ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the middle decades of the twentieth century, rough years for a paradisiacal instinct to be pursued. Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier are presented neither as heroic nor dastardly figures, but representatives of a culture caught in the mix of radical political and social currents. Their importance, however, has been overstated. Frank Lloyd Wright also has its melancholic moments. Even with personal failings, he possessed perhaps the most inventive design mind of the century. Yet his often (idyllic) architectural designs are not the subject here; rather, it is his vision of the disappearing city set in idyllic nature. It entirely utopian in conception (as most architects tend to be); at the same time, it fully imbued with the Emersonian spirit. The last two sections of this chapter are dystopian, figuratively and literally. The “Descent into High Modernism” brings to the fore the great failures of urban theory that would haunt the remainder of the century. The excursus on dystopia pays homage to the most insightful of the century’s dystopian novels, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. Here the garden becomes an alien world.
