Mies van der Rohe is almost diametrically opposed to Frank Lloyd Wright. Compared with an extravagant personality who left complete works of over 1,000 pages, 12,000 drawings, and 100,000 letters, the twenty years younger Mies was a taciturn German who spoke little, hardly wrote, and granted few interviews, so we have reconstructed his thought by studying his library and the marks he left in books. Faithful to his motto ‘Less is more,’ he made a point of expressing himself sparsely. In contrast to Wright’s, his biography is devoid of scandals, murders, or fires, barring the great political conflagration that devastated Europe in the 1930s with the rise of Nazism, and forced Mies into exile in America, in the Chicago where Wright too had lived and where the second part of his career would unfold...