Alfred Mosher Butts practised at a period when the terms of architecture itself were under argument.
The record lists Alfred Mosher Butts as American designer and architect; creator of Scrabble (1899–1993).
Alfred Mosher Butts was born in 1899. His recorded nationality is United States.
Modernism rejected ornament and historical style, arguing that a building should express its structure and its function - a claim contested ever since.
Buildings outlast their architects and usually their purposes, which is what makes the discipline unforgiving.
That the work was built in United States shaped it: climate, materials, planning law and who holds the budget all decide what can actually be built.
Alfred Mosher Butts died in 1993, aged 94. The buildings remain, still in use by people who never knew the name - which is the particular afterlife architecture offers.
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