Terry Teachout’s Saturday column in the Wall Street Journal examines midcentruy modern and why Americans are comfortable with modernism so many spheres of the arts, but not in architecture. One of his conclusions:
That’s what’s wrong with the more extreme forms of modern architecture: Too often they tell you how to live, instead of helping you live the way you want. But even those modern architects who were sensitive to the needs of their clients often failed to please the public at large. In her brief life of Frank Lloyd Wright, America’s greatest architect, Ada Louise Huxtable, the Journal’s architecture critic, pointed out that his houses “never insisted that their occupants reshape themselves to conform to an abstract architectural ideal.”
Teachout even enlists Henry David Thoreau to help make his argument, which is a pretty neat trick when you are discussing modernism.