From Gargoyles to Galvanized Steel: How Our Streets Lost Their Art-my observations

Forgive me if I am being pedantic here but I thought it might be useful to recommend a book that further elaborates on this very issue:
In 1981 Tom Wolfe wrote a book entitled “From Bauhaus to Our House” in which he surgically and comprehensively dissects the rot in modern architecture. I quote here from his forward to give you a taste:
“ O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within thy blessed borders today?”
It was Wolfe who coined the pungent phrase “the turd on the plaza”; referring to the obligatory sculptures in the front of these buildings.
A second important book by Wolfe from the same period (1979, I believe) is “The Painted Word.”
The same dry wit and insightfulness.