a review of:

Frank Gehry, Architect, The Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York.

Mies in America, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Mies in Berlin, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Published in Deutsche Bauzeitung June 2001.

We are fortunate this summer to have three major architectural shows, or two depending on how you are counting, at New York museums. The Guggenheim has a retrospective of Frank Gehry's work, placing him firmly in the architectural canon. But while Mies's work is already Scripture, Scripture can always be interpreted -- the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum present a view of the architect more diverse and inclusive than we've known before. The Gehry and Mies shows as a pair explore what is gained and what is lost by an architect's self-presentation.

These shows aren't what you would expect from the architects's work. Gehry's progress toward his complex, messy, luscious form is inexorable, whereas Mies, in fits and starts, diversions and struggles, meanders toward his purity. The fox appears as a hedgehog and the hedgehog as a fox. This inversion might boil down to Gehry being able to control his show's arrangement, as Mies couldn't, being quite dead (or "still dead," to use Johnson's clipped assessment of the show). Gehry's retrospective gives him a chance to revise the image of his accomplishment. But in contrast the versions of Mies at MoMA and the Whitney labor to undue Mies' own careful revisions.

Perhaps this is the right approach, and these exhibits deserve the praise they will no doubt receive. Thankfully the inclusive, sprawling MoMA show has no fear of presenting new material - most notably Thomas Ruff's digitally processed photographs that include a ravishing blur-motion filtered image of the Barcelona Pavilion. The images illustrates T.S. Eliot's observation that "the past is be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past." But what sort of show would Mies himself have presented? MoMA's 1947 exhibit curated by Philip Johnson might have come the closest, and Mies's collage perspectives of his interiors also suggest how he might have wanted his own show to appear.

We can also get an idea of this from the models: in particular the Whitney's display of Mies's model for the Resor House. Interestingly it is made with materials parallel to their literal counterparts: the roof is copper, the walls polished cypress, the river underneath is a sheet of blue glass. The model explores nuances of reflection, effects of sheen, and transparency akin to the issues explored by Mies's built work. In contrast, the new models exhibited at MoMA show all the soulfulness one would expect of the spray-enameled lasercut styrene, which is to say none. Some models are even worse than that - the 1921 Freidrichstrasse skyscraper project is simply a stack of clear acrylic, and besides being numbly reductive, when viewed from the same perspectival point as the rashiving charcoal drawing presented next to it has a completely different optical effect. The model of the German Pavilion in Barcelona tries earnestly to represent a fountain of water in styrene, the effect is ridiculous. But as phoned-in as these new models are, they do at least include enough of their sites to show the projects' relation to their context.

These exhibits struggle with the conflicting impulse to show architectural ideas as they evolve and as complete and finished presentations, while both shows are testimony that such ideas are often at their most powerful in ephemeral moments, quick sketches, and small instances of discovery. We can see a certain death in the architectural process in both offices, later in the careers, where the architects can add full time staff to produce legacy drawings. In Mies case, one stands in awe of the ravishing ruling-pen ink drawings on illustration board, imagining spilling a catastrophic ink drop as the drawing is completed. But then maybe in Mies' world no ink ever drops by accident -- unlike Gehry's office, where they would be coopted into the design.

2001.