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Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

March 27, 2012 by · Comments Off on Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe 

Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the groundbreaking German architect whose sharp, angular designs still feature prominently on city skylines across North America, got a Google Doodle Tuesday for his 126th birthday.

Mies, born in Aachen in 1886, was one of the pioneers of modern architecture. After beginning his career in Germany, he fled under pressure from the Nazis in 1937 and eventually settled in Chicago. To this day, Mies’s buildings remain some of the city’s most prominent landmarks.

Mies’s S.R. Crown Hall – which bears a striking resemblance to Tuesday’s Google Doodle – houses the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he was director, and is a National Historic Landmark.

In Toronto, Mies is responsible for the Toronto-Dominion Centre, a six-acre cluster of buildings that, on any given week day, houses about 20,000 workers.

He also designed the Seagram Building in New York, the Martin Luther King Jr. library in Washington D.C. and Westmount Square in Westmount, Que.

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