The Decorated Diagram: Harvard Architecture and the Failure of the Bauhaus Legacy

by KLAUS HERDEG

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In answering the critic Clement Greenberg's query "why all those ugly buildings?" Klaus Herdeg lays the blame directly at the feet of Walter Gropius and the curriculum at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Herdeg contends that the work of many of America's leading architects who studied under Gropius-Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei. John Johannsen, and Edward Barnes among them - commands visual interest through an almost total absence of design, resulting in the banal and sterile quality of so much of modern architecture. He builds his case through meticulous comparisons of dozens of buildings.

Klaus Herdeg is Professor of Architecture at Columbia University.