‘Order and simplification are the first steps towards mastery of a subject’ Thomas Mann
Designed as a complex of three buildings,
every component of Mies van der Rohe’s
Federal Center in Chicago — columns,
windows, doors, benches, lighting, paving
slabs — exists in perfect alignment
with every other, within the architect’s
meticulously conceived structural grid.
Set within this flawless expression of
perpendicular order, whose reflective
surfaces appear wilfully to distort the
geometries of neighbouring buildings,
the exuberant form of Alexander
Calder’s scarlet Flamingo acquires a
particular charge.
Photography
Max Gleeson