Quotes from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

You can teach students how to work; you can teach them technique - how to use reason; you can even give them a sense of proportions - of order. You can teach them general principles.

True education is concerned not only with practical goals but also with values. Our aims assure us of our material life, our values make possible our spiritual life.

What finally is beauty? Certainly nothing that can be calculated or measured. It is always something imponderable, something that lies between things.

I especially remember that on All Souls Day, when so many people wanted new monuments for the graves, our whole family pitched in. I did the lettering on the stones, my brother did the carving, and my sisters put the finishing touches on them, the gold leaf and all that.

The tendency of our time is wholly oriented toward the secular. The efforts of the mystics will remain episodes. Despite a deepening of our conceptions of life, we will build no cathedrals.

It took me a long time to understand the relationship between ideas and between objective facts. But after I clearly understood this relationship, I didn't fool around with other wild ideas. That is one of the main reasons why I just make my scheme as simple as possible.

Technology is rooted in the past. It dominates the present and tends into the future. It is a real historical movement - one of the great movements which shape and represent their epoch.

Just as we acquaint ourselves with materials, and just as we must understand functions, we must become familiar with the psychological and spiritual factors of the day. No cultural activity is possible otherwise, for we are dependent on the spirit of our time.

Most of our designs are developed long before there is a practical possibility of carrying them out. I do that on purpose and have done it all my life. I do it when I am interested in something.

1926 was the most significant year. Looking back, it seems that it was not just a year in the sense of time. It was a year of great realisation or awareness. It seems to me that at certain times of the history of man, the understanding of certain situations ripens.

In addition to the wishes of the client, the position, orientation, and size of the plot also play an important role in determining the final plan of the house. The 'where' and 'how' of the exterior then follows naturally from all of that.

It is much better to have just one idea, and if the idea is clear, then you can fight for it. That is how you can get things done.

Education must lead us from the irresponsible opinion to true responsible judgment. It must lead us from chance and arbitrariness to rational clarity and intellectual order. Therefore, let us guide our students over the road of discipline from materials, through function, to creative work.

I thought a lot and I controlled my thoughts in my work - and I controlled my work through my thoughts.

Wherever technology reaches its real fulfillment, it transcends into architecture.

The problem of architecture has always been the same throughout time. Its authentic quality is reached through its proportions, and the proportions cost nothing. In fact, most of them are proportions among things, not the things themselves. Art is almost always a question of proportions.

The unformed is not worse than the over-formed. The former is nothing; the latter is mere appearance. Real form presupposes real life.

You cannot save wonderful towns. You can only save wonderful towns by building new ones.

Where can we find greater structural clarity than in the wooden buildings of old? Where else can we find such unity of material, construction and form? here, the wisdom of whole generations is stored.

Nothing can express the aim and meaning of our work better than the profound words of St. Augustine - 'Beauty is the splendor of Truth.'

You can use up all the slums for new development. In all the cities of the world, there are large areas of these. Also, you can avoid the spread of these silly suburban houses. Chicago has thousands of them all over the place.

It is not architectural achievement that makes the structures of earlier times seem to us so full of significance but the circumstance that antique temples, Roman basilicas, and even the cathedrals of the Middle Ages are not the works of single personalities but creations of entire epochs.

I discovered by working with actual glass models that the important thing is the play of reflections and not the effect of light and shadow, as in ordinary buildings.

We refuse to recognize problems of form, but only problems of building. Form is not the aim of our work, but only the result. Form, by itself, does not exist. Form as an aim is formalism; and that we reject.