[selectionbias]

I sympathize with the author's disdain for brutalist and some deconstructivist work. But to suggest that all contemporary architecture is a movement towards creating deliberately alienating and impractical buildings, seems to me very wrong. I think Zaha Hadid's work (which the author critiques) is aesthetically pleasing to most people, not alienating, for example https://assets.newatlas.com/dims4/default/e09670a/2147483647... . The author expresses a uniform disdain for skyscrapers, but many skyscrapers are popular with the general public, for example, the Gherkin in London https://i.pinimg.com/474x/b5/78/c0/b578c0732b532b91b5e8455de... or say, The Empire State Building. Personally I do not find the shiny glass and sleek curves of many of these buildings unsettling or alienating nor, I think, do most people. In short, if we accept a basic premise of the author's: that what is good architecture is what is pleasing to most of the people who view and interact with it, then the author's critique is (I believe) too broad because many of the architects and buildings the author implicitly or explicitly criticizes are in fact popular.

Furthermore, something that the author does not address is the movement in contemporary architecture to carefully consider the practical effect of building design on the people within it. For example, how the flow of people is directed by the building, how the layout can help its occupants interact with each other, how interior walls can support privacy or erode it, and how to cater the response to these concerns to the function of the building. This is the opposite of the approach in Eisenman's house design mentioned in the article.