All courses in architectural history should start here in Lincoln Nebraska, which is just as corn-fed and friendly and Midwestern and flat as your imagination suggests. Lincoln is a capital city and a college town (the 'N' of Nowledge) of a decent size, friendly size.

To the right, maybe 40 miles away, Omaha To the left, the edge of the American outback, a great emptiness and stillness. It may help to realize that Nebraskans are decent, patient, hardworking people whose children tend to move cityward, gradually emptying the flat towns and flat counties where you can now pick up a 3-bedroom house for $17-$25K, or for free, if you seem kind, and promise to stay.

Lincoln, though. Lincoln has two centers of gravity a few blocks away from each other. The University of Nebraska, its agricultural school and its stadium, and the state capitol building, which towers over everything.

It's a profoundly alien building, completely unexpected. You're expecting maybe a capitol building like all the others, a white dome and two stately wings - no. This is a different shape and different presence entirely. The white-dome-and-stately-wings is a container in shape, you sense that it contains something. This tower is more assertive, the Nebraska State Shaft, particularly in contrast to all the surrounding flatness. It's a phallus, really. It's like a dick. Great government dick or not, it's irresistible, so let's approach it while I rattle off exposition.

Built in 1925 - actually it took a decade to build and its architect was already dead. He died of embarrassment because his name was Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, and he looks like a complete patsy in his official photograph, but I'm convinced that if his name had been, say, uh, Vickers Strong, he'd be a household name like he was in 1920.

Goodhue was the best architect of his generation.

Goodhue was a badass: this is the pinnacle of his career, and one of the best buildings in the country, big shoulders, big noise, original gangster, civic lynchpin to say the least, the ghost of something great that didn't happen except here and in central LA, stone evidence, and the building that won't shut up.