Hubbe House, Living Room, Magdeburg, Germany, Perspective

German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe first came to the United States to design a house for advertising executives Stanley B. Resor and Helen Lansdowne Resor’s large ranch in Wyoming. Mies’s unbuilt design features a flat roof, open plan, and cruciform columns—all elements that recall his earlier residential projects in Europe. As these sketches show, however, Mies combined this modernist vocabulary with new features inspired by the rugged American landscape including a massive, double-sided stone chimney bisectingthe open-plan living area.