Timeless Cities: An Architect's Reflections on Renaissance Italy, by David Mayernik (Westview, 288 pp., $26)
TRADITION, T. S. Eliot wrote 85 years ago, cannot "be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor." As Tom Wolfe showed in his hilarious 1981 satire on modern architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House, all the most influential early- and mid-20th-century Modernist "master" architects found the weight and trajectory of traditional architecture ...