Mies van der Rohe and the construction of the metropolis, from Berlin to Chicago

Over the past twenty-five years, knowledge of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's life and work has been profoundly transformed by numerous studies of his projects and buildings, and of the contexts in which they were developed. On the basis of recent discoveries in archival collections and interpretations shedding new light on the context and figures of his architectural invention, an overview of the trajectory of the man who was the last director of the Bauhaus will be proposed. Mies can no longer be seen as a solitary figure or misanthrope, but as a complete architect of great intellectual ambition, deeply involved in the transformation of two metropolises often placed in parallel: Berlin, where he imagined his provocative manifestos of the 1920s and built landmark buildings; and Chicago, where in the 1950s he continued to perfect a limited number of architectural types emblematic of his second life, which found America as its stage.