Mies van der Rohe’s Chicago buildings “When I lived in Chicago, I rode my bike to the Art Institute every day and passed these buildings — I thought they were stunning, especially once I learned how old they were and how they were the first to exist as pure form. They were the first example I had as to what modernism was. The image I’ve used is from the buildings’ construction phase, which I hadn’t seen until I was preparing this story; I was going to use photos of them finished, but I liked that you can see through them, and they reminded me of my cube structures.”