Yes, this top-comment is obviously wrong and mistaken if you know anything about aesthetics and architecture. The broken timelining of Modernist design is the most obvious error. I wouldn’t expect HN to get this right though.

No, it isn't.

It isn't what is taught in school, but it is a reasonably well-informed opinion, as my sibling comments show.

Yes it is. I have an undergraduate in Architecture, and your comment reads as wildly incorrect.

Checking out the book you link, I see this in Wikipedia:

> The response to Wolfe's book from the architecture world was highly negative. Critics argued that, once again, Wolfe was writing on a topic he knew nothing about and had little insight to contribute to the conversation.

No surprised. If you're going to critique Modernist architecture, at least understand that it started about 40 years before you say it did.

I saw the U.C. Berkeley architecture department ignore and mock Christopher Alexander from their hideous (and richly deserved) concrete monstrosity, so I hope you'll forgive me if an undergraduate architecture degree doesn't impress me, and I am completely indifferent towards the same communities opinion on Wolfe's book.

You need to read my initial comment more closely, I didn't claim modernism sprung fully formed from Gropius' head on September 2nd, 1945: "World Wars 1 & 2 happened, shattering the remaining sense of aesthetic unity we had."

Of course forms of modernism were experimented with pre-WW1, but high modernism and it's attendant ugliness didn't come dominate the built environment until post-WW2. This is of course true, and I think you know this, but you are using snobbish nit-picking (ah yes, architecture) in an attempt to intimidate me because we disagree on aesthetics.

Of course there was a process involved, the edwardian era was stripping down classicism and art nouveau was recognizably post-classical, but WWs1&2 (and the subsequent rebuilding of europe and build out of america) is where modern architecture took over.

The earliest important modernist building from Gropius was Fagus, in 1911: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagus_Factory

Sullivan, sometimes considered an early modernist, was building buildings like this as late at 1889:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditorium_Building_(Chicago)

Birmingham UK is the birthplace of the industrial revolution, and as late at 1909 was building train stations that look like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Moor_Street_railway...

Surrendering the aesthetics that everyone save a small group of intellectuals, ideologues and capitalist sharpers likes to the right (and arrogantly dismissing us as intellectually unsophisticated) strikes me as an own-goal.