Problems of painting and building in architecture Introduction

Pictorial grids: reading the buildings of Mies van der Rohe through the paintings of Agnes Martin

“…It is the contention of this paper that these are misreadings of Mies and as such symptomatic of 'the blind spot that constitutes modernity's problem with its own past'. 4 At a symposium held in 1992 to mark the twentyfifth anniversary of the Toronto-Dominion Centre Rosalind Krauss gave a paper in which she suggested that there was something to be learned about the architecture of Mies van der Rohe through attending to the paintings of Agnes Martin. Having made such a tantalising suggestion, Krauss then announced her inadequacy to the task and proceeded to give a modestly revised version of a paper she had written for another occasion, that being the catalogue of the Agnes Martin retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, November, 1992.…”