In the Tugendhat Villa stands an onyx wall that, at dusk, lights up from within with a honey-coloured glow. It is not load-bearing. It holds nothing up; it merely divides space and gives it a mood. The man who erected that slab in Brno in 1930, less than thirty years later, determined what the New York skyline would look like. A direct line connects that onyx and the bronze tower on Park Avenue. His name is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and this year he would have been one hundred and forty years old.
The story, usually told as two chapters, European and American, is in fact one idea brought to fruition on two continents.
The House in Brno That Was Ahead of Its Time
The Tugendhat Villa was built between 1929 and 1930 for the family of Brno textile entrepreneurs. For its time, it was almost a provocation. Instead of load-bearing walls, there were steel columns coated in chrome, so the main living space is a single open area that both family members and guests perceive as a landscape, not a series of rooms. Glass walls facing the garden could be electrically lowered into the floor. And in the middle, that onyx slab, a purely sensory element in a house that otherwise did nothing extra.
This arrangement is called a free plan, and Mies perfected it here. Since 2001, the villa has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List, as the only monument of modern architecture in the Czech Republic. Brno at that time was not a periphery where waves arrived from elsewhere. It was a place where modernism was written.
When the School Closed
In 1930, Mies took over the leadership of the Bauhaus, the most influential design school of the twentieth century. He became its last director. When Nazi pressure escalated, the school ceased to exist in 1933. For an architect whose language was openness, steel, and glass, there was no longer any space left in the country.
In 1937, at the age of fifty-one, Mies emigrated to the United States and settled in Chicago. From 1938, he headed the Department of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He was starting over, in a foreign country and on a different scale. But what he brought with him remained unchanged: the conviction that beauty arises from honest construction, not from ornamentation.
Chicago: Truth Built from Steel
On American soil, Mies got what Europe had failed to offer. Grandeur. For the IIT campus, he designed a whole complex of buildings, culminating in Crown Hall, a steel and glass hall where space is not divided at all, because the roof is supported by girders above the roof, not by columns inside. He extended the same logic he used for the living room in Brno to the entire building here.
Between 1949 and 1951, he built the Lake Shore Drive twin residential towers on the shore of Lake Michigan. Black steel, glass, no decoration. The building as a clear grid that the eye can read at first glance. Both critics and admirers understood that this was not just a style. It was a guide to what a modern city could look like.
Seagram: Less That Cost the Most
In 1958, Mies, along with Philip Johnson, completed the Seagram Building skyscraper on New York's Park Avenue. Bronze mullions, tinted glass, a façade as calm as a still surface. Mies did something that must have been anathema to the developer: he set the building back from the street and left an empty stone plaza in front of it. He sacrificed rentable square footage for distance, breathing room, a view.
It is here that his most quoted phrase makes sense. Less is more. And to it, a second, less known but more apt: God is in the details. The Seagram doesn't appear expensive because it's ornate. It appears expensive because every joint, every edge, and every proportion are resolved to completion. Mies spent a fortune to make the building look simple.
The bronze tower changed the rules. The setback from the street, the stone forecourt, the clean grid of the facade became the vocabulary of the American skyscraper for an entire generation. What we perceive today as the self-evident face of business centers is largely Mies's invention.
What Remained of Brno in New York
When you place the Tugendhat Villa and the Seagram Building side by side, they look like two distinct worlds: a family home above a city and an office tower above a metropolis. Yet beneath the surface, they are the same statements. Free, open space. Structure revealed, not hidden. Material that does not pretend to be something else. And one additional sensory luxury, onyx in Brno, bronze in New York, which says that purity does not have to be cold.
Between the two buildings lie less than thirty years, an ocean, and one emigration. The idea remained unchanged. Mies simply built it once for a family and a second time for an entire city.
What to Take Away From This
Modern architecture, which we today consider an American import, has one of its roots in Brno. The same person, the same principle, a different scale. And the reverse is also true: honesty of material and the serenity of open space are not matters of a large budget or a famous address. They are decisions that can be made in a family home just as in a skyscraper. Mies proved that the hardest and most expensive thing in design is to make things look effortless.
We understand that serenity, material, and sense of detail. It is the world from which brote. originates, and about which we continue to write in the journal.