The making of dystopia …

… The Rise of the Architectural Cult | Articles | Inference: International Review of Science. (Hat topip, Dave Lull.)

Curl … addresses topics such as the science of design, cults and substitute religions, and how totalitarian systems arise. The book starts as architectural history and becomes an indictment of a movement. The contemporary built environment, dictated primarily by style, lacks key geometrical features that human biology craves. Scientists, who should have been the first to notice this discrepancy, unwisely or naively left the shaping of our world in the hands of the architects.

I should note that I grew up familiar with and impressed by what was then the PSFS building and is Loews Hotel in Center City Philadelphia. Not everything that in the international style was bad.