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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was arguably the most imitated architect of the 20th century.
A German who imigrated to Chicago just before World War II, Mies single-handedly developed the style for all those sleek metal-and-glass office buildings and skyscrapers that became ubiquitous from the 1960s into the '80s.
His widely copied style dominated business and commercial architecture in those years and permanently changed the skylines of cities worldwide. Along with America's Frank Lloyd Wright and the European Le Corbusier, Mies is one of the "masters of modern architecture."
Most Downtown office towers built from the '60s on would not look the way they do without the influence of Mies.
Yet, often overlooked is that we have an exceptionally fine building designed by Mies in Pittsburgh -- the Richard King Mellon Hall of Science at Duquesne University.
That the building is not well known, even here in town, is probably because of its being four full floors of laboratories, with two lecture halls and a few seminar rooms mixed among them. Unless you're a science student at Duquesne -- an undergraduate or a Ph.D. candidate -- you're not likely to go there at all.
The building is very visible. It sits high up at the edge of The Bluff, overlooking...