At 10:00 A.M. on Wednesday, September 19, the Museum of Modern Art held a memorial tribute to the distinguished modernist architect Gordon Bunshaft, who died August 6 at the age of eighty-one. Few of New York’s prominent architects missed it, in spite of the early hour, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill—the venerable firm that was Bunshaft’s home for over four decades—was represented in full force. The eulogists were Richard E. Oldenburg, director of MOMA, William Rubin, former director of the museum’s Department of Painting and Sculpture, David Rockefeller, and architects Edward C. Bassett and Leon Moed of SOM, Philip Johnson, and Kevin Roche. For anyone in the large turnout interested in the art of contemporary architecture, seeking clues to its future, or perhaps even trying to learn lessons from its past, the eulogies had little to offer. After all, a eulogy is a eulogy, not a critique. But the eulogists, who spoke independently and obviously without collusion, unwittingly made today’s architecture appear to be without values, principles, or genuine art. In contrast, Bunshaft’s works, and the modern movement to which he contributed so much, were made to seem part of a lost golden age.

Oldenburg, for example, praised the architect’s qualities of mind and eye, as well as his connoisseurship of contemporary art, seeing in his large collection of painting and sculpture the reservoir from which he drew to sustain his own creative life. Oldenburg also lauded Bunshaft’s carefully arranged matches between architecture and sculpture, particularly