Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886 – 1969) was a German-American architect (mainly know as Mies). Along with Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright, he is regarded as one of the pioneers of modernist architecture. Mies was the last director of the Bauhaus, a seminal school in modern architecture. Mies strove toward architectural style with minimal framework. He called his buildings "skin and bones". He is often associated with his fondness for the aphorisms, "less is more" and "God is in the details".

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe constructed one of the nation’s earliest urban renewal projects in Detroit, Lafayette Park, between 1956 and 1959. The development spans 78 acres and was designed with the goal of replacing the tumbledown Black Bottom neighborhood with efficiently and comfortably housing for growing post-WWII middle class.

Mies’s Lafayette Park project includes 186 residences. Single- and two-story townhouses sit beneath three soaring glass and concrete apartment towers, and all of the neighborhood’s residences encircle a 13-acre public park known as Lafayette Plaisance. The leafy green space includes playground, wide-open lawns, and plantings that feels cool and shady in summer and explode into color in spring and autumn.

For lovers of mid century design, Lafayette Park feels the place to be. There are a number of ways for visitors to explore which the best of best is by walking.