"After 1945 our plutocrats, bureaucrats, board chairmen, CEOs, commissioners, and college presidents undergo an inexplicable change. They become diffident and reticent. All at once they are willing to accept that glass of ice water in the face, that bracing slap across the mouth, that reprimand for the fat on one's bourgeois soul, known as modern architecture."

After critiquing-and infuriating-the art world with The Painted Word, the award-winning author Tom Wolfe shares his less-than-favorable thoughts about modern architecture in From Bauhaus to Our House.

In this examination of the strange saga of twentieth-century architecture, Wolfe takes such European architects as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Bauhaus art school founder Walter Gropius to task for their glass-and-steel-box buildings that have influenced (and infected) America's cities.