Page "Ludwig Mies van der Rohe" Paragraph 19

Commission opportunities dwindled with the worldwide depression after 1929.

Starting in 1930, Mies served as the last Director of the faltering Bauhaus, at the request of his colleague and competitor Walter Gropius.

In 1932, Nazi political pressure forced the state-supported school to leave its campus in Dessau, and Mies moved it to an abandoned telephone factory in Berlin.

By 1933, however, the continued operation of the school was untenable ( it was raided by the Gestapo in April ), and in July of that year, Mies and the faculty voted to close the Bauhaus.

He built very little in these years ( one built commission was Philip Johnson's New York apartment ); the Nazis rejected his style as not " German " in character.