In 1938 James Speyer departed Harvard's School of Design in order to become Mies van der Rohe's first American graduate student at the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago. During the 40s and 50s he taught architecture under Mies while at the same time, as an architect in his own right, he completed houses in Chicago and Pittsburgh that represented the cutting edge of new glass-and-steel design. In 1957 Speyer traveled to Greece on a Fulbright...