Minimal Art seemed harmless: just a few hard-edged, greyish pieces of metal laid on the ground, some bricks aligned a certain way, heaps of logs. Minimal Art looked unnecessarily stubborn and a bit stupid, but nobody would ever have thought it could do any harm.

Perhaps it didn't. And in the end Minimal Art is not our business, at least not directly. But eventually the sad rhetoric of Minimal Art turned into the grimly asocial monumentality of Minimalist architecture. The silence of the monkeys became the silence of the monks.

"Monks and Monkeys" tries to understand how at a certain point Minimalist architecture won out and became mainstream, and how the sad rhetoric of Minimal Art turned into the grimly asocial monumentality of Minimalist architecture. It also explores how Minimalist architecture turned the stupidity of Minimal Art into a slick, perverted religion.