Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2101728 in Books
• Published on: 1985-08-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 133 pages

Review


"Among the more devastating comparisons are Johnson's and Franzen's respective facade designs for apartment buildings at 1001 and 800 Fifth Avenue with to Corbusier's Besnos House, Johnson's Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery with Schinkel's Altes Museum, and Barnes's master plan for the S.U.N.Y campus at Purchase with Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia. Never in any doubt, the final score is Harvard zero and History three. Herdeg possesses a keen eye and an incisive style. He is at his best in these critiques."
- Mary N. Woods, Progressive Architecture



"The Decorated Diagram is an intellectual's version of From Bauhaus to Our House.... Relying on a series of breathtaking sophisticated formal analyses, Herdeg concludes that most of today's buildings are 'curiously passionless' because they are built by former students of Gropius.... Herdeg's brilliant essay cuts across realms of modern, latemodern, and postmodern into a far more exciting and illuminating sphere."
- Sarah Williams, Architectural Record