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.
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.