Museum for a Small City project (Perspective sketch)
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
American, born Germany. 1886–1969
1943
A delicate pencil study for Mies van der Rohe’s Museum for a Small City that tests a spare, horizontal pavilion of planes and slender supports to explore scale and movement.
What strikes you is the economy of the drawing—pale, precise lines suggest a low rectangular building, a long diagonal canopy and a single tiny standing figure that instantly gives the airy composition human scale.
The sheet distills Mies’s pared-back modernist language—open plans, minimal structure and careful proportion—that helped define postwar architecture and the idea of the museum as a simple, contemplative pavilion.
Medium
Pencil on paper
Dimensions
6 x 8 3/4" (15.2 x 22.2 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Mies van der Rohe Archive, gift of the architect
Accession
725.1963.1
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
