A turning point in the public’s perception of the building art came with the publication of Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘An Autobiography’ of 1932, a picaresque narrative that captivated many who hadn’t the slightest inkling of what architects actually did.

Few developments central to the history of art have been so misrepresented or misunderstood as the brief, brave, glorious, doomed life of the Bauhaus – the epochally influential German art, architecture, crafts, and design school that was founded in Goethe’s sleepy hometown of Weimar in 1919.

From the outset, MoMA followed the Bauhaus’s strict prohibition against design that even hinted at the decorative, a prejudice that skewed the pioneering museum’s view of Modernism for decades.

During the modern period, the vanguard architect has usually relied on small residential jobs both to supply a steady income and to serve as ‘sketches’ for ideas that are often later translated to the larger scale of public commissions.

The danger for any artist whose work is both recognizable and critically acclaimed is complacent repetition – the temptation to churn out easily identifiable, eagerly welcomed, and readily salable designs.

Architecture was the last of the major professions to devise a formal ‘cursus honorum’ before its practice could be undertaken.

The skyscraper style first advocated by Louis Sullivan – a tower of strongly vertical character with clear definitions among base, shaft, and crown – has remained remarkably consistent throughout the history of this building type.

The first half of the 1960s was the apogee of what might be termed the Age of Cool – as defined by that quality of being simultaneously with-it and disengaged, in control but nonchalant, knowing but ironically self-aware, and above all inscrutably undemonstrative.

There is no sadder tale in the annals of architecture than the virtual disappearance of the defining architectural form of the Modern Movement – publicly sponsored housing.

Architectural kitsch is most common in the commercial pop vernacular – typified by the Big Duck of 1931 in Flanders, New York, a Long Island roadside poultry stand resembling a duck, which Venturi and Scott Brown made a cult object through their writings.