'Living Modernity: Experiments in the Exceptional and the Everyday, 1920s–1970s'

Building Mies's Unbuilt Row House

John Hill | 22. March 2025

All photos by Neoplus Sixten Inc.

LIVING Modernity: Experiments in the Exceptional and Everyday 1920s–1970s, an exhibition that just opened at The National Art Center, Tokyo, presents fourteen masterpieces of modern residential architecture, plus a full-scale reproduction of one of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's unbuilt courtyard houses from the 1930s. Take a look at some photos of the exhibition and the immersive Mies house.

On display from March 19 until June 30, 2025, LIVING Modernity: Experiments in the Exceptional and Everyday 1920s–1970s examines how houses designed by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto, Frank Gehry, and others from the 1920s to 1970s transformed daily living. The exhibition “showcases houses designed by architects who embraced modernity,” per The National Art Center, Tokyo, “by reexamining the fundamentals of living to improve functionality, artistry and comfort.” Furthermore, “these houses share the international ethos of creating a new architecture fundamentally connected to their specific time, region, climate, and social context,” and “vividly express the family dynamics and characters of their individual residents.” Mies's Tugendhat House, Lina Bo Bardi's Casa de Vidro, and Kiyonori and Norie Kikutake's Sky House are just a few of the fourteen houses in the exhibition.

The curators of the Japan-Architects platform visited LIVING Modernity for the opening, documenting their visit in a report with numerous photographs. A few of them are highlight here to give a taste of the exhibition and to draw attention to the full-scale reproduction of one of Mies's least-known houses.

The exhibition comprises Special Exhibition Gallery 1E and 2E in The National Art Center, Tokyo, with the fourteen houses in Gallery 1E and the unbuilt Mies house upstairs in Gallery 2E.

At the entrance to the exhibition, a drop ceiling in mesh (for fire safety reasons, it cannot be solid) immerses visitors in a modernist aesthetic.

The ceiling and ribbon window are full-scale recreations of Villa “Le Lac” in Corseaux, Switzerland, which Le Corbusier built for his parents in 1923/24, and is the oldest house among the fourteen projects in the exhibition.

The fourteen houses documented in models, drawings, photos, and other media are spread across the predominantly open first-floor gallery, grouped according to seven “fundamental challenges faced by architects in the 20th century”: hygiene, materiality, window, kitchen, furnishings, media, and landscape.

Soon after the Barcelona Pavilion (1929) and Tugendhat House (1930), Mies devised a series of courtyard houses that had similar free-flowing plans organized about walled-in courts. If built, they would have been grouped into higher-density urban assemblages, rather than as standalone houses in the landscape. None of the courtyard houses that Mies designed between 1931 and his emigration to the United States in 1938 were built, so they are not as well known today as the Edith Farnsworth House (1951) or even the unbuilt Resor House (1938). LIVING Modernity is the first attempt to take one of these projects, the Row House (1931), from drawing board to reality.

While admission is required for the exhibition, Mies's Row House on the second floor of the museum is open to all visitors for free.

To help pay for the full-scale reproduction, The National Art Center, Tokyo raised donations through crowdfunding, a first for the institution.

The lighting changes color from moment to moment, reproducing a day's light environment in 6 minutes and 30 seconds (see also the time-lapse video at bottom).

Architects Waro Kishi (left), supervisor of this exhibition (left) and Naoyuki Nagata, organizer of the venue, speaking at the exhibition opening.

Visit Japan-Architects to see many more photos from the opening of LIVING Modernity: Experiments in the Exceptional and Everyday 1920s–1970s.