LUDWIG Mies van der Rohe is not a name that trips easily off the lips. And though Le Corbusier is probably mush better known, Mies was undoubtedly the most influential architect of the 20th century, epitomising - as "Corb" did, too - its struggle for something entirely new and modern.
What Mies did, single - mindedly and almost single - handedly, was to develop a new architectural language with its own rigorous grammatical structure. And co powerful was this grammar that it became the gospel for a whole generation of architects, some of whom had studied at the feet of The Master in Chicago.
Elegant steel towers raised on podiums, modular grids, clear - span roofs and the drive to create "universal space" - these were the key elements of the gospel according to Mies. What he promulgated was nothing less than a new way of building, "a means of concieving architecture as a frame for experience".
That's how Barry Bergdoll and Terence Riley, curators of an understanding exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMa), sum up the Miesian project.
And there is no denying its influence, even in Ireland, where such eminent architects as Ronnie Tallon, Cathal O'Neill and the late Peter Doyle were among his disciples.
Scott Tallon Walker's Bank of Ireland headquarters in Baggot Street was a literal reworking of the Seagram building in New York. Its design and layout of the RTE complex in Donnybrook echo his Illinois Institute of Technology campus in Chicago and even the Carroll's cigarette factory in Dundalk is a homage to Mies.
"Less is more," Mies decreed - and so it was. But the pure, spare minimalism of his buildings was only achieved after great thought and effort; for the glass-walled Resor house in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, framing a sublime panorama of the Grand Tetons, he made 800 drawings before the project was cancelled by his clients.
That was in 1938, the year he emigrated to the US from Nazi Germany to embark on the second chapter of his remarkable career. Already 52 years old, he had a substantial body of work under his belt, having also served as the last director of the Bauhaus, which had been closed down in 1933 after a raid by the Gestapo.
Mies, the son of a stonemason from Aachen, with no formal architectural training, produced one of the great icons of 20th century architecture - the German Pavilion at the Barcelona Exposition of 1929 - a building that remained hugely influential, even though it survived only in photographs, for more than 50 years.
The pavilion demanded to be rebuilt and it was in 1986, by the City of Barcelona, using photographs and drawings from the vast Mies van der Rohe archive held by MoMA in New York. That was also the rich source from which most of the latest MoMA exhibition, "Mies in Berlin", was expertly culled by Bergdoll and Riley.
The fact that the Whitney Museum in New York is simultaneously staging a companion show, "Mies in America", has been billed as "an intellectual and cultural event of the first magnitude" by its director, Max Anderson; at the press preview, he even declared - with characteristic New York hype - that it was "possible to speak of 2001 as the Year of Mies".
But it is MoMA that can lay claim to a Miesian record of considerable longevity. Thanks to Philip Johnson (91) - then an agenda-setting critic and later a very successful architect who dallied with the degeneracy of postmodernism - some of Mies's early works first got a showing as long ago as 1932, in an exhibition featuring the International Style.
Mies got his own show at MoMA in 1938, coinciding with his arrival in the US, followed by a retrospective in 1947 and another major exhibition in 1986, marking the centenary of his birth (he died in 1969). But because this was staged at the high-point of the "po-mo" craze, it received quite a chilly critical reception. How times change! Bergdoll, who is professor of art history at Columbia University, and Riley, head of MoMA's architecture and design department, concede that Mies collaborated with Johnson in "cleansing and clarifying" (i.e. air-brushing) the first chapter of his career so that the transition to his "second act" in North America would appear quite seamless.
The truth is that not everything Mies designed between 1905 and 1938 was "modern", and the current exhibition makes no attempt to disguise that. What its two curators set out to do was to look afresh at his German career - on its own terms - providing "a portrait of the artist as a young man", as Riley put it. Thus, it has "revisionist aspirations".
Who would imagine, for example, that Mies designed a ponderous colonnaded monument to Otto von Bismarck, in a 1910 competition entry which has never been seen previously in a major exhibition? Or that his early houses were quite traditional in style, inspired by Berlin's great neo-classical architect, Karl Friederich Schinkel? Peter Behrens, for whom Mies worked while still in his 20s, was another major influence. His stupendous turbine factory, built for AEG in 1910 and still as impressive as ever, taught the young architect the idea of "great form". Behrens also imbued him with the notion that it was the mission of architecture to seek "a higher sense of order".
In 1921, Mies consciously re-invented himself by adding on his mother's maiden name, Rohe, and inserting the Dutch aristocratic "van der" in between. By then, he had become a leading member of Berlin's avant-garde set; one of its flagship publications, the short-lived G magazine was produced in his apartment.
No doubt they all hailed the cutting-edge quality of his crystalline skyscraper for a triangular site next to Friederichstrasse station, designed for a 1921 competition and shown in drawings and a stunning scale model.
Meant to symbolise Berlin's revival after the first World War, it pre-figured what he would do later in North America.
By the mid-1920s, Mies was designing projects for flat-roofed villas in concrete and brick, such as the Wolf House, with its fluid floor plan, as well as major public-housing schemes in Berlin and Stuttgart, which were intended to promote the concept of modern living. Though criticised by some as "flat cubes", those that survive are clearly cherished.
"Architecture begins where one brick is carefully laid on another," Mies once said. But what would Red-baiting Americans have made of his 1926 layered brick monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, which was so controversial that Krupps wouldn't supply the steel for its hammer-and-sickle crest? The Nazis destroyed it in 1933.
Mies was well aware of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and other US architects long before he fled Germany. He even had views on Henry Ford as early as 1924: "We agree with the direction Ford has taken, but we reject the plane on which he moves. Mechanisation can never be a goal, it must remain a means. A means toward a spiritual purpose".
He began to realise his own mission when he designed the Tugendat House in Brno, capital of the Czech province of Moravia.
It was probably one of the most expensive wedding presents ever given, featuring as its piΦce de rΘsistance a retractable glass wall, 80 feet long, which could be dropped into the floor at the flick of a switch to dissolve the fluid interior into the sloping garden outside.
A model by Mies himself is one of the highlights of MoMA exhibitions.
The retractable wall wasn't working when I visited in 1992 with architecture students from UCD; the house had been pressed into service as a Russian officers' club and, inevitably, that took its toll. But to the immense credit of Brno, it has since been restored.
Mies was working on the Tugendat House while he was designing his Barcelona Pavilion - and it's hard to believe that both date from 1929. The pavilion revolutionised the concept of space in the 20th century because its flat roof was supported by chromed steel columns; thus, the walls of glass and marble could be positioned freely.
It is, by common consent, a tour de force. The clean lines, the pebble-filled pools, the sculpture, the Barcelona Chair, the seamless flow between inside and out - everything about it inspires wonder. And it's no surprise that this building, and the design principle that lay behind it, was imprinted on the minds of architecture students everywhere.
Not so well known is the fact that Mies designed another German pavilion for the Brussels Exposition in 1935, two years after the Nazis seized power; it was rejected, even though it came with swastikas, admittedly half-heartedly drawn. But that's the real value of this exhibition: it is Mies van der Rohe, minor warts and all.