Katia Baudin, director of the Kunstmuseen Krefeld: “Since 2016, we have been working hard to raise the unique profile of the Kunstmuseen Krefeld with their three architectural jewels and their long, multifaceted history. Our starting point is the unique DNA of the institution as a place where art, design, and architecture intersect, which we then build upon while taking contemporary approaches and issues into consideration.” This identity is rooted in the founding history of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, which has served as a bridge between museum, urban society, and everyday life since around 1900. It is equally influenced by the progressive programming of former director Paul Wember, who brought the international avant-garde to Krefeld in the postwar period and established the tradition of site-specific work in Haus Lange. Then as now, we see the museum as a platform and laboratory, a living space that facilitates new dialogues between the museum, artists, and the public, between disciplines and eras, between the past and the future. This universal guiding principle is reflected in everything we do, from the exhibition program, the presentation of the collection and our mediation formats to our visual identity,”

As a result, they tell us little about the real significance that the textile manufacturer had for Mies van der Rohe's creative work in the 1920s. After all, Hermann Lange was responsible for commissioning or passing on eight projects to him. Their collaboration began with the appointments for the café “Velvet and Silk” at the Berlin trade fair for women’s fashion in 1927.

By 1927–28, when he began to plan Haus Lange and Haus Esters, Mies van der Rohe was already a highly successful Modernist architect. Born in 1886 in Aachen as Ludwig Mies, the name under which he was to rise to fame was made by adding his mother's maiden name. After a brief apprenticeship in Aachen (vocational school, his father's stonemason business) and initial employment as a furniture designer by Bruno Paul and later as an architect for Peter Behrens in Berlin, in 1912 he opened up his own architectural practice.

By the beginning of the 1920s he had already come up with trailblazing ideas for a high-rise at Friedrichstrasse station (1921), an office block in reinforced concrete (1923), a country house also in reinforced concrete (1923), and for a country house in brick (1923/24), even if none of them were built. At the same time, by the mid-1920s Mies van der Rohe was already an experienced architect who built villas and country houses for the upper classes in Berlin and its surrounding areas. In 1926 he directed the Werkbund exhibition The Apartment, which was responsible for the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart. That same year he became vice president of the Deutscher Werkbund and in 1930 director of the Bauhaus, which had moved from Dessau to Berlin, where it was closed in 1933 by the National Socialists.

These few key dates already give an idea of the sheer scope and diversity of this great man of architecture. The foundations of Miesian design, which is inadequately conveyed by such buzzwords as “open plan” and “steel frame” (even for residential buildings and country homes), had already reached its maturity in Mies van der Rohe's work in Europe. Ultimately his greatly impressive achievements while in America from 1938 onwards were his revolutionary ideas for high-rise buildings and the concepts behind his large-scale projects. Mies van der Rohe developed the curtain wall made of steel and glass, as well as trussless interiors for hall constructions with wide-span roofs.

In 1953 Mies van der Rohe was made a Member of the Order Pour le Mérite (German Federal Republic) and in 1963 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom—an honor bestowed by the president of the United States of America. Mies van der Rohe died on August 17, 1969 in Chicago.