860/880 Lake Shore Drive Apartment Building, Chicago, Illinois (Site plan)
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
American, born Germany. 1886–1969
c. 1948-51
A precise site plan rendered in black ink and pencil on illustration board that maps Mies van der Rohe’s twin Lake Shore Drive apartment blocks and their plazas, expressing his aim to make structure, circulation, and landscape visible through a strict grid and spare geometry.
What strikes you is the cool economy of line—the regular grid of the building plates, the tiny black squares that mark columns, and the airy stretches of blank paper punctuated by delicate, cloudlike tree outlines that set the blocks within the streetscape.
The drawing crystallizes Mies’s Modernist ideals—structural clarity, minimal ornament, and a disciplined relationship between building and site—and helped define the visual language of postwar high‑rise residential architecture in the United States.
Medium
Black ink over pencil on illustration board
Dimensions
30 x 40" (76.2 x 101.6 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Mies van der Rohe Archive, gift of the architect
Accession
MR4807.127
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
