A detailed analysis of these collaborative projects reveals Lilly Reich’s contribution to teamwork and provides an interpretive framework for an intuition that already existed but which architects and critics left unarticulated for decades. Lilly Reich was an architect and designer of strong character, firm in negotiating her contracts, and respected on the construction site. Her partnership with Mies gave her access to major exhibition projects, where she was able to fully deploy her creative sensibility. However, that same partnership eventually overshadowed the critical reception of her own work.

In the words of Magdalena Droste, author of the foreword, the book offers “an impressive and convincing counter-narrative to the canonical interpretation of Barcelona 1929 in architectural literature.” It presents a counter-history to the supposed division of tasks between the design of the pavilion and that of the exhibitions, between Mies and Lilly Reich, a version that Reich herself never had the chance to refute. She died shortly after the end of the Second World War, having catalogued, packed, and safeguarded from the bombing of Berlin the legacy of her former partner, who had emigrated to America. That task, carried out by Lilly Reich during the war, ensured the critical fortune of Mies’s individual and shared work in Europe, but, unfortunately, not her own.