The first in-depth look at the early career of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe examines Mies’s work from the time he arrived in Berlin in 1905 and established his architectural practice there in 1913, until his emigration to the United States in 1938. Mies in Berlin, which includes three hundred drawings, fifteen scale models, video and digital displays, and new photographs of Mies’s work by Kay Fingerle and Thomas Ruff, focuses on facets of Mies’s career that have been previously neglected in considering Mies as an International Style architect. The exhibition demonstrates that his German work is much more than a prelude to a more mature phase of his career in America. By suggesting a more continuous and complex evolution of the architect’s design methods—as well as his theories of nature, materials, modern space, and dwelling—the exhibition invites reconsideration of a key figure of the modern movement. Mies in America, a comprehensive survey of the architect’s work from 1938 to 1969 organized by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, is on view June 21—September 23 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Organized by Terence Riley, Chief Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, and Barry Bergdoll, Professor of Art History, Columbia University.
