Although the son of an Aachen stonemason never took any official final exams, architecture as a profession seemed to be his destiny. After learning a great deal about construction in his father’s business, the 19-year-old went to Berlin, where he worked in the offices of Bruno Paul and Peter Behrens, both central figures in the reform movement. Mies was admitted to the circles of the wealthy and educated, some of whom were collectors who aroused his interest in modern art. The early 1920s saw his first skyscraper designs. A bachelor again after a failed marriage, Mies the modernist abjured any kind of “trivial embellishment”. But even in his revolutionary open floor plans – most of them for villas – he never departed from the basic structure of a middle-class way of life, which included the separation of the men’s from the women’s area, as well as some sort of shield from the staff. Furniture was merely a by-product of his construction work. The Weissenhof residential estate project in Stuttgart (1927), his German pavilion for the World Fair in Barcelona (1929), as well as the Villa Tugenhat in Brno (1930) represent milestones in architectural design. His international career began with the “cantilevered chair” – totally without back legs – he presented in Stuttgart, originally a concept by Mart Stam, which Mies honed. He called the easychair he designed for the World Fair, MR 90, a“monumental object”.