Installation of the ‘Mies van der Rohe’ exhibition at the MoMA, 1947

The museum of Modern Art played a near exclusive role in shaping popular and critical understanding of Mies van der Rohe’s architecture for sixty years, from the 1932 “International Style” exhibition to the 1986 posthumous retrospective honoring the centennial of his birth. The authoritative role assumed by the museum, a virtual monopoly by mutual consent, is inversely proportional to Mies’s diffidence about appearing as a salesman for his own architecture. Furthermore, Mies’s reputation for being aloof and inaccessible might account for the fact that in 1947 there were very few writings by him and even fewer about him... [+]