In the 200-year history of the museum as a paramount center of culture, there has probably never been a more effective institution than the department of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. Its diamond jubilee is now being celebrated in a new exhibition, “75 Years of Architecture at MoMA.”

The show displays a choice and representative sampling of the museum’s extensive horde of drawings and models by some of the most famous architects of the modern and postmodern movements. It is also the first exhibition at MoMA to be curated by the new chief curator of architecture and design, Barry Bergdoll, together with a curatorial assistant, Alexandra Quantrill.

Mr. Bergdoll follows in a distinguished succession that began with Philip Johnson, who founded the department back in 1932. In doing so, he also happened to create the first museum-based architectural department in the world. As it turned out, the very first exhibition that Johnson curated was to have such cultural consequence that the architectural community, 75 years later, still has not stopped talking about it. The show consecrated to what Johnson and his co-curator Henry Russell Hitchcock named the International Style, gave the world a way of conceiving and talking about the most radically new style in building, that of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, to have emerged since the Gothic Age.

It is almost incredible to think that that show was curated by Johnson — not yet an architect himself — when he was only 25, and that he would live for another 73 years. In that period, he and his successors would mount a number of other exhibitions that were scarcely less perceptive in defining major shifts in the profession. The man who succeeded him, Arthur Drexler, had the uncanny foresight, as early as 1975, to stage a crucial re-evaluation of the École des Beaux-Arts, the sworn enemy of the Modern movement to whose cause the museum had been founded in the first place. It was only a matter of years before a reinvigorated historicism would become the greatest challenge that the movement had sustained in nearly half a century. And yet, half a generation later, as that same historicism was showing signs of early exhaustion, it was again MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design, under Johnson redux and Mark Wigley, that redefined the field, in 1989, by drawing attention to the tectonic shift embodied by the then emerging movement known as Deconstructivism.

In all the time that the museum was mounting these signal exhibitions, however, it was also avidly collecting the models, manifestos, and artifacts of the major architects of the 20th century. To see the 50-odd samples of their efforts, arrayed in the galleries of MoMA, is to pass in rapid review of the history of architecture over the past three generations. It would be unfair to judge Mr. Bergdoll one way or another from the resulting exhibition. It is a collection of the museum’s greatest architectural hits, a self-congratulatory celebration that is also well deserved.

Though the exhibitions created by this department received the closest attention in the architectural community, they have never had and never will have the exuberant following that painting and sculpture have attained in the public at large. Thus, not everyone will want to rush to see the treasures on view. But to anyone at all interested in the recent history of architecture, it is hard to imagine a more enjoyable showing.

There is an almost reliquary power to Le Corbusier’s model of the Villa Savoye, from 1929–31, a poignancy and a force to the recognition that this little mock-up of wood, aluminum, and plastic was the embryo of something that would change the very language of modern architecture.

This is not by any means the only display that positively crackles with historical consequence. There are two large drawings of Mies van der Rohe’s master plan for Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology, a perspective of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House, as well as three never-realized skyscrapers that Frank Lloyd Wright designed for the area around St. Mark’s Church on the Bowery in Lower Manhattan. Also on display are important examples of such key figures of Postmodernism as Hans Hollein, Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman, and Rem Koolhaas.

When all is said, however, the most poignant and moving item is the 1939 model by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone for the building that would become the first installment of MoMA itself on 53rd Street, a stridently Modernist manifesto for its time, with some of the first curtainwalls and ribbon windows that had been seen in America or anywhere else at that time. If this little building represents MoMA and the Modern movement in their militant stage, the Taniguchi structure that began to engulf it two years ago — and that now houses the present exhibition — represents the movement in its triumph.

Until June 18 (11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).