Today’s Google Doodle celebrates a great, ominously talented architect…it’s the 126th Anniversary of the birth of the modernist Mies van der Rohe.  The Google image is of the German architect’s minimal design for Crown Hall (with its sweeping interior room) at the Illinois Institute of Technology on the south side of Chicago. Mies modernized ancient ideas of exquisite, unflinching logic, the embrace of courtyards and an honest use of the earth’s materials.  Consider his Toronto-Dominion Centre as a modern-day Pompeii.  His devotion to his principles meant repeating the same ideas of architecture in Chicago, New York and Toronto – and, in lesser versions, around the world.  Today my blog background gets changed to Miesian black.