Dietrich Neumann
Professor of History of Art and Architecture - Brown University | Rhode Island
"Complex Simplicity: A new look at the work of Mies van der Rohe"
Lecture: Wednesday, September 18, 2024 | 6:00PM | ARCH 132 DF Pray Lecture Theatre
Dietrich Neumann is a professor for the history of Modern Architecture and Urban Studies and the Director of the John Nicholas Brown Center of Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage. He was trained as an architect in Munich, Germany and at the Architectural Association in London and received his PhD from Munich University. His publications have dealt with the history of skyscrapers, movie set design, architectural illumination, building materials and in particular with the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. He has won fellowships at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montréal, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, at the American Academies in Berlin and Rome and won the Founder’s (1996) and Philip Johnson Awards (2003) from the Society of Architectural Historians, where he served as president 2008-2010 and was named a fellow in 2018. He was the first Vincent Scully Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Architecture and is a member of the Committee on Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art.
The renowned architectural historian Dietrich Neumann presents a new, critical look at Mies and complicates the established narrative about him. Diverging from the reverential posture of many existing accounts, Neumann insists on the importance of the contemporary context—social, political, and architectural—for understanding the architect’s life and work. In his new book (September, 2024, Neumann presents several previously unknown buildings, projects, and furniture designs and challenges long-established interpretations of key works.
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