Organizing the past 55Two major exhibitions on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
(1886–1969) were staged concurrently in New York in 2001:
Mies in Berlin at the Museum of Modern Art, and Mies in
America at the Whitney Museum of American Art.^29 Together
they illustrate some of the points raised above. Here the
architect’s work is organized along the clear division of his
European and American ‘periods’, divisible by his 1937 emi-
gration from Germany. How does Mies’s work change after
his move to Chicago? What aspects of his work ‘belong’ to
Berlin? And what property belongs to the US? What among
his work and ideas transcend the place of his practice – or
the intellectual and artistic context of the modern movement,
for which he is customarily claimed? The trajectory of this
story can be cast long – from earliest infl uences on the young
Mies to his posthumous infl uence on others – or short – from
the fi rst building to the last. The bio-geographical division
maintained by the two museums and curatorial teams (led
by Terence Riley and Barry Bergdoll at the Museum of
Modern Art and Phyllis Lambert at the Whitney) suggests a
large subsidiary unit of ‘the life’ within which Mies historians
fi nd smaller sets of his architectural projects.
7 Mies and America? Jacqueline Kennedy chatting with Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe, 12 April 1964, Hyannis Port, Mass.