An entrenched fallacy about the Bauhaus is that it was somehow responsible for the lamentable global proliferation of boring corporate Modernist architecture after World War II. Actually, the blame lies with commercial property developers who exploited Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s minimalist “skin-and-bones” formula for steel-framed, glass-skinned high-rise buildings because they were cheaper and more profitable to erect than pre-war masonry-clad, decoratively embellished structures; but they aped his schemes without a trace of Mies’s proportional subtlety or technical finesse.
—“The Powerhouse of the New” by Martin Filler for The New York Review of Books
