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"The high priest of curtain-wall modernism, German-born architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is one of those towering talents about whom no facts seem hidden. Since his death in 1969, at age 83, more than two dozen books about his life and work have been published, exploring everything from the picturesque houses he designed in his native Germany in the 1910s to the lean skycrapers he added to the American skyline four decades later, most famously the 1958 Seagram Building in New York City. Yet more tributes are in the pipeline, including Phyllis Lambert's Building Seagram and Detlif Mertins's Mies. One recent book, however, has been largely overlooked by reviewers, perhaps because it appears to be merely a revised edition of a volume that Mies lovers already have on their bookshelves. Other than the title, though, the book is a completely different animal.\n\nPinterestFacebookThe latest\u2014and dramatically different\u2014edition of *Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography.*\n\n Photo courtesy of University of Chicago Press\n\nMies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (University of Chicago Press) was first published in 1985 and received wide acclaim, with Paul Goldberger calling it \"distinguished and eloquent\" and the late Ada Louise Huxtable praising its \"herculean, generally successful effort.\" The new incarnation, released last November, has very little to do with the earlier, magisterial work. For one, the original author, Lake Forest College art professor Franz Schulze, now shares writing credit with Chicago architect Edward Windhorst. For another, fresh research into Mies's American commissions, among them the troubled history of his most alluring American residential work\u2014a transparent glass house for the eminent nephrologist Dr. Edith Farnsworth\u2014has resulted in an almost entirely new book. As Windhorst told me in a telephone interview recently, \"Only 10 to 15 percent [of Schulze's original manuscript] survives.\"\n\nPinterestFacebookThe Farnsworth House (1951) in Plano, Illinois, now a modernist icon, was once a highly controversial home. Photo: \u00A9 Arcaid Images/Alamy\n\nWindhorst and Schulze began their literary renovation project in 2004, four years after the architect began encouraging his friend to consider a rewrite. Windhorst noted that much new information about Mies had been uncovered in the intervening years, especially about the European period of his life. The original book skimmed over construction details, but in the new edition technical aspects are addressed at fascinating length, proving beyond a doubt how the practical knowledge Mies gained from being the son and grandson of stone carvers greatly influenced his elegantly functional designs. (\"We do not build for fun,\" he told Life magazine. \"We build for a purpose.\") Says Schulze, admiringly, of his collaboration with Windhorst, \"One of the differences between an architect and an architectural historian is that the architect knows how buildings are built, while the historian explains the difference between Ionic and Doric orders.\"\n\nPinterestFacebookEdith Farnsworth with Myron Goldsmith, a student and later, employee, of Mies's, in 1950.\n\n Photo: Edward Duckett\n\nThe team also agreed to explore the daily operations of Mies's Chicago practice, to gain greater insights into the architect's working habits and his relationships with his staff. Since Windhorst knew some of the office's major players, \"we interviewed them,\" he says. Those associates have since died, making the conversations valuable records of an especially fertile moment in modern American architecture. \"It allowed Franz and me to tell the story of what it was like to be in Mies's office, after he came to America in 1937 and reinvented himself in a place where he didn't speak the language and knew almost no one,\" Windhorst says. \"That story has never been told in one place by anybody before.\"\n\nPinterestFacebook860\u2013880 North Lake Shore Drive; part of a grouping of Chicago towers contemporary critics referred to as the \"glass menagerie.\" Photo courtesy of University of Chicago Press\n\nMies is no hagiography, though, and its authors have interwoven their detailed examination of their subject's career with candid appraisals of Mies the man. Self-centered, taciturn, touchy, and indecisive\u2014Jacqueline Kennedy unfavorably compared him to \"an Egyptian potentate\"\u2014he drinks prodigiously and treats women carelessly, from his wife to his mistresses. As much of a perfectionist in his personal relationships as in his blueprints, Mies also exhibits a stunning lack of generosity. Trivial mistakes by staff members are never forgotten or forgiven, recalls one former associate, who adds, \"no matter what that person did for the rest of their life, Mies never really trusted them [again].\"\n\nPinterestFacebookBaltimore's One Charles Center building featured a Miesian signature, the reentrant corner.\n\n Photo courtesy of University of Chicago Press\n\nAnother tale that Mies van der Rohe recounts is the 1951\u201356 legal battle between Mies and Farnsworth, who sued the architect for fraud\u2014and whose fury at his cost overruns might have masked an unrequited romance. For decades, the 3,500-page transcript of the trial, which threatened to bruise Mies's reputation, had lain, unexamined by any scholars, in storage boxes at a law firm. Windhorst tracked down the papers and produced a chapter that reads like an episode of The Practice, complete with manipulation of witnesses and gasp-inducing presentations of damning evidence. Today, ironically, Mies and Farnsworth are buried within sight of each other's headstones, in Chicago's Graceland Cemetery. \"Despite their sharp differences,\" Schulze says, \"reunion has been effected in death.\"\n\nTo order a copy of Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography, go to the website of the University of Chicago Press, press.uchicago.edu."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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