This rich exchange between two fiery American iconoclasts began in 1926, when Wright was at a low point in his career. In desperate need of renewed critical interest in his work, he approached Mumford with an admiring note, and they developed an often wary friendship that meanders from growing intimacy to a bitter break over the Second World War and then to a gradual reconciliation. The collection stands out in particular for the intensity of the pair's intellectual discourse. Both Wright and Mumford rejected the harsh orthodoxy of modernists like Le Corbusier and shared a kind of Emersonian wish that architecture and technology should better serve humanistic ideals. The reader is left with a rueful sense of how little of that architectural vision prevailed in the postwar era.
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