Mies the master

Less is more," said Mies van der Rohe, one-time director of the Bauhaus school of art, architecture and design, and giant of 20th century architecture. With Le Corbusier's "a house is a machine for living in", this sentence tops the league of famous and provocative statements made by the era's architects.

Both aphorisms became sticks with which to beat their makers, seeming as they do to describe a cold, empty, spiritless world. "Less is a bore," declared the post-modern American architect Robert Venturi in the 1960s, when he led the gaudy, decorative reaction against Mies's austerity. Venturi's view still dominated in the 1980s, when Prince Charles denounced the Mies-designed tower that Peter Palumbo wanted to build in the City as a "giant glass stump".

You can, perhaps, see his critics' point. With the Seagram building on Park Avenue, New York, and other works, Mies invented the monumental graph-paper office block, whose bastard progeny once threatened to swamp the world with blandness. He was a severe, ruthless and opportunistic man, ready to dispense with family and lovers when they no longer suited his artistic progress. He designed one building with a hammer and sickle and another with a swastika: respectively, a memorial for the Spartacist revolt of 1918-19 and the

German pavilion for the Brussels International Exposition of 1934. This is possibly a unique achievement. All he seemed to care about was his art and he would flirt with whatever totalitarian movement - and whatever female clients - would help him fulfil it.

He would, when teaching architecture students, sit in front of their drawing in silence for the best part of an hour before delivering a terse judgment. He would also set them an austere exercise in which they would have to draw many parallel lines on a large sheet of paper. Yet, after a short time in the Whitechapel's Mies in Berlin exhibition, the myth of Mies (1886-1969) the miserable is rapidly dispelled. All the above is true, but he was also a sensualist and a man of exquisite skill and sensitivity. No architect has ever drawn a pencil line as Mies could, nor made marble and stainless steel look so beautiful as he did in the luxury villas that dominated his early career.

The show, which originated in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, covers the first half of his career, up until he emigrated to the United States in 1938. Early in the exhibition, you see the gigantic charcoal drawings he made of glass skyscrapers he proposed for 1920s Berlin, designs which would still seem bold if they were proposed for London 80 years later. In these drawings, the textured surface of the charcoal takes on a life of its own, almost as paint would in the hands of Pollock and Rothko in the Fifties and Sixties. A film at the Whitechapel tells you about a cafè Mies made of brightly coloured silk and velvet for a fashion show in Berlin, and an exhibition stand celebrating German mining with walls made of salt and coal.

His buildings, solemn as temples, seem to aim for eternity, but he also played with transience. Much of his earlier career was based on ephemera, on exhibition designs and imaginary projects created for magazine articles.

Even in his solid, permanent buildings he makes the hard stuff of stone, steel and glass dissolve into reflections and transparencies. In his drawings and his buildings, he would make their structure look less substantial than the openings and the views of greenery they framed. The unstable and the stable are constantly swapping places.

The fashion world has long recognised Mies as an ally, appropriating his buildings as backdrops for shoots and the phrase "less is more", or variations thereof, to headline articles on the latest outbreak of minimalism. In the Whitechapel show, large tinted photographs, specially commissioned from the artist Thomas Ruff, underline Mies's Otherworldly sensuality.

Nearly a century after his first building, Mies is still one of the world's most imitated architects - every crisp glass box and every cool minimalist shop descends from him - but none of the imitators comes close to matching his subtlety and complexity. Perhaps this show will help them see what they're missing.