Architecture: Modernism Gets Old

"The American Institute of Architects recently asked a national sample to judge American buildings, monuments and other structures...not a single Modernist building made it to the top 10...The surveys underscore a deep divide between most Americans, with their attachment to the traditional, and architects and critics, with their preference for the modern, the new and the striking...Modernism's goal was to create architecture for the people, not princes...The most powerful and effective attack on the Modernist doctrine was launched by Jane Jacobs in her "Death and Life of Great American Cities" in 1961. Her book's relevance and influence has grown steadily in the years since."

"Nearly all our suburbs — tracts of Georgian revivals, Cape Cod bungalows, faux adobes — evoke the past rather than the Modernists' future...architects don't even think anymore, as they once did, of how to build a better city. Nor does anyone subscribe to the idea that a collection of buildings by superstar architects would do so."