"The other cancer is the idea that building design has sociological, psychological, and macro-economic dimensions that the architect-- simply by virtue of being an architect-- is competent to judge. What really matters to your average architecture student is drawing-- which is fine, and just as it should be, until the vain idea emerges that their drawings represent some kind of implicit vision for mankind. At my school, any student's design presentation had to include a verbal rationale-- often post hoc and invariably half- baked-- of how the form, massing, and materials of the design are expressive of such imponderables as the supposed psychological 'needs' and 'aspirations' of the users and the wider 'community' that the building is to serve. The students were simply reciting the bogus language of their tutors-- in which buildings might be said to be 'fun,' 'thought provoking,' 'democratic,' 'inclusive' and other such nonsense."

"I had first-hand experience of this dynamic in architectural education in the 1980s. In my school, the status of 'Corb' (as we were encouraged to affectionately call him) as a hero was a given, and dissenting from this position was risky. Such is the power of group-think which universities are, sadly, no less prone to than anywhere else. To be fair, nobody was still plugging the megalomaniac aspect of their hero; his knock-down-the-center-of-Paris side. All those undeniably God-awful tower blocks for 'rationally' housing 'the people' that sprang up all over Europe in his name? Well, we were assured, they could not be blamed on Corb; it was just that his more pedestrian architectural acolytes hadn't properly understood what he had meant. In addition to the persistence of Corb-hero worship itself, two cancerous aspects of its radical mindset have survived intact in our schools of architecture."