“German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe joined the then Armour Institute of Technology to head both Armour’s and the Art Institute of Chicago’s architecture program. The Art Institute would later separate and form its own program. Mies was given the task of designing a completely new campus, and the result was a spacious, open, 120-acre (0.49 km2) campus set in contrast to the busy, crowded urban neighborhood around it. The first Mies-designed buildings were completed in the mid-1940s, and construction on what is considered the “Mies Campus” continued until the early 1970s.” [See wiki].

Most famously in 1956 Mies designed the SR Crown Hall. [ http://www.mimoa.eu/projects/United%20States/Chicago/S.R.%20Crown%20Hall ]. See also interior colour photographs [ http://static.urbarama.com/photos/medium/2200.jpg ] and [ http://www.andertoons.com/img/cartoon-blog/2010/06/iit-s-r-crown-warhol-1.jpg ].

It is said of the Bauhaus founded in Germany “the question they dared to ask led to new definitions of beauty in the unadorned and practical aspects of the functional”.

Mies aimed at this purity in his design for SR Crown Hall.

A summary of the Bauhaus principles by Alfred Barr (Bauhaus) is as follows:

* most student should face the fact that their future should be involved primarily with industry and mass production rather than with individual craftsmanship.

* teachers in schools of design should be men who are in advance of their profession rather than safely and academically in the rearguard.

* the schools of design should, as the Bauhaus did, bring together the various arts of painting, architechture, theatre, photography, weaving, typography, etc., into a modern synthesis which disregards conventional distinctions between the “fine” and “applied” arts.

* it is harder to design a first rate chair than to paint a second rate painting-and much more useful.

* a school of design should have on its faculty the purely creative and disinterested artist such as the easel painter as a spiritual counterpoint to the practical technician in order that they may work and teach side by side for the benefit of the student.

* manual experience of materials is essential to the student of design- experience at first confined to free experiment and then extended to the practical workshop.

* the study of rational design in terms of techniques and materials should be only the first step in the development of a new and modern sense of beauty

* because we live in the 20th century, the student architect or designer should be offered no refuge in the past but should be equipped for the modern world in its various aspects, artistic, technical, social, economic, spiritual, so that he may function in society not as a decorator but as a vital participant.