All along, from Bauhaus to Farnsworth to the Seagram's building, Mies & Eames were consistently developing and defining a designer's modernist vocabulary that worked it's way into the 2 and 3 dimensional language of the 2nd half of the century.

1. Mies van der Rohe Barcelona Pavilion 1929 The German national pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition. Built from glass, travertine and different kinds of marble, the Pavilion was conceived to accommodate the official reception presided over by King Alphonso XIII of Spain along with the German authorities.

2. After the closure of the Exhibition, the Pavilion was disassembled in 1930.

4. It was recreated in its original form and on the same site in 1981-1986 by the Barcelona City Council.

8. Planes, faced in polished green Tinian marble, in their turn reflected the highlights of the chromium vertical glazing bars holding the glass in place.

9. Seen from the side, the single curve of the bar forming the chair's back and front legs crosses the S-curve of the bar forming the seat and back legs, making an intersection of the two. This simple shape derives from a long history of precedents, from ancient Egyptian folding stools to nineteenth-century neoclassical seating.

10. The generous canopy roof, walls that stop well short of abutting one another, and the floor-to-ceiling glazing break down the distinction between inside and outside. Even the doors are in the form of two halves of an all-glass wall, which rotate not about hinges at their edges, but about a pivot in the floor and ceiling a few inches from the edge: the result is that when opened through ninety degrees each door becomes just another freestanding, parallel glass plane in keeping with the other planes defining the spaces in the building. Credit - galinsky.com

11. “ Every physical element has been distilled to its irreducible essence. The interior is unprecedentedly transparent to the surrounding site, and also unprecedentedly uncluttered in itself. All of the paraphernalia of traditional living –rooms, walls, doors, interior trim, loose furniture, pictures on walls, even personal possessions – have been virtually abolished in a puritanical vision of simplified, transcendental existence. Mies had finally achieved a goal towards which he had been feeling his way for three decades."

16. “ In its simplest form architecture is rooted in entirely functional considerations, but it can reach up through all degrees of value to the highest sphere of spiritual existence into the realm of pure art.”

17. The architecture of the house represents the ultimate refinement of Mies van der Rohe’s minimalist expression of structure and space.

37. Seagram Building, New York, 1958

38. Mies wanted a complete regularity in the appearance of the building. "structure is spiritual" and "less is more."

39. Following these premises, the Seagram Building is meant to confirm Mies' assertion that when modern industrialized building technology is truthfully expressed, architecture becomes transcendent.

40. He believed that the more a building was pared to its essential structural and functional elements, and the less superfluous imagery is used, the more a building expresses its structure and form.

41. "Skyscrapers reveal their bold structural pattern during construction. Only then does the gigantic steel web seem impressive. When the outer walls are put in place, the structural system, which is the basis of all artistic design, is hidden by a chaos of meaningless and trivial forms... Instead of trying to solve old problems with these old forms we should develop new forms from the very nature of the new problems. We can see the new structural principles most clearly when we use glass in place of the outer walls, which is feasible today since in a skeleton building these outer walls do not carry weight. The use of glass imposes new solutions."

43. In 1919 Mies van der Rohe designed the first project of a series of five famous unbuilt crystal towers on a site near the Friedrichstrasse station. The competition entry named "Honeycomb" symbolized the dawning of a new culture, where the use of steel and glass allowed a building to have a surface that is more translucent than solid. With this project it seemed that Mies van der Rohe has introduced a new expressive shape that apparently owed nothing to history.

44. The Lake Shore Drive Apartments, Chicago, photographed in 1955

45. Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois. completed 1956. Arts Club interior

47. R ecognizing the need, Charles Eames said, is the primary condition for design. Early in their careers together, Charles and Ray identified the need for affordable, yet high-quality furniture for the average consumer -- furniture that could serve a variety of uses. For forty years the Eameses experimented with ways to meet this challenge, designing flexibility into their compact storage units and collapsible sofas for the home; seating for stadiums, airports, and schools; and chairs for virtually anywhere .

48. Charles & Ray Eames

49. "What works is better than what looks good," Ray said. "The looks good can change, but what works, works." The aluminum chair's concept formed the basis of the office's 1962 Eames Tandem Sling Seating, an institutional multiple-seating system designed for Washington's Dulles International Airport.

50. T he Eameses' molded-plywood chair was their first attempt to create a single shell that would be comfortable without padding and could be quickly mass-produced

51. The expensive metal-stamped chair was replaced by a low -cost fiberglass reinforced plastic chair.

53. I nspired by trays, dress forms, baskets, and animal traps, the Eames Office investigated bent and welded wire mesh as the basis for furniture designs. The wire-mesh chair, like the fiberglass chair, was a uni-shell design. The shell could be adapted to various base configurations and upholstery types

58. T he Eameses' molded-plywood chair was their first attempt to create a single shell that would be comfortable without padding and could be quickly mass-produced