Alice T. Friedman, an architectural historian and professor of American art history at Wellesley, has a new book, “American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture” (Yale University Press; $65), that links the work of postwar architects like Morris Lapidus, Philip Johnson and Richard Neutra to a single quality: glamour, writes Penelope Green for the New York Times.

Critics categorized modern architecture as tawdry eye candy, but glamour, Professor Friedman proposes, is no mere aesthetic; it is a sensual, emotional and magical sensibility that percolated up from American popular culture, elevating the ordinary — a toaster, say — into the extraordinary.