Mies van der Rohe, who was born 125 years ago today, put God in the details of his spare, glassy, flat-roofed buildings and striking furniture. From his 1969 New York Times obituary:

“Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a man without any academic architectural training, was one of the great artist-architect-philosophers of his age, acclaimed as a genius for his uncompromisingly spare design, his fastidiousness and his innovations.

Along with Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, the German-born master builder who was universally know as Mies (pronounced mees) fashioned scores of imposing structures expressing the spirit of the industrial 20th century.

‘Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space,’ he remarked in a talkative moment. Pressed to explain his own role as a model for others–a matter on which he was shy, as he was on most others–he said:

‘I have tried to make an architecture for a technological society. I have wanted to keep everything reasonable and clear–to have an architecture that anybody can do.'”

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Lego version of the Farnsworth House: