- Bruce Graham: Mies began to influence developers, who in fact have built America. It is those people who were sympathetic to simplistic buildings- buildings that were very hard and had very little wastage. He did not pretend to solve all problems. He was simply working on a particular language of discovery, searching for the symbols of our times, the psyche of our time, and beginning to draw that language which would be elaborated on by others.
- James Ingo Freed: I think that Mies always felt that he was waging a war within the modern movement, for the soul of the modern movement. And he desperately wanted to win that war. So he turned himself, not only into an artist, but into a polemicist and into an educator in order to influence what he assumed was going to be an acceptable, universal style.
- Arthur Drexler: Mies sought to lift architecture out of the flux of style and fashion and passing fancies. He felt that he was making architecture that would last forever and that would never appear dated or foolish or the result of some trivial preoccupation. I think that he was right- at least as far as his work went- and that this, to an astonishing degree, is the case.