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its finished product—and as testament to
remarkable talents of those involved, which
included a select league of contractors and
architects Philip Johnson, Ely Jacques
Kahn and Robert Allan Jacobs—the
Seagram Building took only a few years
to devise and construct. (In late 1954
Mies had been selected for the project
by Phyllis Lambert, daughter of Seagram
CEO Samuel Bronfman. By late 1957
the company was moving into their new
building.)
It had been only three years, yet the power
of Mies, then 71 years old, to conceive and
execute such a thing had been decades in
the making, starting not long after his birth.
Seeds of Mies: Shocking. Technically
Buildable.
Born in Germany in 1886, Mies would
study and labor in the workshop of his
father, a master mason like his father before
him, before beginning an architectural
apprenticeship at age 15. In his 20s while
working for Peter Behrens, a leading
German architect and industrial designer,
Mies worked as construction supervisor
for the German Embassy at St. Petersburg.
(Not coincidentally, two other pillars of
Modernist architecture, Le Corbusier and
Walter Gropius, were also employed in
Behrens studio during this time period.)
The significance of these years show
how the architect's fundamental roots
were in building—which is where they
would remain. "By actually working with
stone he acquired as a boy what many
school-trained architects never learn—a
thorough knowledge of the possibilities and
limitations of masonry construction—and
as a result of his early training he has never
been guilty of the solecisms of 'paper
architecture'" wrote Philip Johnson in a
1947 Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) press
release on the eve of a Mies retrospective.
When it comes to tracing pivotal seeds
of the Seagram Building and other Mies
landmarks—there are the detailed, early
plans for his skyscraper visions, starting as
far back as the late 1910s. His five famous
projects. These plans were so-named for
their startling innovation and influence;
they were published frequently in Germany
throughout the 1920s and a hundred years
later are still considered touchstones of
Modernist design. His five plans included
two soaring glass skyscrapers and a glass-
and-concrete office building; all as stark
Top, Mies' final building, the skyscraper at 330 North Wabash in Chicago. Credit: Stewart Dawson, licensed under CC BY 2.0. creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode. Bottom, The majestic Seagram Building.
Credit: Tom Ravenscrodt, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode.
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