Painted wood, metal, wooden tiles, plastic fence steps and windows
Grete and Fritz Tugendhat, a married couple who were both children of German-Jewish textile industrialists, commissioned Mies to design their hillside residence in the Czech city of Brno, a major center of European textile production. The home’s enormous glass panes offered panoramic views of the surrounding landscape and the factories in the valley below.
The house featured many technological innovations; for instance, the glass front of the living space could be mechanically lowered into the ground. The residence also included a water-powered air-conditioning system. The production of the home’s steel frame, glass panels, and twenty-nine identical cruciform columns was made possible by mass-production technologies.
2023
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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
American, born Germany. 1886–1969 2063 works onlineOne of the leading lights of modernist architecture, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created a body of work—ranging from tubular steel furniture to iconic office buildings—that influenced generations of architects worldwide.
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International Style
A style of modern architecture that emerged in Europe (principally Germany and France) in the 1920s and 1930s. Historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and architect Philip Johnson coined the term International Style to describe this plain, unadorned architecture of rectilinear forms built of steel, reinforced concrete, and glass.
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Architecture in the Age of Industry
Gallery 511The early 1900s saw a boom of industry in the United States, embodied most notably by Henry Ford’s development of assembly line manufacturing.
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