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A Bizarre Monument to Non-Architecture

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(The following is from Note 2, Chapter 5, "The Origins of SDI, 1944-1983")

Ada Louise Huxtable, "A Bizarre Monument to Non-Architecture", New York Times, 14 December 1975, Section II, P. D39.

Huxtable noted that "the stark engineering composition of severely abstract forms, grimly silhouetted against open sky and flat land, upstages architecture totally. It is without doubt one of the most peculiarly impressive built (sic) groups of our time. Architects trying consciously for impact and meaning might just as well call it quits in the face of this kind of brute esthetic force." Huxtable saw the Safeguard structures as symbolic of the death of the optimism of the engineer and technician: "All of that engineering elegance and efficiency born of rational, industrialized solutions that was (sic) to make a better world -- led by the architect -- did not bring a new dawn. It brought an era of more gigantic problems in the nature of life and survival than history has ever known." The structures are also symbolic of how the architect is being pushed out of his field by "engineers and investment builders."