Mies van der Rohe

Basel, Switzerland–based Werner Blaser, though trained as an architect, is best known for his astonishingly prolific career as an architectural historian, writer, curator and photographer. In those roles, he’s often focused on Mies van der Rohe (under whom he studied at IIT), and in curating “West Is East Is West,” he draws parallels between Mies’s work and traditions in Eastern architecture, pairing images of Mies’s designs with photos Blaser shot during travels to Japan and China.

Each of the diptychs that make up the exhibit highlights a different aspect of the connection—mostly variations on affinities involving framing of nature and the integration of interior and exterior spaces. Blaser offers no claim that Mies—who doesn’t appear even to have traveled to Asia in his lifetime—intended any of this; instead, he seems to imply that, in architecture, there is much that is basic and maybe even unconscious.

The show’s venue, Crown Hall, works both for and against it. Despite the high quality and large size of Blaser’s photos, the vastness of the open space would swallow nearly anything displayed there. But because IIT doesn’t schedule classes at Crown Hall during the summer, you have the opportunity to appreciate the eloquent geometry and austere beauty of Mies’s masterpiece (painstakingly restored for its 50th birthday in 2005) without the messy intrusion of people and their stuff. This alone would make it worth the trip, although the (admittedly modest) entrance fee could be a deterrent to somebody who isn’t usually in the neighborhood.—Philip Berger