Members of the Architects' Collaborative cling on to modern art outside their Harvard Graduate Center, 1949. Gropius' feet are closest to the ground. (Source: Andrew Saint, The Image of the Architect.)

The diminished significance of the architect is mainly noticeable at the level of the figure of speech: Von Clausewitz was the architect of modern warfare, Napoleon III the architect of 19th century Paris, but which contemporary man or woman of consequence can be compared to the creator of the flimsy, shabby and casual structures which are the architecture of our times?The classical metaphor of the architect as dominant and all-controlling strategist, so natural and harmonious in the times of humble, exalted master-builders, has become ridiculous in the age of modern architecture, and fallen into disuse. In the twentieth century the architect has been unmasked as the impotent practitioner of an unmanageable discipline, a constricted and half-paralysed art.

Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, Delinquent Visionaries