Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, ‘The populist movement in architecture’

By the end of the Second World War, the architectural profession seemed to have attained a state of relative equilibrium and peace. The long struggle, begun in the eighteenth century by a few visionary architects and theoreticians, against the constraining tradition of orders, proportions and decoration, had ended. The final triumph by avant-garde figures such as Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies and Gropius was universally acknowledged. Modernist architecture was ;establishment,’ and polemics a thing of the past. The task that now lay ahead was the broad implementation of the new principles.