According to Nathan Glazer in his From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture's Encounter with the American City modernism in architecture and urban design, proposed one big and all-embracing ideal for buildings and cities: building should be functional, rational, directly accommodating specific needs, and should eschew the forms and elements that had dominated architecture in the West since the Greeks.

It rejected the sculpted, ornamented architecture of major public buildings, and the use of the details and conventions of some past epochs, best expressed in the buildings designed for princes and potentates, secular and sacred. Modernism rejected any use of the styles of building of the past.

Modernism called for "the machine for living." And the city was also to be a machine. The architecture and urban design of modernism—in particular, the publicly subsidized high-rise housing projects on large cleared sites that became, along with the flat-topped glass and steel skyscrapers of the city center, are the very emblems of modernism—in Australia.

Glazer's From a Cause to a Style collects his intriguing and accessible essays on urban architecture and public space, some of which originally appeared in City Journal and The Public Interest. He says that in an effort both to break with the past and to provide the working classes with better living conditions the modernists insisted that buildings should be relentlessly functional and rational, accommodating specific needs. Architects should make no concessions to public taste—the public would need to learn what to like. He adds:

that the greatest successes of the critics of modernism had less to do with building something new and counter to modernism than with preserving what existed, what had been created in the ages before modernism, when historical styles were innocently copied, revived, revised, adapted to different uses, used even for factories and office buildings, and were allowed to cluster together messily and incongruously in the city.