From Bauhaus to Our House

an architect with modernist credentials, even if they had lapsed, who was willing to give them something else.

His idea was to combine the usual worker-housing elements in ways that were austere and elegant at the same time, along the lines of what today is called “minimalism.”

My architecture is almost nothing.

What did it matter if they said you were imitating Mies or Gropius or Corbu or any of the rest? It was like accusing a Christian of imitating Jesus Christ.

Every respected instrument of architectural opinion and cultivated taste, from Domus to House & Garden, told the urban dwellers of America that this was living. This was the good taste of today; this was modern, and soon the International Style became known simply as modern architecture.

The only people left trapped in worker housing in America today are those who don’t work at all and are on welfare—these are the sole inhabitants of “the projects”—and, of course, the urban rich who live in places such as the Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York.

“Every building must have … its own soul.”

When you saw that holy object on the sisal rug, you knew you were in a household where a fledgling architect and his young wife had sacrificed everything to bring the symbol of the godly mission into their home.

Under socialism, the client was the worker. Alas, the poor devil was only just now rising up out of the ooze. In the meantime, the architect, the artist, and the intellectual would arrange his life for him. To use Stalin’s phrase, they would be the engineers of his soul.

they had to be “reeducated” to comprehend the beauty of “the Radiant City” of the future