Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Last director of the Bauhaus before its 1933 closure; from 1938 director of architecture at IIT Chicago. Built the Barcelona Pavilion (1929), Tugendhat House (1930), Farnsworth House (1951), Seagram Building (1958), and Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie (1968).

"Less is more." Mies stripped buildings to a structural skeleton and a glass skin, with materials (travertine, onyx, bronze) carrying the entire ornamental load. The exposed steel I-beam became his rhetorical device.

His skin-and-bones tower template defined corporate American architecture for two generations. The Mies van der Rohe Foundation administers the EU Mies Award (the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture).