No season in living memory has offered the embarrassment of architectural riches on view in exhibitions across the United States this summer. With retrospectives on Frank Gehry at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rudolph Schindler first at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and now at the National Building Museum in Washington, and a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe double-header in New York, not even the most avid proponent of the art can complain that architecture is being slighted, as it had been by major American museums for much of the last decade. Why, how, where, and when exhibitions on established artists occur can be traced to a variety of motivations, from so-called calendar shows that mark an anniversary of some sort to surveys that reflect the general perception that it is time for a fresh look at a particular body of work. In the case of "Mies in Berlin" at the Museum of Modern Art and "Mies in America" at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the reasons are more personal in nature. This exhibition project began as the brainchild of Phyllis Lambert, founding director of the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, a study center and the world's foremost museum of the building art. An heiress to the Seagram liquor fortune, in 1954 she persuaded her father and the company's president, Samuel Bronfman, to let her select the architect for its new New York headquarters and to oversee its construction. The twenty-seven-year-old Lambert chose no less than Mies van der Rohe, universally acclaimed as one of the titans of modern architecture.
Mies's rigorously simplified structures, typified by grids of steel and glass and an absence of applied ornament, represented the Platonic ideal of modernism for many people. He was rivaled at the time only by the two other architects whom Lambert considered most seriously for the job: Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright (whose Guggenheim Museum was erected two miles uptown during the same years as the Seagram Building). But Corbusier and Wright were increasingly interested in expressive effects that Lambert found dated and superficial. As she later wrote, "Mies forces you in. You have to go deeper. You might think this austere strength, this ugly beauty, is terribly severe. It is, and yet all the more beauty in it."
The result of Lambert's precocious effort was one of the best tall structures of the twentieth century (though it is hardly the building of the millennium, as Herbert Muschamp hyperbolized in The New York Times two years ago, or, more preposterous yet, the building of two millennia, as he even more breathlessly maintained in his first review of the current Mies shows). Even within Mies's own oeuvre, an achievement more outstanding than the Seagram Building is surely his German Pavilion of 1928-1929 for the International Exposition in Barcelona. The masterwork was torn down after the World's Fair and reconstructed on its original site in 1986. With its seemingly free-floating wall planes and its open-plan spaces that go further than Wright's dematerialization of the box-like room, this was the most radical re-thinking of architectural enclosure until Frank Gehry's free-form experiments six decades later.
Recently Lambert decided to originate an exhibition on the work that Mies did in the United States after he emigrated here in 1938, no doubt to memorialize her own remarkable role in his career. (As well as his role in hers: after the Seagram commission, she worked for a while in Mies's Chicago office and went on to become an architect in her own right.) A recent consortial arrangement between the CCA and the Whitney dictated that the show appear at that New York venue. Lambert approached Terence Riley, the chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, home of the Mies van der Rohe Archive (its holdings are crucial to any serious exhibition on the architect), and asked him to join in her retrospective.
Riley understandably declined Lambert's offer. Though she is extraordinarily generous with her fortune, she also possesses a well-known will of iron. Rather than joining forces with her, Riley sensibly decided to mount a separate survey of Mies's earlier career in his native Germany. The architect's working life divides quite neatly into two halves, thirty years in Germany, thirty-one in the United States (with the exception of a vacation house in the Rockies that he designed before leaving Berlin, and his New National Gallery in Berlin, completed a year before his death, in 1969). Thus the dual arrangement makes good sense, especially as it affords the enterprise an appropriate spaciousness that no single institution would likely give it.
Mies's reputation has risen steadily since his hundredth anniversary, which unfortunately coincided with the full flood of American postmodernism and its xenophobic attempts to stigmatize him (along with his fellow German and erstwhile Bauhaus director Walter Gropius) as the fons et origo of alien International Style globalism. Yet even the provocateur Robert Venturi, who turned Mies's most famous dictum on its head by impertinently declaring that "less is a bore," has said that he wished he could take back his jibe at a master whom he now reveres.
For all that Venturi and Denise Scott Brown profess to have learned from Mies, however, do not expect his brand of cool reductivism from them any time soon. And even though Mies's exacting minimalism has any number of present-day exponents--the British architects John Pawson and Graham Phillips, the much- sought-after Swiss team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, and their more talented countryman Peter Zumthor--none of them can be described as specifically Miesian. (That is especially true of Herzog and de Meuron, whose tendency toward haphazard detailing and materials that weather badly would make the Meister cringe.) Moreover, recent technological advances in everything from glass to adhesives enable today's minimalists to achieve effects much more stunningly simplified than anything Mies was able to accomplish. He wanted, he said, to create an architecture that was beinahe nichts, almost nothing; but present-day practitioners have extended the boundaries of nothingness in ways undreamed of a generation ago.
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