| Mies Van Der Rohe (1886-1969)
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 Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe was born in Aachen, Germany in 1886. He worked in the family stone-carving business before he joined the office of Bruno Paul in Berlin. He entered the studio of Peter Behrens in 1908 and remained until 1912.
Under Behrens’ influence, Mies developed a design approach based on advanced structural techniques and Prussian Classicism. He also developed a sympathy for the aesthetic credos of both Russian Constructivism and the Dutch De Stijl group. He borrowed from the post and lintel construction of Karl Friedrich Schinkel for his designs in steel and glass.
Mies worked with the magazine G which started in July 1923. He made major contributions to the architectural philosophies of the late 1920s and 1930s as artistic director of the Werkbund-sponsored Weissenhof project and as Director of the Bauhaus.
Famous for his dictum ’Less is More’, Mies attempted to create contemplative, neutral spaces through an architecture based on material honesty and structural integrity. Over the last twenty years of his life, Mies achieved his vision of a monumental ’skin and bone’ architecture. His later works provide a fitting denouement to a life dedicated to the idea of a universal, simplified architecture
Mies died in Chicago, Illinois in 1969
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 In 1887 Le Corbusier was born as Charles-Edouard Jeanneret in La Chaux-de-Fonds (Switzerland). He went to an Art School to become a watch engraver in this centre of Swiss watch industry. However, his teacher, L’Eplattenier, persuaded him to become an architect. After having had problems with Schwob he decided to leave Switzerland for France and to adopt the name Le Corbusier. He swore never to come back to Switzerland. After the World War I he totally changed his style to help build up France. This is where he developed the new construction method that he called ’Plan Libre.’ He allowed himself some liberty for the first time when designing Ronchamp in 1950. Often he worked together with his nephew Pierre Jeanneret. Undoubtedly one of his greatest works is the design of the city of Chandigar (India). This project included the design of all the public buildings for this city. In 1965 he died while swimming near his Cabanon in Saint Martin (the south of France).
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| Marcel Breuer (1902-1981)
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 Breuer, Marcel, Hungarian-American architect, designer, and teacher, who helped establish the functionalist principles underlying the International style. Breuer was born in Pécs, Hungary, and studied at the Bauhaus school of design in Weimar, Germany. He practiced architecture in Berlin until the rise of the Nazi Party, fleeing to England in 1933 and then to the United States in 1937. There he helped develop the influential School of Architecture at Harvard University. During the 1950s and 1960s Breuer designed a number of prominent buildings in the United States and Europe. His buildings are generally composed of severe blocks in rough, unfinished stone or concrete and wood.
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 On August 9. 1878, Eileen Gray was born to an aristocratic family in Enniscorthy, a small market town in south-eastern Ireland, and spent her childhood years there. As a young adult, in order to develop her artistic sensibilities, she entered the Slade School for Fine Arts in London and from there moved to Paris where she would spend most of her working life.
Paris at the turn of the century was a creative mecca for visual and performance artists, writers, scientists and philosophers. She was strikingly elegant in appearance with a tall lithe stature and auburn hair. Pictures of her, taken in her late teens and early twenties show her dressed in a Victorian style with thick tresses of dark hair piled on top of her head. In these pictures she seems a timid and slightly sad young woman with a hint of disdain in her expression, which may have been the fashion at the time for young people of her class. Later, in a 1926 photograph by Berenice Abbott she appears as a strong sophisticated woman with a lot of style, a little bit mannish perhaps - a tendancy among the bohemian set at that time - but with a lot of womanly beauty.
By the time she was photographed by Abbott (according to Gray’s biographer Peter Adams, to be ’done’ by Abbott who was a student of Man Ray ’ meant you were rated as somebody’) she had begun to come into the fulness of her creative energy and had created opportunities for herself to explore her talent..
On a trip to London in 1905 Eileen wandered into a lacquer repair shop: a trip which was to change the course of her creative life. With new-found knowledge and some tools in hand, she returned to Paris, linked up with a master craftsman of lacquer, Sugiwara-san, and from there developed new furniture and assessory designs with striking colors and understated shapes. Her boredom with the flowing, leafy lines of the Art Nouveau movement led to an artistic vocabulary which was more closely related to the De Stijl movement: clean lines and simple forms. The effect was stunning: (see linked Lacquer work file.)
Eileen’s lacquerwork succeeded in bringing her into the world of furniture and interior design. Her creative genius combined with an innovative sense of form as well as sensitivity to color, were utilized in new and innovative ways, usually to stunning effect.(see linked Furniture/Interior file) In 1921, Eileen opened a store at 217 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore as a direct outlet to the public for her designs. The store met with relative success in spite of the owner’s lack of commercial and marketing skills. She continued to hone her designs, building upon a growing reputation for design excellence.
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| Harry Bertoia (1915-1978)
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 Best known as a sculptor and furniture designer, Harry Bertoia was born in San Lorenzo, Udine, Italy. In 1928 he began taking drawing classes in Italy before immigrating first to Canada, then to Detroit in 1930. He received a scholarship to the School of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts in 1936 and a year later was awarded a teaching scholarship at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. There he taught metalworking from 1937 to 1942 and then graphics for one year. In 1943 Bertoia moved to Los Angeles to work as a furniture designer. He also took welding classes at Santa Monica City College and in 1947 created his first welded sculptures. During this period Bertoia became an American citizen. His employer, Knoll Associates, introduced the Bertoia Collection of furniture in 1952. The following year he received his first commission for a large-scale sculpture for the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. Bertoia subsequently resigned from Knoll Associates to concentrate on his sculpture. His distinguished work brought him other major commissions for the Massachussetts Institute of Technology Chapel, Lambert Airport in St. Louis, Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C., and the Federal Reserve Bank in Richmond, Virginia. Beginning in the 1940s, Bertoia exhibited extensively. Among his many awards were the Gold Medal given by the Architectural League of New York (1955-56), the Fine Arts Medal from the Pennsylvania Association of the American Institute of Architects (1963), and an honorary doctorate from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
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| Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988)
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 1904 Born November 17 in Los Angeles.
1906 Family moves to Japan.
1918-22 Returns alone to the United States to attend school in Rolling Prairie, Illinois. After graduation apprentices in sculpture studio of Gutzon Borglum.
1923 Moves to New York. Enrolls in Columbia University’s premedical program.
1924 Studies sculpture at Leonardo da Vinci Art School in New York.
1927-28 Receives John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Travels to Paris where he works as an assistant to Brancusi and studies drawing at Academy Grande Chaumière and Academy Collarosi.
1929 First solo exhibition at the Eugene Schoen Gallery, New York.
1930-31 Studies brush drawing with Chi Pai-shih in Beijing and clay sculpting with Jinmatsu Uno in Kyoto.
1935 Creates first of many stage sets for Martha Graham.
1938 Wins competition and creates relief sculpture for entrance of Associated Press building at Rockefeller Center, New York.
1951 Begins to design akari lamps.
1956 Designs gardens at UNESCO in Paris.
1968 Retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
1974 Participates in Masters of Modern Sculpture show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
1985 Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum opens to the public in Long Island City, New York.
1986 Represents the United States at the Venice Biennale.
1987 Receives the National Medal of Arts.
1988 Dies December 30 in New York.
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| Charles Eames (1907-1978)
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 Eames, Charles (1907-1978), American architect and designer, best known for his seminal formfitting designs for chairs. He studied architecture under Eliel Saarinen and in 1940 collaborated with Eero Saarinen in designing a chair that won first prize in the organic furniture competition sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. This chair, with a molded plywood shell, foam-rubber padding, and innovative rubber-weld joints, unfortunately proved too expensive for mass manufacture, but Eames continued to pursue his goal of creating an artistically valid design that could also be produced by modern mass-production techniques. In collaboration with his wife, Ray (Kaiser) Eames, he succeeded in 1946 with an elegantly simple chair consisting of a molded plywood back and seat, mounted on a tubular metal frame; this design became the prototype for much mass-production seating of the 1950s and ’60s.
The Eamses’ most famous later design was a luxurious leather-covered reclining armchair with a matching molded ottoman. For their house (1949) in Santa Monica, California, they designed practical prefabricated elements—doors, windows, and walls—with which they hoped to popularise the construction of well-designed mass-production housing.
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| Eero Saarinen (1910-1961)
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 Eero Saarinen was born in Kirkkonummi, Finland in 1910. He studied in Paris and at Yale University, after which he joined his father’s practice. Eero initially pursued sculpture as his art of choice. After a year in art school, he decided to become an architect instead. Much of his work shows a relation to sculpture.
Saarinen developed a remarkable range which depended on color, form and materials. Saarinen showed a marked dependence on innovative structures and sculptural forms, but not at the cost of pragmatic considerations. He easily moved back and forth between the International Style and Expressionism, utilizing a vocabulary of curves and cantilevered forms.
Saarinen died in Ann Arbour, Michigan in 1961.
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| Charles Mackintosh (1868-1928)
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 Charles Mackintosh was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1868. In 1884 he began an apprenticeship with John Hutchinson and began attending evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art. In 1889 he became an architectural assistant with Honeyman & Keppie. He also enrolled at the Glasgow School of Art. In 1890 he won a travelling scholarship and toured Italy before settling down into practice.
While enrolled at the Glasgow School of Art, Mackintosh developed an artistic relationship with Margaret MacDonald, Frances Macdonald and Herbert McNair. Known as ”The Four”, they exhibited posters, furnishings, and a variety of graphic designs in Glasgow, London, Vienna and Turin. These exhibitions helped establish Mackintosh’s reputation.
With a design philosophy solidly rooted in Scottish tradition, Mackintosh disregarded the architecture of Greece and Rome as unsuitable for the climate or needs Scotland. He believed that a revival of the Scottish Baronial style, adapted to modern society would meet contemporary needs. His buildings clearly demonstrate this belief.
Mackintosh created buildings notable for the elegance and clarity of their spatial concepts, the skillful exploitation of natural and artificial lighting, and skillful detailing. He felt that each design should work as a whole to which each carefully contrived detail contributes.
In 1913 Mackintosh left the firm of Honeyman, Keppie & Mackintosh where he had been a partner since 1904. After unsuccessfully trying to establish his own practice, he dedicated his time to landscape painting. He returned to England in 1927 for treatment of cancer of the tongue.
An outstanding architect, furniture designer, and painter, who pioneered the Modern Movement in Scotland, Mackintosh’s works exist as the greatest flowering of the British Arts & Crafts movement in either Scotland or England. Mackintosh died in London in 1928.
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| George Nelson (1908-1986)
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 George Nelson (1908-1986) was a pioneering modernist who ranks with Raymond Loewy, Charles Eames, and Eliot Noyes as one of America’s outstanding designers. Nelson’s office produced some of the twentieth century’s canonical pieces of industrial design, many of which are still in production: the ball clock, the bubble lamp, the sling sofa. Nelson also made major contributions to the storage wall, the shopping mall, the multi-media presentation, and the open-plan office system. The author of this definitive biography was given access to Nelson’s office archives and personal papers. He also interviewed more than 70 of Nelson’s friends, colleagues, employees, and clients (including the late D. J. De Pree, former head of the Herman Miller Furniture Company and Nelson’s chief patron) and obtained many previously unpublished images from corporate and private archives.
The full range of Nelson’s work is represented, from product and furniture design to packaging and graphics to large-scale projects such as the Fairchild house and the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow. Because Nelson was a serious and original thinker about design issues, Abercrombie quotes extensively from his published and unpublished writings, offering provocative new material to students of design theory and philosophy.
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