Mint except for a closed tear to the front of the jacket. Though in Italian, the bulk of the book is made up of illustrations. "Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies; March 27, 1886 - August 17, 1969) was a German-born American architect. He was commonly referred to as Mies, his surname. Along with Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright, he is regarded as one of the pioneers of modernist architecture. In the 1930s, Mies was the last director of the Bauhaus, a ground-breaking school of modern art, design and architecture. After Nazism's rise to power, with its strong opposition to modernism (leading to the closing of the Bauhaus itself), Mies emigrated to the United States. He accepted the position to head the architecture school at the Armour Institute of Technology (later the Illinois Institute of Technology), in Chicago. (Wikipedia)