Mies urbanist, from Detroit to Toronto. A monumental return to Berlin

Together with Hilberseimer, Mies van der Rohe designed a single housing project in the United States: Lafayette Park, an urban renewal project in which high-rise buildings are accompanied by row houses in a large park (1955-63). The urban design of the Seagram Building was repeated with increasing complexity in the Federal Center in Chicago, the Toronto Dominion and the Westmount Center in Montreal. After a series of failures, such as the Mannheim Theater (1953), he managed to return to Germany, where the Nationalgalerie in West Berlin (1968) enabled him to complete the slow development of the vast exhibition pavilion he had been studying since the 1950s, occasionally rediscovering memories of the buildings of Behrens and Karl-Friedrich Schinkel.