In Miesian style, Mr. Van Valkenburgh and MVVA principal Matthew Urbanski choreographed the surrounding countryside to look informal and timeless, alternating wooded areas with open meadows.
His most successful buildings were small ones, the jewel-like pavilions of the exquisite museum in the gardens at Washington's Dumbarton Oaks, and his own, iconic glass house in Connecticut built on the Miesien model, although Mies himself remarked how un-Miesian it was in its details.
The General Motors Technical Center, completed in 1954 outside of Detroit, was a 17-building complex of Miesian precision that flouted that modernist master's formal, neutral aesthetic with brilliant color and the use of neoprene gaskets to seal the windows, a technology borrowed from car windshields.