Over a decade ago, I trundled my good-natured family across miles of southern Switzerland to see every building I could by Peter Zumthor, who is this year's winner of the Pritzker Prize. Then as now, most of Zumthor's work was off the beaten track, not only literally but metaphorically, little known to the general public although admired by professionals. What drew me to make the trek to his work was what, from pictures, appeared to be its conceptual rigor, its unabashed monumentality, and an attention to detail so fanatical that every threshold, corner, and joint seemed to become an opportunity to rethink the way hands make buildings.

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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.