Having said that, I agree with what I see as Wolfe’s central premise that the disengagement of architecture from its clientele during the 20th century, combined with its embrace of theory and ideology, was disastrous both for the profession and for the clients. In other words, I think there is “good” Modern design and “not-good” Modern design–I don’t think it’s all bad. And as I’ve said before, I find many things to like in the simplicity of what Wolfe dismisses as “glass boxes” and have found that when you start really looking at them, many (not all, by any means) are more complex creations than they first appear. I’m not sure how many of our Mississippi architects fell into this compound mentality, and yet they designed many buildings in their own version of the International style. He decries the lock-step conformism that he sees engulfing the architectural world beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the publication of the book, what he calls the “compound mentality” where initiates fell over themselves to subscribe to all the right theories to avoid being ostracized by their fellow “leading” architects.īecause it’s a short, non-scholarly book, From Bauhaus to Our House contains many generalities that I don’t think hold up particularly well for those of us in the provinces. His premise is that Modernism, specifically the International style and its progeny, was foisted on America by German refugees from failed German schools of architecture and that these refugees were feted by Americans who didn’t know or care that many of them had never actually practiced architecture in any meaningful way. Wolfe blasts modern music and art in a few passages, but concentrates the bulk of the book on architecture. It took me a couple of days to read it, but that was with interruptions and was really only a few hours if you put all my reading time together. According to the copyright page, most of the book was published in Harper’s during the June and July issues, so you can see it’s not a long tome. Published in 1981, this is not a scholarly work, but it’s a passionate rejection of Modernist architecture and its practitioners. I recently read–finally, way after I should have–Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House. From Bauhaus To Our House Tom Wolfe – Farrar Straus Giroux – 1981

From our house to bauhaus