Check this out...
By happy chance, Lileks wrote about the current dean of the U. of Minnesota's School of Design, which apparently my architecture school has sort of mutated into.
Read how this guy thinks, and imagine what it was like there right after the 60s.
"A whole new mind is required," the professor goes on to say. Sigh. A whole new doubeplus newthink mind, brother, until oldthink unbellyfeel. "The legalistic way of looking at things – black or white, public or private, win or lose – does not match real life."
Beware people who regard the distinctions between public and private as a mere legality, and one based on subjective viewpoint at that. In the end, they can define anything private as public, which gives them the right to take it away. And if you lose something you own, well, "loss" is a subjective concept as well that does not match real life. Or at least the real life you can understand if you have a whole new mind.
"Urban planning" and "New Towns" were the rage when I was in school: highly-organized cities planned by a wiser elite for the masses. The peak of this for me was Paolo Soleri's "arcologies," which even though I realized would become a wretched hive of humanity in the real world, were cool as hell.
There is something about the socialist mindset that, in architecture, eventually winds up where Albert Speer and Louis the Sixteenth lived.
I'm a little disappointed in Lileks, though. I managed to find the original interview.