Edificio Seagram, Nueva York, 1954-1958

The conventional image of Mies in America as the architect of mullioned high-rise and clear-span steel-frame structures portrays him as a creative genius sprung fully formed into the world as the magisterial designer of new building types. However, this essay casts another image, that of a Mies who would find his way from the elegance of the European avant-garde of the 1920s, through the bluntness of primal industrial pragmatism, to a tough, hardened lyricism that would be uniquely American, and yet would carry within it his earliest visions of “an architecture of his time”... [+]