Detlef Mertins was an architect, historian, and educator with extensive experience in teaching, scholarship, and academic administration, as well as architectural practice. He completed his BArch at the University of Toronto (1980) and his PhD at Princeton University (1996). He was Professor of Architecture and former Chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining Penn in 2003, he was Associate Professor at the University of Toronto in the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design where he held a Canada Research Chair in Architecture. After completing his Bachelor of Architecture at the University of Toronto in 1980, Mertins practiced in Toronto, first with Baird/Sampson and Jones and Kirkland, then in his own firm for a number of years. At that time, he served as Professional Advisor for several important Canadian competitions. Later, in 2000, he was professional advisor for the Downsview Park Competition, Toronto, the results of which were subsequently exhibited at the Van Alen Institute and published by Harvard University. His revisionist interpretations of Modernism have appeared in publications such as The Presence of Mies, the English edition of Walter Curt Behrendt’s The Victory of the New Building Style, and essays in Architecture and Cubism, Autonomy and Ideology, Mies in Berlin, Mies in America, NOX: Machining Architecture, and Phylogenesis: FOA’s Ark. Recent publications include “The Modernity of Zaha Hadid” (Zaha Hadid exhibition catalogue, Guggenheim Museum), “Mies’s Event Space” (Grey Room 20), “Interview with Natalie de Blois” (SOM Journal 4), and “Walter Benjamin and the Tectonic Unconscious” (Walter Benjamin and Art, edited Andrew Benjamin). He co-edited the English edition of G: An Avant-Garde Journal in Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 1923–1926 (Getty, 2010) and a collection of his essays was published as Modernity Unbound (AA, 2011). Mertins’s landmark monograph Mies (Phaidon, 2014) was published posthumously. Author affiliation details are correct at time of print publication.
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