“My heart went out!”

Illinois Institute of Technology’s Crown Hall covered in wet snow, March 2014.
photogrpghs by versluis
South elevation and entrance
Mies van der Rohe, architect
Open in 1956

If Peter Behrens, (d. 1940) had seen Mies’s Crown Hall perhaps he would have exclaimed, “My heart went out!” The quote was Behrens’s remark when he saw Mies’s 1927 Weissenhofsiedlung project [*]. (1)

These photographs indicate Mies's classicistic perspective on architectural form in glass and steel. The modernistic formal language and principles of design served the Miesian framework and became the Bauhaus curriculum of architecture. The building is emblematic of Mies’s pedagogical perspective and program on how to become an architect.

*The Weissenhofsiedlung was housing (a subdivision) built for the Deutscher Werkbund in Stuttgart.

1. Bax, Marty. Bauhaus Lecture Notes 1930-1933. Amsterdam: Architectura & Natura Press, 1991. 53. Print.