Did modern architecture ever die? Accounts of its demise appear much exaggerated, especially to a new generation, for whom postmodern historicism seems the exclusive domain of strip malls and willful eccentrics with enough money to pay for correct Corinthian detailing, whatever that is. Most of this younger generation of star architects, and there are plenty of them, owe their fame in no small part to deliberate distance they have put between themselves and any but the most casual recall of history. Abstract form and technological imagery are very much back in vogue.

Meredith Clausen’s The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream is a timely reminder of why many of the most perceptive observers of the American architectural scene, most of whom began their careers as defenders of the International Style, became increasingly uncomfortable around 1960 with its star architects and their uncritical attitude toward frankly capitalist urban development. Clausen tells a marvelous story. Two of the country’s most famous architects, Walter Gropius and Pietro Belluschi, brought in to gild a substantial increase in the size of New York City office towers, instead designed a skyscraper that remains almost universally reviled, both for its ham-fisted ugliness and for the destructive blow it dealt to the short-lived reign of Park Avenue as one of the city’s most uniform ensembles.

This is, quite simply, a splendid book, indeed possibly the best single study of postwar American architecture. Grounded almost entirely in primary sources, it reads like a good novel. In place of suspense, Clausen offers a compelling cast of characters, from architects and critics to real estate developers and structural engineers. Her own voice seeps through only occasionally in an account that, although rooted in facts rather than theories, suggests that the study of modern American architecture needs to be revised in ways that also have profound implications for an understanding of the practice of architecture and urban design around the world today.

Clausen’s account suggests, for instance, that the “triumph” of modern architecture in the United States, and in particular of European immigrant advocates of that architecture, was relatively brief. The affection that many New Yorkers, including leading architectural critics, demonstrated for Grand Central Station when it was first threatened in 1954 and continued to express as well for Park Avenue throughout the 1950s and 1960s hints that even at the height of American acceptance of the International Style enthusiasm for it was tempered by considerable respect for Beaux-Arts planning. Nostalgia for Park Avenue’s canyon wall of stately apartment houses, derided only a generation earlier by Lewis Mumford as tenements for the rich, was pervasive among those who, although generally supportive of modernism, mourned an urban order that seemed as stable to them as if it had indeed been erected by Renaissance princes rather than real estate developers too young in many cases to have been their grandfathers.

What went wrong? The issue was not yet style but scale and the hubris that accompanied it. The critics at the center of Clausen’s book, Douglas Haskell of Architectural Forum and Ada Louise Huxtable of the New York Times, believed, as Jane Jacobs and Robert Venturi, writing just a few years later, did not, in modern architecture; but they also believed in excellence and in the importance of sensitive urban design. We are apt to remember the 1950s with some of the fondness that critics then had for Park Avenue, as a time when capital had not yet corrupted and constrained design to the extent that it does today; but Lever House and the Seagram Building were always boxed in by the work of Emery Roth & Sons, in which modernism was reduced to the economical elimination of ornament and the bulking up of office floors whose size was no longer contained by the necessity of access to natural light. In the 1920s, German architects such as Erich Mendelsohn had deftly deployed dynamic massing and detailing to compensate for the increasing heft of office buildings and department stores. A decade later the American responsible for Rockefeller Center used public art and rigorous planning to accomplish the same goal. Even Pan Am’s developer, Erwin Wolfson, recognized the need to offer aesthetic amenities beyond the Roth firm’s usual purview. But this was something that by the late 1950s was far beyond the abilities of most mainstream American modernists, Mies aside, to provide.

Is it merely coincidence that the two most egregious proposals, only one of which thankfully was ever built, for towers over Grand Central were the work of Bauhaus masters—specifically, Gropius and his former student, colleague, and partner Marcel Breuer? Clausen draws a devastating portrait of the aging Gropius. Again and again she catches him talking with Apollonian pompousness out of two sides of his mouth, while unhesitatingly betraying this lofty rhetoric in his role as a designer. She is at her most conventional, however, when she describes the downfall of modernism’s purported former idealism. How much of this idealism had always been a convenient fiction designed to screen Gropius’s craving for publicity, which always interested him more than either process or product? He had established his reputation at the Fagus factory by dressing the modest needs of an industrialist client up in fashionable clothes, and then exaggerating his accomplishment. He routinely lied about its date and the degree of his own involvement in the design, and mistakenly claimed it as Germany’s first curtain wall.

If the book has any flaw, it is Clausen’s failure to break out beyond the story of the Pan Am building. She does not, for instance, mention the Fagus factory. Nor does she illustrate Gropius’s Chicago Tribune entry, which he used as the background in the photographic portrait that was widely published following his appointment at Harvard. Including it would have allowed us to try to locate in the Pan Am building a glimmer of the constructivist-infused vigor of that scheme. Why did American taste change so radically in the interim, and what role did Gropius play in that shift? And can we really leap from the train to the airplane without considering the role of the automobile in the transformation of the American city and its transportation infrastructure? Finally, what were the implications of the Pan Am building on further modernist failures, such as the World Trade Towers, which are instead here memorialized with the improbably poetic recollection of a window washer who watched their destruction from a perch on the Pan Am Building?

Within the boundaries she draws for herself, however, Clausen is anything but narrow-minded. I was particularly delighted by the seriousness with which she took Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, whose criticism of modernist giants is too often dismissed as hysterical. One wonders to what degree female critics, including Huxtable and Jacobs as well as Moholy-Nagy, saw through the architectural establishment so well because, despite jobs with good firms such as Breuer, or Kahn, or Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, women were still not full participants in it.

Finally, this book is a tribute to Haskell, who did so much to ensure the preservation of Grand Central Station, and whose papers, preserved at the Avery Library, were such an important resource for Clausen. Under Haskell, Architectural Forum dared to offer more than vapid publicity for the architectural profession, which it instead held accountable to the general public. Huxtable took the same line in her columns for the New York Times. Clausen, perhaps not remembering Lewis Mumford’s Skyline columns in the New Yorker, sees this as the revival of American architectural criticism. Whether or not that was so does not check the desperate need today for voices like Haskell’s and Huxtable’s that insist on holding the profession accountable to those whose lives they shape.