[mhink]

I get where you're coming from, but the article is very specifically about the external design of buildings, and the impact that external design has on the area around it.

You're not wrong that the internal design is important (and perhaps, in some cases, given less attention than it should fairly receive) but one of the points the article makes is that for any given building, only a very small people who experience that building will actually be interacting with it directly. Most people will experience it as a background to something else going on in their life:

> Buildings’ exteriors serve as backgrounds to a huge range of activities. In my view, this generates constraints on what we want them to look like. The streets of a city are places of work and play, of sickness and health, of triumph and grief. To all this, buildings owned by strangers form the involuntary backdrop, and for this reason, we often want them to be as we want strangers to be: polite, courteous, friendly and unintrusive.

With this in mind, I don't think it's unreasonable to also evaluate buildings on the basis of how their facade contributes (or doesn't contribute) to the general vibe of the area around it.