This book examines the life and work of one of the great architects of our time, Mies van der Rohe. Beginning and ending in Berlin, from the pre-1914 houses for the intelligentsia to the final masterpiece of 1968, the Neue Nationalgalerie, this essay records the stages of a distinguished career from the Bauhaus to Chicago, Detroit, Montreal and to New York, with the famous Seagram Building, confirming Mies van der Rohe as the equal of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier.

Jean-Louis Cohen brings out the paradoxes in this elegant, remote, refined and mysterious personality: the man who built the monument to Rosa Luxembourg and who flirted with the Nazi regime; the architect who affirmed, in one of his famous aphorisms, that 'less is more' and yet does not hesitate to use the most sophisticated materials for his buildings.

This study shows how Mies 'designed, in his initial types, and in their development, categories of buildings as symbolic of the capitalist way of production as of the Florentine palaces of Quattrocento society'.