Sibyl Moholy-Nagy "embarked on a study of American vernacular architecture; this research led to her book, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, published in 1957. She turned to vernacular architecture in order to offer an alternative for contemporary architects, showing them that the anonymous architecture of the past could offer sources of inspiration for designing better contemporary homes; this architecture, she believed, displayed the exact qualities that were lacking in the mass-produced houses of the 1950s. Imitation, however, was not the point she was advocating. In comparing a spec house in Levittown with the seventeenth-century Abraham Hasbrook House in New Paltz, New York, of which it was a pasteboard replica, she ridiculed the intentions of the developer. Whereas the original example was a marvel of functionality and good design for its location and its times (which implied poor heating provisions and vulnerability to Indian attack), the replica was a cheap reproduction of forms that lacked any climatic or functional justification. What she advocated, therefore, was that architects should commit themselves once again to the design of homes, not leaving this critical task to the care of building promoters and real estate developers, and that they should seek inspiration in the intrinsic qualities (not the external forms) of the vernacular houses of the past. She wrote, "To provide the home as an ideal standard is still the architect's first cause, no matter how great and rewarding are his other contributions to monumental and technological building. . . . As those builders of old, the architect of today has to create an anonymous architecture for the anonymous men of the Industrial Age." -- Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, Pioneering Women of Architecture.