The White Gods!

Come from the skies at last!

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Mies was installed as the Dean of Architecture at the Armour Institute in Chicago [later renamed the Illinois Institute of Technology]. And not just dean, master builder, also. He was given a campus to create, twenty-one buildings in all...Twenty-one large buildings, in the middle of the Depression, at a time when building had come to a halt in the United States--for an architect who had completed only seventeen buildings in his career--

O White Gods. In actuality, the IIT campus was, and is, surprisingly modest in appearance, especially Mies's Depression-era buildings, all of which were built on Spartan budgets. But once World War II ended, and the American economy took off and war-related construction restrictions were lifted, Mies began to build, and in quantity. For better or worse, the skyline of urban America is to this day shaped by Mies's glass box designs, as the interviewees of Regular or Super explain.

One of those interviewed for the documentary is Phyllis Lambert, one the most important figures in Mies's American career. Her father was Samuel Bronfman, owner of Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, the famous distillers. In the mid-1950s, she convinced him to hire Mies to build Seagram's office building on Park Ave, thus giving New York what is arguably its best post-World War II building. The Seagram Building's interior contains two restaurants, the Four Seasons and the Brasserie. While the Four Seasons is a landmark--and islandmarked, along with the Seagram building itself--the Brasserie was almost an afterthought. Philip Johnson, who also designed the Four Seasons (and detailed much of the Seagram Building's interior spaces), designed it as a sort of a minimalist coffee shop in the late 1950s, but it closed after a mid-1990s fire. Regular or Super spends quite a bit of time exploring the space and interviewing Elizabeth Diller, the architect in charge of remodeling, but precious little time is explaining the restaurant upstairs, even though a few of the documentary's interviews were filmed there.

Lack of Footage Distorts Story

Of course, considering when the documentary was made (presumably early to mid 2003), Johnson, who passed away just this month at the incredible age of 98, was already probably not in the best of health.

The omission of a serious discussion of Johnson's role in Mies's career in this film highlights a problem with many documentaries. To produce something visually interesting, the documentarian almost has to "go where the footage is" when assembling a film, which may or not be the most important elements of his subject's life, and can dramatically distort how a story is told in documentary form.