Art: Armour’s Architect

Good modern architects have something which good U. S. communities want. This encouraging fact appeared two years ago in the appointment of Bauhaus-Founder Walter Gropius, professor in Harvard’s architectural department, last year in the opening of Chicago’s New Bauhaus. This week it appeared again when 33-year-old President Henry Townley Heald of Chicago’s Armour Institute announced that his tough technical school had hired Ludwig Mies van der Rohe of Berlin to direct its school of architecture.

Leathery, massy, meditative Mies van der Rohe is famed in Europe and the U. S.

for one beautiful house, at Brno, Czechoslovakia. He was Director of the Dessau Bauhaus from 1930 to 1933. On his first visit to the U. S. last year, his friend John Augur Holabird of the esteemed Chicago firm of Holabird & Root interested Mies van der Rohe in Chicago, the Armour Institute in Mies van der Rohe.

With Architect van der Rohe at Armour this month will be two other old Bauhaus men, Ludwig Hilberseimer, expert on city planning, and Walter Peterhans, technician in photography. Under this triumvirate Armour students will tackle a trivium: materials, functions, design. As to what is expected of them: “[This educational method] would serve no purpose,” says Mies van der Rohe, “unless … it were to lead without fail to a clear and un equivocal spiritual orientation.”