We should attempt to bring nature, houses, and human beings together in a higher unity.
Ludwig Mies Van Der RoheRead
Reinforced concrete buildings are by nature skeletal buildings. No noodles nor armoured turrets. A construction of girders that carry the weight, and walls that carry no weight. That is to say, buildings consisting of skin and bones.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the simplistic and essential nature of modern architecture, highlighting how form follows function.
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe's quote illustrates the philosophy of modern architecture, where buildings are designed to reveal their structural elements. By describing reinforced concrete buildings as 'skeletal,' he conveys the idea that the visible framework, or 'girders,' is what supports the structure, while the walls serve merely as a skin—emphasizing a blend of aesthetics and functionality that defines modernist design.
Themes
ArchitectureModernismDesignStructureFunctionality
In practice
Example use cases
In an architecture lecture, discussing the principles of modernist design.
More from Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe
All quotes →Architecture depends on facts, but its real field of activity lies in the realm of the significance.
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The demands of the time for objectivity and functionality must be fulfilled. If that clearly happens, then the buildings of our day will convey the greatness of which the age is capable, and only a fool will maintain that they lack it.
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I think that an industrial process is not like a rubber stamp. Everything has to be put together and, as such, should have its own expression.
Ludwig Mies Van Der RoheRead
Modern buildings of our time are so huge that one must group them. Often the space between these buildings is as important as the buildings themselves.
Ludwig Mies Van Der RoheRead
It is not architectural achievement that makes the structures of earlier times seem to us so full of significance but the circumstance that antique temples, Roman basilicas, and even the cathedrals of the Middle Ages are not the works of single personalities but creations of entire epochs.
Ludwig Mies Van Der RoheRead
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