Dr. Rosemarie Haag Bletter

"The expectations of the modernists were utopian," says one of the world's authorities on the early modernists, Dr. Rosemarie Bletter of the City University of New York's Graduate Center, "but the critique of Corbusier's planning is overdrawn.After all, it was American planners who put it into practice."

Certain things about Americans made them a terrible mix with the ideas of the modernists.The first is that like Corbusier, Americans don't like cities much.From the 19th century onward, Americans were leaving the cities, drifting toward the ideal of the wide open space, the frontier, one's own piece of private property."There was always anti-urbanization in American," Bletter says."The cities were the dens of sin."

Panelists are Dr. Rosemarie Haag Bletter, Professor, Art History and German, City University of New York Graduate Center; Caroline Constant, Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, University of Florida; Esther da Costa Meyer, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Yale University; and Franz Schulze, Professor of Art, Lake Forest College.

The Age of the Skyscrapers, with Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New Yorker, and Rosemarie Bletter, professor of architectural history, City University of New York