Mies van der Rohe’s professional career was one of continuous exploration, endless ambition, and a tireless search for what modern architecture should be and stand for.

Becoming the director of the Bauhaus would have been the pick of a career for many architects, however, for Mies it was only the beginning. By the time the Nazis forced the Bauhaus to close, he had already designed such iconic buildings as the Barcelona Pavilion or the Tugendhat House, yet some of his best works were still to come.

Mies left Germany and emigrated to the US in 1937, looking for a more favorable environment to pursue his vision, and oh my did he achieve it!

But how could a single person’s ideas have such a deep impact on a discipline as bast as architecture? Way before moving to the US Mies understood his buildings and the ones from a handful of contemporary colleagues who shared his ideals would not be enough to stand up against centuries of tradition. Education was the only way to make his ideas endure. Only by planting that seed in future generations would modern architecture stand a chance of succeeding.

Mies believed his ideas could be translated into an architectural language that could objectively be taught and learned, and that this language could be applied, and give an appropriate solution, to any type of building. And just like the Rosetta Stone will always remain an invaluable key to understanding the evolution of language, Mies’s visual dictionary for a modern architectural language deserves to be studied, cared for and cherished.