When we speak about Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, we usually think of the great canonical works: the Barcelona Pavilion, the Tugendhat House, the Seagram Building. His reputation rests on a clarity of form that seems timeless, as if it had always been there. But the journey that led him to this stripped-down, almost ascetic modernism was anything but linear. The early years of Mies’ career are full of detours, experiments, and compromises that reveal not only his gradual formation as an architect but also the complex social fabric of Wilhelmine Germany.
Mies grew up in Aachen at the turn of the twentieth century. His family background was modest – his father ran a stone-carving workshop – and he had no access to higher education. The absence of a university degree closed the doors of the technical schools to him, so he took the alternative path of practice: learning by drawing, building, and absorbing. This hands-on entry into architecture is decisive. Unlike many of his contemporaries who came from elite backgrounds, Mies’ starting point was a craft tradition rather than an academic pedigree.
By 1905, the young draftsman left Aachen for Berlin. That move was more than a change of city; it was a shift into the cultural vortex of the empire. Berlin was booming with new industries, exhibitions, and artistic debates. Figures such as Bruno Paul and Peter Behrens were beginning to rethink the role of design in an industrial society, and it is in their offices that Mies found both mentorship and opportunity. Paul gave him a first commission – the Riehl House in Potsdam – while Behrens introduced him to a world where architecture, product design, and corporate identity were seamlessly integrated. In Behrens’ studio Mies briefly overlapped with Walter Gropius and the young Le Corbusier, a reminder of how small and tightly knit the avant-garde circles really were.
The early commissions reveal a searching spirit. The Riehl House still belongs to the comfortable bourgeois idiom of Neo-Biedermeier, its strongest gesture being a massive retaining wall that transforms the sloping site into a kind of podium. A few years later, Mies tried his hand at monumental competition projects, such as a proposal for a Bismarck memorial on the Rhine. The design combined abstracted colonnades and heavy masses in a way that echoed both Friedrich Gilly and Karl Friedrich Schinkel, showing how deeply the young architect was still rooted in the Prussian classical tradition.
Perhaps the most dramatic episode of these years was his involvement in the Dutch project for the industrialist couple Helene Kröller-Müller and Anton Kröller. Initially called in to assist Behrens, Mies soon produced his own competing design for a grand villa that was meant to house both family life and a growing art collection. The commission ended in disappointment. Hendrik Petrus Berlage was favored instead, and Mies’ scheme was shelved. Yet the episode was formative: it forced him to test himself against established masters, and it made clear how far his ambitions reached.
World War I intervened, interrupting private building in Germany but not ending Mies’ professional activity. He managed to secure a major commission during the conflict: the Urbig House at the Griebnitzsee near Berlin. This large villa, completed between 1915 and 1917, is a fascinating hybrid. On the one hand, it is steeped in eclectic references to eighteenth-century palaces, Schinkelian motifs, and even the sober elegance of Frank Lloyd Wright’s early houses. On the other, it already hints at the themes that would dominate Mies’ mature work: the careful staging of the relationship between interior and landscape, the deliberate sequencing of movement through spaces, the subtle play between heavy walls and open vistas. It is not yet modernism, but the seeds are there.
Seen from today, these “pre-modern” projects occupy an ambiguous position. They are neither celebrated masterpieces nor complete failures. They oscillate between tradition and experiment, revealing an architect still trying to find his voice. But precisely because of this in-between quality they are so valuable. They remind us that modernism did not spring fully formed from the minds of its protagonists. It was the product of struggle, compromise, and gradual emancipation from the weight of history.
Mies’ early works deserve attention not as hidden gems of modernism, but as laboratories of formation. They show a young architect grappling with Schinkel and Wright, with the conventions of the villa and the expectations of wealthy patrons, with the setbacks of competition defeats and the compromises of war commissions. Only by tracing these detours can we fully appreciate the radical clarity of his later architecture. Modernism, in Mies’ case, was not a straight path but a winding road – and it is in those bends and diversions that his human story emerges most vividly.
Architekt und Architekturhistoriker
Luigi Monzo 