As an architect who recognizes the obvious historical significance of early modernism, I found the Neues Bauen International 1927 | 2002 exhibition currently running at Victoria University School of Architecture profoundly disappointing. It was advertised as a "unique overview" of the work of canonical architects such as Mies van de Rohe, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright, but I can only report that while the travelling exhibition is an overview, it is not unique. Given the wealth of scholarly work on the modern movement, and the architects being presented, the exhibition's generators had the responsibility to do more than just hang their hats on a historically significant exhibition, that being the Internationale Plan und Modellausstellung Neuer Baukunst (International Plan and Model Exhibition) presented at the 1927 Deutscher Werkbund exhibition, Die Wohnung (Habitation). This is not to say that German curator, Professor Karin Kirsh did not try to do more. The underlying ambition of the exhibition was to select works from the original exhibition that might still be relevant to the future of architecture today, if not more than they were in 1927. Unfortunately, the exhibition largely fails on this account and merely stands as a cursory and amateurishly curated retrospective of what was once a potent collection of revolutionary work.

Out of all the work exhibited only that of Mies, Corbusier, and El Lissitzky can really be seen as still pointing in a direct way to "the future," having continued to provide fertile ground for contemporary provocateurs such as Rem Koolhaas/OMA or Herzog & de Meuron. In the case of Koolhaas we can see Mies still playing out in such work as the McCormick Tribune Campus Centre at IIT in Chicago, the recent proposal for Latvia's Museum of Contemporary Art, and in a more radical way, the Seattle Public Library. And, one cannot help but contemplate the yet unrealized energy present in Mies' sketches for the design of skyscrapers and think of the many radical high-rise proposals still being made - the Roche Tower in Basel, Switzerland by H&deM, Jean Nouvel's Torre Agbar in Barcelona, or OMA's CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, China just to name a few. The most provocative work presented was El Lissitzky's "Cloudhanger", a project which still represents a radical view of density and the liberation of the ground plane, and suggested an alternate future to that of skyscraper. In many ways it is the only project that had the potential of living up to the underlying ambition of the exhibition. For it is only now that we can see its influence being realized, most notably in projects such as Steven Holl's recent proposal for the Vanke Centre in Shenzhen, China. What all these contemporary projects point to is what the exhibition might have been if only the connections had been made.

I guess I find it difficult at the beginning of the 21st century, and after all the historical accounts and criticism, to merely look back and admire these works without any regard to that which came before or after. Because, while it can be said architecture would not be where it is today without the modern movement, the same can also be said for neo-classicism and post-modernism - just to name modernism's closest neighbours on the historical timeline. It is on this continuum that the true importance and influence of any work lies. This exhibition, quite carelessly, dislodges these important works from their chronological place in history and offers nothing new in return - no recontextualization or alternate readings. I am still not sure what audience Neues Bauen International 1927 | 2002 is aimed at - students, academics, practitioners, or laypersons - but whoever it is, I do not think they are well served by what should have been at the very least a rigorous reconstruction of the original exhibition, and is not.