Why We Shouldn't Let Architects Shape Our Cities

In an all-out assault on Architecture, Meades rails on everything from the profession's "smugly hermetic milieu" and "mutual dependence," to "architects' lack of empathy." His main complaint seems to be with the general inability of architects to create places, and the perpetual need to obliterate the "layers of urban archaeology," that Meades cherishes, in the drive to find the next "non-place where derivative architecture can gloriously propagate itself with impunity."

While Meades mentions a few select projects for praise, including Ledoux's Arc-et-Senans and Le Corbusier's l'Unité d'Habitation, "[t]hey
are the exceptions to the rule that planned towns, tied towns, new
towns, garden cities, garden villages, communist utopias, national
socialist utopias, socialist utopias, one-nation utopias, comprehensive
developments and wholesale regenerations that lurch between the mediocre
and the disastrous."

"It
doesn't matter what idiom is essayed," continues Meades, "it is the business of attempting
to create places that defeats architects. Architects cannot devise
analogues for what has developed over centuries, for generation upon
generation of amendments. They cannot understand the appeal of
untidiness and randomness, and even if they could they wouldn't know how
to replicate it."