The slab-sided U.N. Secretariat building in Manhattan has caused more controversy than any other skyscraper in Manhattan's jagged skyline. Distinguished architects like Richard Neutra have hailed it as a great architectural achievement. Other people have referred to it scornfully as "a sandwich on edge." Last week Author-Critic Lewis Mumford, writing in The New Yorker, knocked it flaton paper.
Wrote Mumford: "In this building, the movement that took shape in the mind of Le Corbusier in the early 1920sand that sought to identify the vast and varied contents of modern architecture with its own arid mannerismhas reached a climax of formal purity and...