Mies wrote little: short theses in the avant-garde magazine G (1923), a few lectures and many remembered sayings. From them, and from his buildings, comes the doctrine of an architecture reduced to structure, enclosure and open, universal space.
In the “working theses” printed in G in 1923 Mies rejected aesthetic speculation and formalism and described architecture as the will of the age expressed in space. His projects of the early 1920s (glass skyscrapers, a concrete office building, brick and concrete country houses) pursued the consequences of the frame with a rigour that culminated in the Barcelona Pavilion (1929), where walls slide freely beneath a roof carried only by eight steel columns.
In Chicago, where he directed the architecture school of the Illinois Institute of Technology from 1938, Mies developed the steel-and-glass tower (860–880 Lake Shore Drive, 1949–51; the Seagram Building in New York, 1954–58) and the column-free hall. His admirers summarised his method in phrases (“less is more”, “God is in the details”) that he used but did not coin.
The book, part by part
I Working theses (1923)
Against formalism; building as the spatial expression of the epoch.
II Space and structure
The free plan beneath a roof on a grid of columns; the universal, column-free hall.
Rules: Less is more
III The steel-and-glass tower
The curtain wall hung from the frame, and the I-section mullion that expresses it.
Rules: The curtain wall