"Space, Tectonics, Morphology": Understanding the Architecture of Mies van der Rohe

"For Mies, modern architecture in the age of industrialization required a renewal of the art of building from within. This could not be achieved by inventing a new formal language, nor by turning architecture toward technology, as many of his modern colleagues assumed. In his view, the modern architect had to recover the intrinsic value of architectural phenomena and fuse them with new life, rather than abandoning architectural values in the name of a new era. From this perspective, Mies combined, for example, classical monumentality and modern transparency, using marble or travertine in combination with modern steel and glass construction.

Mies’s attempt to explore the architectural potential of modern steel construction and the language of formal abstraction was not dedicated to rationalization, but to a new measure of spatial freedom. To achieve this, in the late 1920s, Mies developed his concept of the dialogue between opposites and their morphological transformation, brilliantly implemented in the 1929 Barcelona Pavilion. Later, in his American work, Mies transformed modern steel construction into a classical tectonic framework for an open, column-free space." - Fritz Neumeyer