Classical Architecture’s Counter-Attack

In the early 1950s the American, Henry Hope Reed (1915-2013), had the temerity to suggest that most contemporary architecture then was fraudulent, empty of intellectual content, ugly, illiterate, and meaningless. Convinced that Classicism embraced an architectural language capable of modern use, he aired his views in The Golden City, courageously published by Doubleday & Company in Garden City, New York, 1959. 

Reed argued that an architecture based on a ruthlessly reductionist interplay of ground-plan, construction, and materials — what he called “a form of structural dialectics” — is not an æsthetically viable proposition.