With rare exceptions, I’m not a big fan of modern architecture (or perhaps “post-modern” is the more appropriate term). Neither is Lileks, who I’ve quoted on this subject before. He and I are light-years apart politically speaking, but I think we share the same philosophy when it comes to buildings:

I have quaint notions about architecture. Context may not be king, but it’s not the king’s fool, either. Symmetry keeps a building from flying apart into a heaped-up mess, and helps the brain make sense of what it’s seeing. The occasional dose of historicity — and I don’t mean publicity photos etched into the glass like trapped ghosts — binds a building to the era that preceded its conception.

The above quote comes from today’s Bleat, in which James dissects the new Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Wish I had the observational prowess to describe architectural mishaps like this:

And then there’s the face. Can’t build a new Euro-style cultural complex without inadvertent anthropomorphizing. Here we have the face of a fellow whose wife dragged him to the Guthrie, and it’s the middle of the third act, and he really, really has to use the bathroom… it’s like they modeled him on the Boss level of Tron.

Griping about the asymmetrical, inelegant, cancerous carbuncles of post-modernist public spaces and referencing Tron? There’s got to be some kind of award for blogging like that…