Reverence is appropriate in a religious context, but when the milieu is secular there is something disturbing, even repellent, about it. Which is why the "Mies in America" exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York fails - it treats its subject as an architectural pharaoh.
This must be put down to its curator, Phyllis Lambert, founding director and chair of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Because she and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe go back a long, long way; indeed, it was at her instigation that he was commissioned to design the totemic Seagram building on Park Avenue. That was in 1954 when this diminutive woman in black was a slip of a girl. But she happened to be the daughter of Samuel Bronfman, head of the Canadian distillery group, and managed to persuade him to go for a building of quality. He made her director of planning for the project and she chose Mies; the rest is history.
Ms Lambert subsequently studied architecture under Mies at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and worked in his office throughout the 1960s. "There was a sense of rectitude about him, but he was also a warm human being," she recalls. "And pragmatic: he worked on technical problems with his students."
Years of sweat and thousands of drawings had gone into creating the IIT campus on the south side of Chicago, which Mies described as "the hardest job I ever had to do". Working for the first time on a vast urban scale, he had to master plan a 100-acre site amid the city's slums and design numerous buildings to fill it.
Classically Miesian, they were all buildings as "objects in space" and mostly made from off-the-shelf steel rolling out from the mills of the Midwest, which gave IIT an industrial image to go with its technological mission. And every one of these buildings, including his iconic Crown Hall, was based on a 24ft modular grid.
"Architecture must belong to its own time," Mies once said. It was "the will of an epoch translated into space". And that applied to IIT, too. Its first phase, completed as early as 1946, was immediately applauded for its radical vision. Half a century later, sadly, the entire complex is run-down and in dire need of renovation.
Mies took his great leap towards the goal of creating clear-span, universal space with the Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, some 50 miles west of Chicago. Built in 1951 as a weekend retreat for Dr Edith Farnsworth, it was described by Ms Lambert as "one of the most radically minimalist houses ever designed". A transparent box framed by eight exterior steel columns, its interior consists of a single room subdivided by partitions, set in a wooded landscape.
Well represented at the exhibition by a mesmerising video, this icon of the modern movement has just been acquired from Lord (Peter) Palumbo by the state of Illinois.
Mies was fascinated by skyscrapers and their "soaring skeletal frames" while under construction. His first chance to reach for the sky came with a 1948 commission to design two apartment towers for Chicago's Lake Shore Drive, which he set on a podium to separate them from "the chaotic jungle of the existing city".
He took a similar approach in designing the Seagram building. Setting it back 90 feet from Park Avenue to create a plaza, so that it could be seen properly, punched an unprecedented opening in New York's fabric, and this led to an early revision of the city's zoning code to encourage more public spaces at street level.
Located a few blocks north of the Wladorf Astoria hotel, Seagram high-rise buildings to a new pinnacle of refinement with its mullioned facades of Delta manganese bronze. Though almost suffocated now by taller and much less distinguished tower blocks, it still stands out as a modern masterpiece.
Crass imitations of Mies's work proliferated throughout North America, Europe and elsewhere. "Less is more"., his great slogan, was crudely misinterpreted by property developers as a licence to gross up office space in stripped-down, even gimback buildings. But he can hardly be held responsible for these travesties.
Mies went on to design more high-rise buildings in the 1960s, notably the Toronto Dominion Centre and Chicago's Federal Center, and continued to experiment with clear-span space, best exemplified by the unbuilt Chicago Convention Center and, of course, is last project, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, completed in 1968.
SEEN as "a pure marriage of space and structure", the glass-walled gallery stands on an expensive granite podium under a vast black steel roof, held up by eight external steel columns. Though barely functional as an art space, it is a timeless classic compared to James Stirling's pink-and-blue, po-mo extension to the nearby Science Museum.
At the Whitney, a large model of the Neue Nationalgalerie is laid out like a catafalque in a black-walled room suffused with elegiac music. A film entitled Alltagzeit (In Ordinary Time) plays continuously on a large screen, featuring choreographed people moving about inside from sunrise to sunset - bizarrely pharaonic.
This apotheosis of Mies van der Rohe's architecture - even the scale model recalls his 1930 proposal for a slab inscribed "Den Toten" (To the Dead) in the Neue Wache was memorial on Uter den Linden - is an extreme example of how his work is treated in the exhibition. A more critical appraisal, as in the MMA, should have been possible.
Nonetheless, there is much of interest in the drawings, the books and art (Klee, Kandinsky, Braque, Picasso and the Dadaist Kurt Switters) Mies collected.
Both exhibitions are accompanied by heavy, learned tomes and, this being the 21st century, by digitally created "virtual tours" of several of his major works.
There are two dedicated websites related to the exhibitions at
www.mona.org/mies
and www.whitney.org/mies