James Howard Kunstler

And every year, they fail to because they don't want to hurt I.M.

Pei's feelings.

This was the winner of an international design award in, I think, 1966, something like that.

It wasn't Pay and Cop, another firm, designed this.

But there's not enough Prozac in the world to make people feel OK about going down this block.

This is the back of Boston City Hall, the most important significant civic building in Boston.

And what is the message that is coming, what are the vocabularies and grammars that are coming from this building, and how is it informing us about who we are?

This, in fact, would be a better building if we put mosaic portraits of Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot,

Saddam Hussein and all the other great despots of the 20th century on the side of the building.

Because then we'd honestly be saying what the building is really communicating to us.

You know, it's a despotic building.

It wants us to feel like termites.

You know, this is a building designed like a DVD player.

Audio jack, power supply.

And look, you know, these things are important architectural jobs for firms, right?

You know, we hire firms to design these things.

You can see exactly what went on.

Three o'clock in the morning, the design meeting, you know, eight hours before deadline, four architects trying to get this building in on time, right?

And they're sitting there at the long boardroom table with all the drawings and the renderings and all the Chinese food caskets are lying on the table.

And I mean, what was the conversation that was going on there?