Ludwig Mies van der Rohe(1886–1969) is one of the outstanding representatives of the New Building. He achieved legendary fame as the director of the Bauhaus in Berlin and as a teacher at the IIT in Chicago. The pavilion built at the World Exhibition in Barcelona in 1929 and the Haus Tugendhat in Brno, completed one year later, became incunabula of Modernism.Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Pavilion of the German Empire in Barcelona was dismantled at the end of the exhibition and largely underwent accurate reconstruction in 1986 to mark the architect’s 100th birthday. The Haus Tugendhat, on the other hand, had largely survived despite seventy years of neglect but it was only in 2010–2012 that it could be meticulously restored to its original state.

To mark the reconstruction the architecture photograph Klaus Kinold portrayed both buildings in accurate photographs. The historians of architecture Wolf Tegethoff and Christoph Hölz outline the constructionhistories and pursue the question of justification for the reconstruction of modern architecture.