Reviving mid-century wows with ‘Supersonic Modernism’

In 1981, the satirist Tom Wolfe wrote From Bauhaus to Our House, a witty takedown of the streamlined architectural modernism pioneered at Germany’s Bauhaus school, 60 years before. In its time radical and utopian, the clean-lined Bauhaus aesthetic had become by the 1950s and 1960s the rote style of postwar corporate capitalism in America and allied countries. Wolfe likened the steel and glass towers of the International Style to boxes for refrigerators.

Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes and others counterattacked, pointing out Wolfe’s lack of architectural expertise—lacking as well in art history and theory, the target of his previous book, The Painted Word (1975), about abstract painting—but Wolfe’s witty iconoclasm struck many non-specialist readers as a common-sense, emperor’s-clo