After apprenticing for renowned German architects Bruno Paul and Peter Behrens as a teenager, Mies drew commissions for several impressive, but traditionally styled, mansions. This one, the 1917 Urbig House, was slated to receive a flat roof before the client balked and demanded this traditional hip roof.

When millionaires didn't approve of Mies' early moves toward minimalism, he turned to this public housing project. Designed in 1925 to fill Berlin's growing need for middle-class housing, these apartment blocks have been altered somewhat, but remain standing.

In 1927, Mies and 17 other architects designed more than 20 buildings for a vast housing estate in Stuttgart, part of the Deutscher Werklund exhibition. Due in part to Allied bombing during World War II, only eleven of the structures survive today, including houses 1-4, done by Mies.

With his celebrity growing, Mies once again began to receive high-end residential commissions, like this pair of brick mansions, built for industrialists Hermann Lange and Josef Esters in 1930. A habitual line-stepper, Mies tried to create a completely open floorplan, but the clients demanded doors to separate the rooms.

In 1930, Mies agreed to take the directorship of the Bauhaus school and, facing pressure from Nazis in Dessau, moved the school to this derelict factory in Berlin. The students renovated the space at Mies' direction, but it survived only ten months before the Nazis were swept to national power.

Completed in Czechoslovakia in 1930, the Villa Tugendhat is today listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and recently underwent an extensive two-year renovation. Mies designed the house as well as most of the furnishings, including the Tugendhat Chair, in production to this day.

Soon after his arrival in the U.S., the Illinois Institute of Technology, then known as The Armour Institute, tapped Mies to design a new campus. The architect later built six buildings of his own design, before he was dismissed as architect. Several more buildings were added according to his master plan by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

Not short on ambition, Mies tackled his first residential high-rise building in 1949, while still in the thick of the IIT design. Known as the Promentory Apartments, the building is also the first example of an International Style tower in the U.S.

Designed for Dr. Edith Farnsworth in 1947, the now-legendary Farnsworth House would not be completed until 1951 and was mired in lawsuits and disputes between architect and owner for years. Nonetheless, it is one of the shining examples of American modernism.

The capstone of Mies' tenure as director of IIT's Department of Architecture, Crown Hall is among the architect's masterpieces and was named a historic landmark in 2001. The construction of this monumental building was beset by fire and delays, and probably led to Mies' dismissal as director.

Completed in 1958 on Park Avenue in NYC, Mies' Seagram Building set the tone for skyscraper construction for years to come. A simple glass box set back from the street, the Seagram also featured interiors from fellow starchitect Philip Johnson.

Built on the site of a slum and intended to prevent middle-class flight to the suburbs, this 78-acre complex is today one of the cheapest places to score a Mies-designed pad. A mix of high-rises, townhouses, and coveted garden flats known as "court houses," units here start at $500 per month, while a three-bed townhome was recently listed for $130K.