Leo Marx, in his famous 1964 book, “The Machine in the Garden,” proposed that a central conflict in the American psyche resulted from the industrialization of the unspoiled, Eden-like landscapes of the new world. Wright’s Organic Modernism perhaps allowed 20th-century Americans to unconsciously feel that they could “resolve" that conflict by living in harmony with nature, while International Style Modernism and its machine-like buildings perhaps pointed too directly to the tragedy of industrial capitalism’s despoiling of the environment.
