Irreverent as always, Tom Wolfe examines how European modernism — particularly the legacy of the Bauhaus — came to dominate American architectural taste.

Wolfe traces the migration of modernist architects fleeing Europe in the 1930s and the rapid institutional embrace of their ideas in American universities, museums, and cultural institutions. What begins as a story about design quickly becomes a satire of cultural authority: critics, academics, and patrons shaping the built environment according to theory rather than lived experience.

An entertaining critiques of modernist orthodoxy — a slim but pointed argument about taste, power, and the strange journey of avant-garde ideas into mainstream architecture.