Ludwig Glaeser, my father, died after a fight with throat cancer on September 27. He was an architect who, to my knowledge, never built a building, but rather presented works of the great modernists, like Mies van der Rohe, to the American public. He spent much of his career as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and then briefly became director of the Canadian Center for Architecture. At MOMA, he ran the Mies Van Der Rohe archive, caring for Mies’ papers, which my namesake and his architectural mentor Edward Ludwig had donated to the museum. Teaching at Cooper Union, my father inspired a large number of students including the current chair of architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

I am writing this column to acknowledge the great debt that I owe to my father. His passion for cities and buildings nurtured my own. His traditional European academic background led him to trust wisdom that comes from knowing the past. While I disappointed him by failing to learn classical Greek, I did at least learn from him a respect for history that helps me balance my economist’s tendency to put too much confidence in theory and statistics.