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

This edition of The Journal of Architecture was guest edited by Watson, who also wrote the introduction (DOI 10.1080/13602360903027848) and article (DOI 10.1080/13602360903027996). It was themed on the subject of ‘Problems of Painting and Building in Architecture.’ Contributions were invited from a range of scholars in the UK and internationally. The range includes papers that look at the overlap between painting and building within the history and theory of architecture as well as those grounded in a design research methodology closer to Watson’s own. One ambition of the publication was to demonstrate the value of design research for the thinking of architectural history and theory. Watson’s essay in the volume picks up on a suggestion of the art historian and critic Rosalind Krauss, who thought there were some interesting parallels between the buildings of Mies van der Rohe and the grid paintings of Agnes Martin. Krauss based her reading of Martin’s painted grids on a phenomenological reading of the work and in this essay Watson asks what it would be to approach van der Rohe’s New National Gallery in Berlin in a similar manner. In particular the inquiry asks if and how the apprehension of the surface of the painting, which Krauss refers to as a ‘feeling like mist,’ is in some sense reciprocated in the apprehension of the volume and mass of the building.