Have Contemporary Architects Forgotten About Urban Design?

Modernist architects, who reigned from the middle of the 20th century into the 1970s, roughly, created no shortage of stirring buildings. But their attempts to rewrite the rules of the modern city were about as successful as the Hindenburg, with which modernism shared German roots.

The nadir -- and architects are really sick of this story by now -- was the attempt by American cities to remake slums according to the principles of such leading modernists as Le Corbusier: Crisp high-rise housing projects sprouting out of green yards announced a new era in America's treatment of its poor. Yet by the late '60s these buildings were widely seen as disasters -- hyperconcentrated loci of crime and despair

Still, give architects like Le Corbusier and Yamasaki points for trying, suggests the eminent sociologist Nathan Glazer in his new book, "From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture's Encounter with the American City" (Princeton).

By contrast, today's architects create stirring additions to cityscapes -- like Boston's new Institute of Contemporary Art, designed by the firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, or Frank Gehry's Stata Center at MIT -- but shy from a broader engagement with cities.

"You wouldn't want a city made up of buildings by Gehry, [Rem] Koolhaas, or [Daniel] Libeskind," Glazer says in an interview, invoking three of today's leading-light architects. "That would be a World's Fair. It wouldn't be a city."