His book is his fullest introduction. It moves comfortably from Le Corbusier's pilotis to the "New York Five," from the white boxes of Modernism to the cult of Supermodernism, and from Niemeyer's Brasília to the office politics of a modern architecture practice. Real names, real buildings and real debates are treated the way a good satirist treats any powerful institution: with enough respect to get the details right, and enough irreverence to notice what is funny.

The result is a novel that works as a crash course and as a comedy at once. Fogel's narrator is not a genius or a star, but the project leader who has to turn a visionary's sketchbook into something a government can actually build, and his view from the middle is where the book finds its voice.