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R E S T O R AT I O N | D AV I D C H I P P E R F I E L D A R C H I T E C T S
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to America in 1938, where he became a
leading light of American modernism in
the post-war period, designing, among
other landmark works of architecture, the
radically transparent Farnsworth House
in Plano, Illinois; the Seagram Building,
a gleaming Park Avenue skyscraper
that he designed in collaboration with
Philip Johnson; and a series of glass
towers in his adopted hometown of
Chicago. Cutting across all his projects
is Mies' architectural pursuit of beauty
and a pragmatic elegance achieved with
functional materials.
The same is true of Neue Nationalgalerie,
a building bearing all the markings of
Mies—meticulous, essentialist, rational—
museum for modern, mainly
early 20th century art, Neue
N a t i o n a l g a l e r i e i s i t s e l f a
masterpiece by German-American
architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Located in Berlin, Germany, this temple to
modernity is an icon of Mies' "less is more"
edict, known for its graceful, glazed façade
and austere aesthetic, and also because of
the master modernist behind it, who, along
with his Bauhaus contemporaries Walter
Gropius and Le Corbusier, helped pioneer
the International Style—that subspecies of
modern architecture characterized by flat
roofs, simple forms, steel frames, loads
of glass, and a conspicuous absence of
applied ornament.
A product of all these qualities, Neue
Nationalgalerie marks Mies' last
construction. It is also the only building that
he completed in Europe after emigrating
