Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies in Germany in 1886, he stripped his name down the way he'd later strip buildings to their bones. By the 1930s he was running the Bauhaus, that engine of modernist thought, until the Nazis shut the whole experiment down. He left for the United States in 1937 or '38 and landed at what became Illinois Institute of Technology, where he spent decades teaching architects to think in steel and glass. His interiors were defined by industrial materials - plate glass, exposed structure - and by what he left out. "Less is more" became his mantra, though he also insisted God lived in the details. He died in Chicago in 1969, having built the vocabulary that glass towers still speak.