis of several of his earliest buildings. In the concluding piece, architect James Ingo Freed, who studied under Mies at the Illinois Institute of Technology and succeeded him as director of ITT, offers penetrating comments on Mies as an educator and as an architect during his American years.

Franz Schulze is Hollender Professor of Art at Lake Forest College. Wolf Tegethoff is Professor at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. Richard Pommer is Professor of Art History at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. Fritz Neumeyer is Professor of Architectural Theory at the Technical University, Berlin. James Ingo Freed is a partner in the architectural firm I.M. Pei & Partners. Distributed for the Museum of Modern Art.