British modernists and postmodernists alike have warmed themselves before Hawksmoor's flinty buildings, with their coarse masses and deceptive volumes.
Buffeted by the building boom, the increasingly generic glass boxes-- the sort that dominate certain sweeps of Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan--came to seem ubiquitous, even inescapable, guaranteeing their place in history and serial rejection by factions all the way from the Supreme Soviet to the postmodernists.