building to no purpose

The modernist revolution failed to win over the public because the public could see that the ­rejection of cultural continuity, accompanied by aesthetic reductionism, resulted in new buildings that were uglier than the buildings they replaced. Something is seriously wrong when the architects shaping our built environment no longer consider it their responsibility to embody a community’s past as the foundation for its future. At Hudson Yards, architecture is not even about “the future”—it is about what’s happening now, what’s “progressive” now.

Here.