« Mies » was part of the Weimar avant-garde, ran the Bauhaus from 1930 to 1933, then closed it to emigrate to America in 1938 where he transformed the skyscraper from a fanciful improvisation into a generic, abstract prototype, to achieve immortality with the phrase « less is more ». How did his body work and how did he stage and project it in the course of his career?

First there is the testimony of a Bauhaus student that every time he encountered Mies approaching in a corridor, he thought he was seeing two people; only from up close did they merge into the single Mies.

If that is just a verbal recollection, a photo proves that his body actually consumed an unusual amount of space, particularly in width. It was taken in 1920, at the opening of the first international Dada-Fair in Berlin.¹

Mies’ back alone occupies twenty percent of the picture plane; twelve other visitors are compressed into the remaining eighty. The fact that the back is clad in very theatrical tweed amplifies its volumetric dominance — a strong fashion statement on an XL back — in flagrant contradiction with « less is more », the motto that would make him famous much later in his life…