The advent of modernism in the 1920s marked the beginning of a decades-long disconnect between the practice of architecture and the study of architectural history. Driven by the fallacy that a new architecture could be built upon a tabula rasa and cleansed of the Western canon, practitioners sought explicitly to reject history, severing design from its roots and positing theoretical and political positions as substitutes for aesthetic goals.
In 1938, just fifteen years after Le Corbusier proclaimed “architecture or revolution,” major architecture schools began their makeovers and European modernists—like Walter Gropius at Harvard and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology—took the helm. This transformation of the academy came at a time of diminishing opportunities for architects. When opportunities did arise, the evisceration of traditional architectural values ushered in the destruction of historic neighborhoods to make way for the beehive-like housing towers that prefigured the Great Society and the soulless glass office blocks of the 1960s. Designs that were heralded in the 1950s as paragons of modernism, like the Pruitt–Igoe housing towers in St. Louis, were already on their path to failure and demolition. By 1960, architecture was stuck in an abyss.
Robert A. M. Stern’s aptly titled autobiography, Between Memory and Invention, is the story of a life devoted to the redemption of the profession, a struggle to reconnect history and culture to the practice of architecture. As a former student and employee, and now a friend of Stern’s,
