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, selecte ...

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