Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

On the morning of April 11 1933, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe turned up for work as normal. It was not a normal day. The Bauhaus, the 20th century's greatest school of art, architecture and design, was closed. The building was cordoned off by armed police and surrounded by crowds.





Mies' pace quickened. "Stop!" he shouted at the officers. "What's the idea? This is my school! It belongs to me!" Not any more, said an officer: the Gestapo was scouring the school for a secret printing press suspected of publishing anti-Nazi propaganda, and documents linking Bauhaus to the Communist party. Mies was released after an interrogation. But the Bauhaus stayed shut.





The next day, Mies, knuckle-headed and stubborn as ever, went to the top. Alfred Rosenberg, the conservative minister of culture in the newly elected Nazi government, was renowned for his iron temperament. But then, so was Mies. "The Bauhaus has a certain idea," began Mies, in his nagging, methodical monotone, "but this idea has nothing to do with politics. Look at your writing table, this shabby writing table. Do you like it? I would throw it out the window." Mies rarely minced his words.





"That is what we at the Bauhaus want to do. We want to have good objects so that we do not have to throw them out of the window." Rosenberg was an architect himself. "Then we will understand each other," said Mies. "What do you expect me to do?" asked Rosenberg. "The Bauhaus is supported by forces fighting our forces."





"For any cultural effort," replied Mies, "one needs peace, and I would like to know whether we will have that peace." The Bauhaus stayed shut.





So Mies tried another route. Every other day, he marched to Gestapo headquarters. This time, it took him three months to get to the top. On July 21, with the Bauhaus on the brink of bankruptcy, a letter arrived from the Gestapo giving permission to reopen, but only if the curriculum was rewritten to suit "the demands of the new State", and if two of its leftwing teachers, Ludwig Hilberseimer and the painter Vasili Kandinsky, were replaced with "individuals who guarantee to support the principles of the National Socialist ideology". Mies gathered his colleagues, opened the champagne, and promptly closed the school himself.

S.R. Crown Hall, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, designed by Ludwig Mies van

Mies spent the mid-1930s designing endless variations of prototypical, ideal buildings - the museum, the office, the university - each, like Erik Satie's Gymnopedies, variations on a theme, subtly different from the last. They remained on paper. He built up a backlog of fantasies that he'd build one day, once the Nazis had disappeared. And he had every faith that they would.





Finally he decided to leave Germany in late 1937, following up one of the many offers of work from wealthy Americans, which had started coming his way after a star billing at the opening exhibition of New York's new Museum of Modern Art in 1932. Since he was in the neighbourhood, he decided to visit Frank Lloyd Wright, the doyen of American architecture, in his Wisconsin ideas factory, Taliesin West.





Mies liked the midwest, with its flat, empty, abstract fields, ripe for his otherworldly spaces. It suited his aesthetic. And, deep in the belly of the continent, far from the Nazis - far, indeed, from any interference - it suited his way of working. No one would disturb him here. Standing in a field outside Wright's studio, he shouted, "Freiheit! Es ist ein Reich!" ("Freedom! This is a kingdom!") Mies had packed for an overnight stay, but ended up staying a week. "Poor Mr Mies," said Wright. "His white shirt is quite grey!"