Two immense and comprehensive exhibitions of the architecture
of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969)—one at the Museum of
Modern Art[1] and one at the Whitney Museum of American
Art[2]—have just departed from New York for international venues.
Why Mies? Why now? Phyllis Lambert, one of the world’s leading
patrons of architecture, decided that the time had come, more
than three decades after his death, to reevaluate and reinterpret
the master’s architecture.
Lambert
is famous for persuading her father, Samuel Bronfman,
then president of Seagram, to fire the California firm of Luckman
and Pereira as architects for the skyscraper he planned to build
on Park Avenue and to allow her to choose an architect capable of
creating a masterpiece. She met and researched the work of the
leading international modernists and in 1954, guided by Philip
Johnson, selected Mies.

Lambert went on to found the Canadian Centre for Architecture
in
1979, which has assembled a comprehensive archive of Mies research and
previously unstudied Miesian material, including drawings and
collages, photographs, project documents, and memorabilia.
Mies himself gave
the Museum of
Modern Art his collection of some 20,000 drawings in 1968. And Terence
Riley, chief curator of MOMA’s department of architecture and
design, also had the idea of a new Mies show, to follow the one
created by Arthur Drexler in 1986 to celebrate the centennial of
the architect’s birth. Riley and Lambert agreed to share their
archives and mount two exhibitions, his to explore