In his 1981 diatribe against contemporary American architecture, "From Bauhaus to Our House," Tom Wolfe notes that seemingly every American child "goes to a school in a building that looks like a duplicating-machine replacement-parts wholesale distribution center warehouse." Anecdotally speaking, this still seems to be the case in East Coast metro areas like Washington and New York City, where suburban teens shuffle in and out of buildings that could double as minimum-security prisons. Wolfe traces the problem to the Lost Generation, which internalized the notion that "they do things better in Europe." In architecture, this outlook was made manifest in the insipid giant glass boxes erected up and down Sixth Avenue in Manhattan and in other major cities from the 1950s to the 1970s. On Wolfe's mind was the demolition of the original Beaux Arts Penn Station -- "the Roman Temple of transportation," one paper called it -- and the construction of the modern Madison Square Garden. Across the country, American towns were being blighted by unsightly and cheerless concrete structures masquerading as utilitarian art much in the same way that the walls of dentists' offices were being hung with third-rate Jackson Pollock knockoffs posing as abstract expressionism.