The obituary of Max Abramovitz, one of America’s leading postwar architects, took me by surprise when I read it last Wednesday: I assumed he had died years ago. He embodied a specific mood and moment in the history of American taste, usually known as the International Style, and that mood and that moment have long since passed.

According to some who knew him, the 96-year-old Abramovitz was famous for having a fine sense of timing. If so, it was never more evident than in the appearance of his obituary just hours before the opening of the first major exhibition devoted to his career. “The Troubled Search: The Work of Max Abramovitz,” on view at Columbia’s Wallach Art Gallery, is based on the extensive papers that he donated to the university. To anyone interested in American and especially New York architecture in the postwar period, the drawings, models, letters, and photographs assembled here represent as copiously illuminating a show as you could wish to see.

Who was Max Abramovitz? You know more about him than you may realize. He is hardly a household name, and even Wallace K. Harrison, his better-known partner, is fading quickly from the memories of men. Yet in the period from 1945 to about 1970 this pair constituted, after Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the most influential architectural firm in the city.

As for Abramovitz, few architects are more deserving of the well-known tribute paid to Sir Christopher Wren in Saint Paul’s: If you seek his monument, look around you. Together with Harrison, he was instrumental in creating the master plans of New York’s two most important postwar developments, the United Nations and Lincoln Center. Though most of their work was born of a complicated collaboration, Abramovitz alone was responsible for what is now Avery Fisher Hall, just as Harrison was responsible for the Metropolitan Opera House.

Together they created the shimmering curtain-walls of the Corning Glass Works Building on Fifth Avenue between 55th and 56th Streets (1959), as well as the enigmatic metal facade of the Socony-Vacuum (now Socony-Mobil) Building at 42nd and Lexington (1956). Earlier they were responsible for the Trilon and Perisphere at the 1939 World’s Fair and for some public housing in Brooklyn created at the behest of Robert Moses.

Like Harrison, Abramovitz was one of those architects – typical of our city – who achieved an almost godlike status within their profession, while remaining all but unknown to anyone outside of it. They were the sturdy, well-connected, and infinitely reliable locals who hobnobbed with Aalto, Saarinen, and Le Corbusier but never attained anything near their international reputation.

For most pedestrians, the buildings of Harrison and Abramovitz, be they ever so massive, are simply there, an act of architectural providence with no name attached. It is in the context of that near-anonymity that the Columbia exhibition proves so useful. For we allow ourselves to forget that each building was a calculated act with a rich history behind it. That history is precisely what the show provides.

The exhibit makes a convincing case for the early brilliance of Max Abramovitz. Born in Chicago in 1908, he was a fine draftsman who worked his way through architecture school at the University of Illinois. He started out in a style very different from the one with which he would become identified. Indeed, architectural taste changed more radically in the period of his apprenticeship, from about 1930 to 1940, than at any other point in history. That transformation was embodied in the man: his early essays in rusticated Beaux Arts door surrounds, his tentative use of Art Deco, his emergence as the most committed, though not the best, exponent of the International Style in America.

I was grateful for the enhanced historical perspective that the exhibition supplies. But it is unlikely to alter dramatically one’s assessment of Abramovitz’s work. Surely he, like his partner, was a gifted architect. But just as surely he was not a great architect. He is the echo, the afterglow, the report that follows immediately upon the Pagasean volleys of Mies and Bunshaft. He and his partner were Aaron to their Moses, the ones who rounded the subversive uniqueness of genius down to the terms of a common language.

In the process, Abramovitz transformed the sheer curtain walls of the International Style from a stupefying stunt to the tired daily fare of the modern American city. Certainly the Corning Glass Building, like the Union Bank in Milwaukee and the Equitable in Pittsburgh, is pleasant and serves its purpose well enough. It is perhaps as much as 98% of the way toward the Seagram Building and Lever House. But that 2% shortfall manifested in the unerring calibration of the ratios of glass to steel, of aperture to infill, the thousand details that seduce the eye with their miraculous rightness makes all the difference between the impeccable artistry of Mies and Bunshaft and the workmanly artifacts of their followers.

That falling short is never more apparent than in the “inventive” architecture that Abramovitz favored after 1960. As though weary of the International Style, Abramovitz sought, at Avery Fisher Hall, a far more personal idiom that would intimate history and even humanity through the faint suggestion of vernacular styles and the almost living feel of travertine. If the Corning Glass Building is a work of architectural prose, Avery Fisher Hall is architectural poetry.

But if mediocrity is tolerable in prose, it is immediately objection able in poetry, and the boxy dullness of the concert hall’s massing and the lack of resonance in its details make it one of the least successful components of Lincoln Center. No mean feat.

There is, perhaps there was from the beginning, something stale about many postwar buildings, with their extensive, elastic rationalism, their love of systems, their obedience to the mass mindset of large corporations. They have not aged well at all, but they remain central artifacts in the history of taste, and Max Abramovitz was one of the most influential authors of that taste. That is no small achievement and perhaps it is fitting that it should constitute the enduring interest of his work.