What Happened to the Social Agenda?

Glazer, Nathan. "What Happened to the Social Agenda?" The American Scholar (2007).

Excerpt: Seven years ago, I was asked to address the 1950 class of the Harvard Graduate School of Design at their 50th reunion in Cambridge. One sentence in the invitation from Robert Geddes, the distinguished architect and former dean of the Princeton School of Architecture, suggested why an urban sociologist, who had only a layman’s knowledge of architecture, would be asked to speak at such an event: “Our formative years as professionals were, as you know, during a period of optimism and a modernist faith in a social agenda.” The unstated question was, what happened? We are still in the epoch of modernism in architecture, even if we call it postmodernism or some other variant of modernism. But what happened to the social agenda?

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The American Scholar