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Where can we find greater structural clarity than in the wooden buildings of old? Where else can we find such unity of material, construction and form? here, the wisdom of whole generations is stored.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -
The demands of the time for objectivity and functionality must be fulfilled. If that clearly happens, then the buildings of our day will convey the greatness of which the age is capable, and only a fool will maintain that they lack it.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
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You can teach students how to work; you can teach them technique - how to use reason; you can even give them a sense of proportions - of order. You can teach them general principles.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -
Each material is only what we make it.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -
What would life be like if everybody insisted you must have actually built such-and-such a thing by yourself? I'd be an old man and have nothing to show for the aging.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -
The unformed is not worse than the over-formed. The former is nothing; the latter is mere appearance. Real form presupposes real life.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -
A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -
We must understand the motives and forces of our time and analyze their structure from three points of view: the material, the functional, and the spiritual. We must make clear in what respects our epoch differs from others and in what respects it is similar.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
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After my time in Holland, an inner battle ensued in which I tried to free myself from the influence of Schinkelesque classicism.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -
I especially remember that on All Souls Day, when so many people wanted new monuments for the graves, our whole family pitched in. I did the lettering on the stones, my brother did the carving, and my sisters put the finishing touches on them, the gold leaf and all that.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -
God is in the details.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -
The building art is man's spatial dialogue with his environment and demonstrates how he asserts himself therein and how he masters it.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -
The architect must get to know the people who will live in the planned house. From their needs, the rest inevitably follows.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -
We have to know that life cannot be changed by us. It will be changed. But not by us. We can only guide the things that can cause physical change.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
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You can use up all the slums for new development. In all the cities of the world, there are large areas of these. Also, you can avoid the spread of these silly suburban houses. Chicago has thousands of them all over the place.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -
Simply by not owning three medium-sized castles in Tuscany I have saved enough money in the last forty years on insurance premiums alone to buy a medium-sized castle in Tuscany.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -
Behrens had a great sense of the great form. that was his main interest; and that I certainly understood and learned from him.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -
The office building is a building for work, organization, lucidity and economy. Light, spacious working rooms, clearly arranged, undivided, only organized according to the pattern of the firm.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -
Architecture depends on its time. It is the crystallization of its inner structure, the slow unfolding of its form.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -
What finally is beauty? Certainly nothing that can be calculated or measured. It is always something imponderable, something that lies between things.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
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We do not evaluate the result but the starting point of the creative process. Precisely, this shows whether the form was discovered by starting from life, or for its own sake. That is why I consider the creative process so essential. Life for us is the decisive factor.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -
Architecture has the power to create order out of unholy confusion.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -
In 1912, when I was working in The Hague, I first saw a drawing by Louis Sullivan of one of his buildings. It interested me.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -
I discovered by working with actual glass models that the important thing is the play of reflections and not the effect of light and shadow, as in ordinary buildings.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe