For a museum, nothing is more difficult to exhibit than architecture. Unless you can haul in the buildings themselves, you have to make do with surrogates—photographs, drawings, and models—none of which possesses the scale or tangible presence of the genuine article, let alone the spatial quality that most distinguishes architecture from all other arts. At worst, you end up with an exhibit of graphic art that happens to have architecture as its subject.

But there is no need to settle for the worst. In an intelligent exhibition, sketches and models, arranged in sequence, can illustrate the grand affair of architectural design, that process through which program, site, and budget are ordered and resolved into a unique arrangement of forms and volumes. And at its best, such an exhibit can even depict something weightier than mere architecture—namely, architectural thought.

The character of that thought is, in any one architect, as distinctive as a fingerprint. That, at least, is the lesson of a spate of recent architectural exhibitions, two of them devoted to Mies van der Rohe and one each to the contemporary architects Robert Venturi and Frank Gehry. The fact that these three men are identified, respectively, with modernism, postmodernism, and deconstruction—that is, with the principal movement of 20th-century architecture and its two recent offshoots—means that the exhibitions also offer an architectural history of the last century. As it happens, it is a rather tragic history—the story, above all, of the formation and the subsequent shattering of a noble undertaking in the field of art.

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While the modern movement that formed in Europe in the first three decades of the 20th century meant different things in different genres—in painting, non-objectivity and abstraction; in music, atonality and serial composition—certain tenets were common to all. Most crucial was the notion that modern life had been so thoroughly transformed by technology and social change as to demand a radically different art. What was required was no mere elaboration or incremental development of past models, but a complete and absolute break.

In architecture, this involved the total rejection of historical form, especially the flitting revivalism that characterized Victorian architecture. No concession to historical convention would be permitted; instead, flat roofs, sheer wall surfaces, and ribbon windows of glass would testify to the facts of modern construction in steel or concrete. This modernist style, devised in France, Germany, and Holland, and subsequently imported to the United States, was dubbed the International Style in recognition not only of its cosmopolitan history but of its claim to universal applicability.

In this story, Mies van der Rohe occupies an exalted role. Aloof, austere, and saturated with high moral seriousness, Mies has come to stand for modernism in its elemental form. His hallmark is the exquisite refinement of details—joints, corners, profiles—which he raised to a kind of crystalline perfection. Indeed, it was revulsion against this cold, formal poetry that would set in motion the architectural reaction that has now been under way longer than the heyday of modernism itself.

The son of a stone carver, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) was born in Aachen, Germany and studied architecture under provincial teachers. At an early age he moved to Berlin, where he worked in the office of Peter Behrens, then a clearinghouse for young modernists including Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. Mies was no youthful firebrand, however: his early work consisted of tasteful classical or neovernacular revivals, in a spirit of modest reform.

After World War I, when he came under the influence of Berlin’s avant-garde culture, Mies’s work turned more radical. Now came the first purely theoretical projects, including an office building of concrete and a skyscraper entirely of glass, shorn of all historical reference, their architectural character derived from the abstract properties of the materials. This process was consummated in his celebrated Barcelona Pavilion of 1928-29, whose flowing envelope of space was defined not by solid walls but by means as spare as hand gestures: planes of colored glass, thin slivers of marble and travertine, a few chrome columns.

In 1930, Mies became the director of the Bauhaus, the school of design founded by Gropius a decade earlier, and served until its dissolution in 1933 shortly after Hitler came to power. After several years of struggling to find work under the new regime, he was recruited by the Armour Institute of Technology (later the Illinois Institute of Technology, or IIT) to become its director of architecture. In 1938 he emigrated to the United States, where, under radically changed circumstances, a second career unfolded. A man who had worked for both Communists and Nazis now bent his steel and glass abstractions to the demands of corporate advertising, most famously in his Seagram Building on New York’s Park Avenue, the quintessential skyscraper of the International Style.

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In the two current exhibitions dedicated to his work, Mies’s two distinct careers are divided between the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, the former giving us Mies in Berlin¹ and the latter Mies in America.² Of the two, Mies in Berlin cannot help being fresher, since it is the first systematic and disinterested look at the architectural culture out of which Mies emerged. In his day, Wilhelmine Berlin, formerly the capital of Prussia and now the newly minted national capital, was still staggering under the weight of a bombastic neo-Baroque style and grasping at various reform movements, from English Arts & Crafts to Prussia’s own tradition of sober, cool classicism. Mies dabbled at each of these, taking inspiration especially from Karl Friedrich Schinkel, a versatile and elegant neoclassicist who was then undergoing a revival.

Mies in Berlin retrieves this early period from considerable myth-making and censorship, above all by Mies himself, who pruned his résumé of his early stylistic fumbling. This included several highly conventional villas, which Mies could evidently still churn out after the war even as he toiled over his great vitreous abstractions. But it is the latter that dominate the show, thanks in large part to their presentation in large, striking photomontages prepared at the time by Mies himself. Disdainful of the lavish renderings turned out by pupils at the French Ecole des Beaux Arts, laboring for weeks over their ink washes, Mies would align a perspective rendering over a photograph of the site and then re-photograph the whole to produce a seamless black and white image that emphasized the prismatic quality of his projects. The finest of these, such as one of a looming skyscraper on Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse, bear comparison with the American Hugh Ferriss’s contemporaneous renderings of Manhattan’s faceted towers.

An exception to Mies’s contempt for lushness was an early project for a memorial to Bismarck (1910). This envisaged a massive terrace overlooking the Rhine and supporting a court that was to be enclosed by a stern classical colonnade but open to the sky. At the end of the terrace was a semicircular apse, perched at the brink of the site and containing the statue of the Iron Chancellor. In its blocky and reductive classicism, the design could easily have been the work of Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer.

The comparison with Speer is not gratuitous. When Hitler came to power, Mies entered several competitions—one at the express invitation of the German government. His designs, with their eagles and swastikas, are the most startling in the exhibition—especially since this is the same Mies who, shortly before, had built a monument (demolished even as he was angling for commissions from the new government) to Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and the 1918 Communist uprising they had led in Berlin.

That Mies hoped for governmental—that is, Nazi—patronage is hardly surprising. There was a long tradition in Germany, especially Prussia, of the state acting as an agent rather than the foe of modernization. Prussia was deeply conscious of its industrial and cultural backwardness, the lingering result of the depredations of the Thirty Years War and a feudal past. Modern industrial England was the model it sought to emulate; Schinkel was sent there in the 1820’s to study its factories and internal improvements, and Hermann Muthesius would be sent at the turn of the century to study its architecture and housing. Mies was hardly the only one who mistakenly hoped that the Nazis would follow this pattern of progressive authoritarianism. (But here the MoMA exhibit,, insatiably curious about other Mies minutiae, falls unconscionably silent.)

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For Mies’s life after his 1938 emigration we turn to Mies in America. This is a more familiar story, although told in considerably richer detail than in previous Mies exhibitions (at MoMA) in 1947 and 1986. The curator, Phyllis Lambert, is herself a central figure in the Mies story, for it was she who in 1954 convinced her father, Samuel Bronfman, the president of Seagram’s, to commission their New York office building from Mies, then her teacher of architecture. And surely it is Lambert’s training as an architect that keeps the focus firmly on the actual design of the buildings.

This is appropriate, for in the final three decades of Mies’s life he pursued the development of his architectural language with unblinking single-mindedness. IIT, whose new campus he was asked to design, and for which he conceived 28 buildings between 1941 and 1956, offered an ideal laboratory. No longer concerned with inventing new forms—increasingly, he contented himself with simple parallelograms—he addressed the steel frame itself, asking how its formal expression could be perfected.

In this struggle to perfect a formal type, Mies’s work recalls nothing so much as the development of the Greek Doric temple (a comparison he appreciated), whose form was likewise the result of continuous and minuscule improvements conducted within the narrowest of compasses. And just as the decorative elements of a Greek temple are, ultimately, structural in origin, so Mies insisted on proclaiming the internal structure of his buildings.

This was not always a straightforward exercise. Where, for example, local regulations demanded that structural beams be encased in concrete as a protection against fire, he would affix an additional set of I-beams to the skin of the building to serve as window mullions. (In the Seagram Building, where they are of bronze, the beams are exceptionally lovely.) Since they do not actually carry the building, these elements are not literally “true,” but they were intended to express a higher truth, making the hidden engineering comprehensible to the viewer and establishing a rhythmic order that is the essence of every framed building.

Mies’s Parthenon, as it were, was his last work, the National Gallery in Berlin (1962-66). There the physical structure receded to the point of maximum reticence: a great cantilevered roof hovering above an absolutely unbroken span, ostensibly carried on its continuous glass walls and on a pair of slim beams on each of the four sides. Alas, however, the great drama of Mies’s late work is not of the pictorial sort. The assembled array of sketches and perspective studies for the IIT buildings—many in faint pencil at the lower threshold of visibility—is the sort of demanding material that modern curators toss out at the first chance, or consign to the catalogue. Its inclusion here is clearly the mark of Phyllis Lambert, who is famous for the intellectually rigorous exhibitions at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, which she founded.

To compensate for these arid passages, the exhibition offers some splendid models, including a spectacular one of the National Gallery, displayed under subdued lighting as if it were a relic in a sacristy. There is also a wonderfully lucid model of Mies’s evolving treatment of the curtain wall, showing in three comparative examples how he extricated the glazing from its structural skeleton. The only distracting note is the constant projection of films interpreting Mies’s buildings, which loom intrusively over difficult drawings that require close concentration.

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Taken together, and in spite of the distractions, these two Mies exhibitions show high modernism at its best, its lofty aspirations still intact, unsullied by imitation or the inevitable indignities that afflict all flat-roofed and cornice-free buildings that are left to stand out in the rain. If this sort of modernism occasionally seems inhuman in its ruthless quest for purity, it is also refreshingly free of the cynicism and irony that taint so much of contemporary culture, architectural culture included.

Which brings us to Robert Venturi. Precisely the quality that makes Mies so difficult to exhibit makes Venturi the most congenial of museum subjects. His strong graphic sense and his facility at jaunty renderings were amply displayed in Out of the Ordinary, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.³ Here his strong freehand drawings, invariably done in a thick black line on yellow tracing paper, fairly quivered on the wall. It was especially instructive to see this exhibition after the Mies, an experience that in its own way re-created the heady sense of liberation produced by Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), the most effective and enduring assault on Mies’s haughty modernism.

Venturi was neatly perched to challenge the International Style. He was born in 1925 in Philadelphia, and there—following an education at Princeton—his practice has always been located. If the International Style was predicated on claims of general and universal validity, here was a city that was defiantly specific: diminutive brick houses, a prim 17th-century street plan, and an abiding Quaker prejudice against display and opulence.

Working within the constraints of his native city (whose character he appreciated all the more after a fellowship in Rome from 1954 to 1956), Venturi came to stress context, the doctrine that a building should take notice of the scale and character of its neighbors. A platitude today, this notion was rather radical at a moment when the same glass and chrome pavilion might serve as a school in Alaska or an embassy in equatorial Africa.

Complexity and Contradiction—the very title was a rebuke to Mies and the Euclidian simplicity he espoused—is a curious book. Published when the teaching of history had been all but banished from architectural education, it offered a veritable parade of examples from the past, assembled to show that Venturi’s architectural ideals—contradiction, ambiguity, elements with multiple functions—were respected in nearly every age and culture: everywhere, that is, except in the modern, Miesian world. On the other hand, the book was also weirdly indifferent to the past, mustering its examples thematically and without reference to chronology or style. This made for some striking juxtapositions: an Egyptian temple and a Renaissance church in Peru, an open-air theater by Alvar Aalto and a 17th-century wooden synagogue in Poland. About the values or beliefs that these buildings embodied, however, or the spiritual or social need that brought them forth, nothing was said. In his own way, Venturi was as ahistorical as Mies.

The book was an international sensation, swiftly appearing in sixteen languages. Its emphasis on context, and its permissive approach to the reuse of historical motifs, proved the impetus for a postmodernist movement in architecture, one that soon gathered up the strands of various attacks on modernism and became the dominant alternative. In the 1970’s, the movement became international in scope. At last even Philip Johnson, Mies’s first American champion and his collaborator on the Seagram Building, joined in the fun, placing a giddy broken pediment atop his AT&T Building in Manhattan.

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In fields other than architecture, postmodernism is generally (and accurately) thought of as a movement of the Left. Its hallmark, most notably in literature, has been an implacable hostility to formalism—the doctrine that a work of art is properly judged by reference to its intrinsic properties, such as structure and form. Instead, postmodern critics routinely make judgments by criteria extrinsic to the work in question, especially political ones.

But in architecture, strangely enough, postmodernism came to be seen as a movement of the Right. Its most conspicuous monuments were the vivid commercial towers erected during the building boom of the 1980’s and characterized by compulsory red granite stripes and giant columns that would have looked overscaled on the Acropolis. As the style came to be seen as a physical manifestation of an alleged “decade of greed,” postmodernism itself became something of a dirty word in schools of architecture. Venturi, anxious to dissociate himself from a now-suspect term, seems to have succeeded in banishing it from both exhibition and catalogue.

Out of the Ordinary lacked the urgent tempo of the two Mies exhibitions. After the establishment of Venturi’s characteristic language in the early 1960’s, there has been no deliberate process of evolution in his career; nor could there have been, for this is an architect who takes his cues from the specifics of site and program. Instead, the exhibition stressed the variety and scope of Venturi’s work, including his early Mother’s House (1959-64), Wu Hall at Princeton University (1980-83), and the controversial Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London (1985-91). Each was represented by drawings and models, including a full-scale model of the façade of Mother’s House.

Taken as a whole, Venturi’s work is strikingly decorative in character, with none of Mies’s fixation on structural innovation—as if the task of an architect were simply to place a pleasing and organized cladding over the frame provided by the builder. Venturi has frankly acknowledged this. In a celebrated 1970 essay, he divided all of architecture into two comprehensive categories: buildings whose meaning is carried by an expressively emblematic shape and buildings that are mere boxes, deriving their meaning from whatever ornament is draped upon their walls. The former type he termed a “duck”—referring to a particularly inane Long Island fast-food stand in that precise form—and the latter a “decorated shed,” the humble category that subsumes most architecture and in which he was happy to work.

These wry terms, refreshing in their blunt plainness, could not have contrasted more strongly with Mies’s heroic seriousness. But, just as in Mies, they were meant to convey the sense that the architect had confronted certain objective facts about the contemporary world and that his ultimate path was in some sense historically inevitable. For Venturi, the objective facts were that modern construction tended toward thin planar walls, and that modern society demanded vital and familiar symbols.

Here was the origin of the emphatically two-dimensional quality that clings to and diminishes all of Venturi’s work. Rather than exhibiting the strengths of sculpture (weight, texture, corporeality), it exhibits the weaknesses of graphic design (thinness, indifference to materials, and a tendency to caricature). In the context of a museum show, to be sure, graphic simplification and eye-catching exaggeration are themselves strengths, just as they are in the visual disorder of the modern city or highway strip. All this accounts for the undoubted success of Venturi and his imitators, who created so much of the rollicking architecture of the last generation. But it also accounts for the general lowering of architectural aspirations with which they are also rightly associated.

Postmodernism began with a promise to restore humanist values to architecture, to make buildings communicate to the public in tones more varied than a prolonged om, and to reconnect architecture to the great continuities of Western tradition. In the end, however, the past has turned out to be nothing but a great rummage sale of reusable forms, detached from their original owners and purposes. Nor is Venturi’s self-conscious celebration of popular imagery (the theme of his second book, Learning from Las Vegas, 1972) free of a certain note of mere cynicism. In a snide gesture that went decidedly unappreciated by his clients, Venturi hoisted an oversized metal television antenna over the Guild House, a retirement complex he built in Philadelphia, to signify to the world how the elderly “spend so much time looking at TV” In this way and others, the rise and fall of architectural postmodernism hides the story of a larger cultural disorder.

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In the final room of the Venturi exhibition, an item of faux graffiti insists that he is “naughty” rather than “nutty,” “mannerist” rather than “expressionist,” and that he believes in making “buildings that look like buildings.” All this is seemingly meant to refer, invidiously, to Frank Gehry, the subject of the fourth major exhibition this year and the architect of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the most trumpeted building of the moment.⁴

Something of a late bloomer (he is only four years younger than Venturi), the California-based Gehry spent his early career as a Miesian modernist, an aspect of his career that the show discreetly omitted just as exhibitions of Mies once shunned his non-modernist work. But in 1977, in an act that won him instant notoriety, he remodeled his house in Santa Monica, a modest bungalow that he sliced, dissected, and encased with low-budget materials—most famously, plywood and chain-link fencing—thereby turning it into an anarchic hodge-podge bristling like a Constructivist collage.

The stylistic movement that Gehry’s house helped launch came to be called deconstruction. This was in part because of the literal fragmentation it espoused, and in part because its challenging attitude suggested the French philosophical fad of the same name. But while a few architectural deconstructionists, like Peter Eisenman, actually seem to have read some Continental philosophy, Gehry’s architecture remained thoroughly Californian in its lightness and essential whimsicality.

As often happens, the avant-garde maverick rapidly became an establishment darling. Within a few years, Gehry’s newfound celebrity and evident eagerness to shock brought him commissions for museums, office buildings, and factories (especially, if unaccountably, in Germany). As his budgets increased, the chain-link fencing and plywood vanished, but the jury-rigged quality remained. By the end of the 1980’s, he had devised an entirely new architectural language in which trapezoidal and curving elements were assembled in a writhing mass, re-suiting in a jumbled structure that seemed calculated by an engineer acquainted only with non-Euclidean geometry (though actually made possible through modern computer technology). It was this fluttering architecture, its separate elements billowing like sails in a tempest, that was chosen for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (1991-97).

So thoroughly plastic an architecture relies on an intense use of models. These were at the heart of Frank Gehry, Architect. Some 600 or so examples were assembled, including several enormous presentation models that were themselves minor technical achievements. The most striking, however, were Gehry’s hasty three-dimensional sketches, as slapdash as his house, consisting of crumpled tissues and bits of paper folded and taped in place in a process very nearly the sculptural equivalent of automatic writing.

All this would have been much more charming were it not for the aura of self-promotion that wafted through the show. Its raison d’être was the proposed new Guggenheim Museum, a close paraphrase of Bilbao, intended for lower Manhattan. A staggering model of this building opened the exhibition (just as the models for Bilbao closed it), and what it made clear was that this building, if carried through to completion, will be one of the most serious single interventions in the physical form of New York—a Leviathan on the East River on the order of the Empire State Building or the Brooklyn Bridge, which it would dwarf.

And that, of course, is the point, as well as perhaps the least attractive element of Gehry’s often frolicsome buildings. Like so much else in contemporary California, his architecture responds to the needs of the roadside; it is not an architecture that observes the covenant of the street, that respects context and continuity, or that acknowledges the presence and worth of neighbors. To the contrary, it is redolent of the hedonistic and self-centered individualism that can be pursued only on a large enclosed lot with one’s neighbors held at arm’s length. In short, it is a suburban architecture, not an urban one.

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Something must be said about the catalogues to these four exhibitions, which together represent the state of the art of contemporary museum publications. Each is a lumbering object, outfitted with a sumptuous portfolio of visual material superbly reproduced. The texts, though, are another matter. Except for Out of the Ordinary, which attempts to recapitulate Venturi’s career, each contains a grab-bag of scholarly essays that tend to flit around the periphery of the exhibition while leaving a void at the center. Mies in Berlin, for example, says virtually nothing about his fateful directorship of the Bauhaus. Phyllis Lambert’s essay in Mies in America is quite thorough and useful, by far the most valuable item in the catalogue, but it is offset by several turgid pieces by contemporary architects and theorists that verge on the unreadable. (In one of them the author complains, evidently in all seriousness, that his own essay is “much too undialectical.”) Nor does any of the catalogues provide a reliable record of what was exhibited.

As for the four shows themselves (all of which are or will be traveling to different cities), they cast a melancholy light on the fate of modernism. Biographical exhibitions inevitably trace a positive arc, telling a story of unfolding powers and widening scope. By nature they are optimistic. And taken one by one, as self-contained case studies, this fine quartet of exhibitions depicts the architecture of the last century in the most positive light imaginable: as an untroubled march of heroic form-givers, stocking the world with polished vignettes of genius.

The casual viewer might be pardoned for thinking that nothing went wrong in that century. But war, revolution, loss of cultural confidence—harvested in full and tragic measure—eventually leave their mark on architecture, too, if only indirectly. For architecture is a social artifact, and cannot help reflecting the civilization that made it. To look at these celebratory exhibitions in this light is rather sobering, for it is difficult not to read them as four celebrations on a downward-descending line.

The quality in the work of Mies that today seems most remote is its pervading sense of responsibility—the responsibility of a generation that, putting every particle of received wisdom to the test, took upon itself the task of re-creating all of architecture as part of the task of reconstructing society itself. If it went about its tradition-toppling work with a certain glee, this was to be expected in Europe after World War I, when civilization itself seemed in some fundamental way discredited.

Venturi and Gehry are untroubled by the impulse to heal a fractured culture. This is their charm, as it is the charm of a civilization that values novelty and arresting imagery, is hesitant about its deeper values and susceptible to the allure of celebrity. No one has made wittier entertainment pavilions or more eye-popping retail outlets than these two. But do not ask them for a courthouse, or a cathedral, or, despite all their undoubted cleverness, to do what Mies and others did routinely and honestly, namely, make buildings that speak of a higher purpose and that acknowledge the tragic nature of life.

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¹ Mies in Berlin opened at the Museum of Modern Art on June 21 and will be on view until September 11. A catalogue by Terence Riley and Barry Bergdoll has been published by the Museum of Modern Art (592 pp., $70.00 cloth, $35.00 paper).

² Mies in America opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art on June 21 and will be on view until September 23. A catalogue of the exhibition, edited by Phyllis Lambert, has been published by Harry N. Abrams (799 pp., $75.00 cloth, $49.95 paper).

³ Out of the Ordinary: Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown & Associates opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on June 10 and was on view until August 5. A catalogue by David B. Brownlee, David G. DeLong, and Kathryn B. Hiesinger has been published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press (277 pp., $60.00 cloth, $36.00 paper).

⁴ Frank Gehry, Architect opened at the Guggenheim Museum on May 18 and was on view until August 26. The catalogue, edited by J. Fiona Ragheb, has been published by the Guggenheim Museum (390 pp., $75.00 cloth, $45.00 paper).

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