Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

He championed a steel-and-glass International Style whose actual supports are the dominant feature of the building, and his 1919-21 glass-skyscraper designs set out the idea of 'skin and bones' construction.

He designed the German Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona exposition and the cantilevered Barcelona chair made for it, which became a classic of twentieth-century furniture design.

In the United States he built the Farnsworth House (1951) and, with Philip Johnson, the Seagram Building in New York, while heading the architecture school at the Illinois Institute of Technology until 1958.

When the Seagram chairman said no one would see a brick firewall at the back, Mies insisted on bronze for it, saying 'God would see it,' according to the building's planning director.

This is consistent with applying the same level of finish to places no visitor would notice. Detail Orientation

At the Farnsworth House he ground rivet heads off the steel junctions and polished the welds smooth to make the connections invisible, while leaving the weekend house without closets and with only two small operable windows.

This is consistent with putting the visual ideal ahead of practical convenience, which produced both a celebrated house and a difficult one to live in. Perfectionism

In 1938 he took over the architecture school at the Armour Institute in Chicago (soon renamed the Illinois Institute of Technology) and drew its campus master plan, his first chance to design a group of buildings in an urban centre.

This is consistent with a working life in which teaching a drafting-based curriculum and his own large commissions were closely linked. Collaboration