In which Tom Wolfe rips the modern and post modernists a new one with his usual pluck and verve. Wolfe cannot get beyond his American disgust for the iconoclasts, who tore down traditional architecture in America for no good reason. His summary of the Europeans seems, from my limited knowledge of them, accurate, and his description is at once funny and painful--painful in the sense of regret for the ugliness that has been raised on the American landscape for decades as a result. This historical background does help explain why Wright has experienced a revival in America since at least the 1990s. 
 Wolfe storms guns of irony blazing into Harvard, Yale and the MoMA and when he gets through nothing is left standing but some crappy pieces of kitsch by the manifesto thumping post-modernists. It is a painful journey that nonetheless rings true; flat roofs tend to leak like cheesecloth. But to be fair, as Wolfe is not, the movement toward new design did not simply arise from the crushing disappointment of the fruits of the prior trajectory, aka, the meaningless slaughter of No Man's Land, but also of what could be done with the new materials and technology of steel and glass, of what had finally become possible. 
 I prefer Richardson and Wright to Corbusier as much as the next guy, but I applauded when I read, in a Japanese history of modern architecture, this description for the Mies van der Rohe Barcelona Pavilion: "It was the architectural equivalent of splitting the atom, breaking design down into its fundamental elements." 
 Wolfe never reaches the conclusion that fame is a false god, and that striving for market recognition results in all the idiocy and poor taste, because he takes the market and human nature as a given. No need to try harder, to make the effort to withdraw from the accepted verities and seek the Tao. No, for Wolfe, the problem is not society. The problem is only the verities that are chosen to be accepted, and the reasons for the rejection of others. Helpful enough, as far as it goes.