Except for Gaudi, Wright and Palladio (the only non-20th Century figure) all the architects on this list are worthless. Modern architecture is the #1 example that human progress is not guaranteed. The 'great' buildings of the 20th century (post-1930) are, in aesthetic terms at least, inferior to everything built in the last 2000 years: glass shoeboxes, brick bunkers, modernist monstrosities, McMansions: crap, crap, crap, crap. Given that our civilization has vastly superior resources than anything Ancient Egypt, Rome, Renaissance Italy or 18th Century England could have dreamed of, why is our architecture so bad? The answer is: Le Corbusier. While the ability to build cheap, ugly buildings using glass, steel and concrete was made possible around 1900, only around 1930 did ugly buildings become common. The key was the ability of Bauhaus architects, particularly Corbusier, to convince wealthy businessmen and high government officials that modern architecture was the both cheap and fashionable. The result: copy-cat skyscrapers, nightmarish high-rise housing projects, low-rise brick schools, and dreary suburban housing developments-that we take for granted as 'the best we can do.' Modern architecture certainly has the potential to be both beautiful and functional, as Gaudi and Wright showed. It's long past time to junk the theories of Le Corbusier, and modernist architects in general, and go back to what works.

Another of this modernist charlatans who gained so much power and did so much damage! Techno-historian and architecture critic Lewis Mumford wrote, the extravagant heights of Le Corbusier's skyscrapers had no reason for existence apart from the fact that they had become technological possibilities; the open spaces in his central areas had no reason for existence either, since on the scale he imagined there was no motive during the business day for pedestrian circulation in the office quarter. By mating utilitarian and financial image of the skyscraper city to the romantic image of the organic environment, Le Corbusier had, in fact, produced a sterile hybrid (Yesterday's City of Tomorrow).