Writing about architecture is like dancing to music.

The Rat looks and laughs at this guide to university architecture. For a more serious take on the subject, William J. Mitchell:

[MIT's Simmons Hall] is not about the comfortable continuity of tradition (specially for those who have been privileged by it), but about transformation and social mobility—not about fitting in, but breaking out. It wants to attract the first-generation migrant kids whose parents have worked long hours to get them into college and on course for a better life, the children of blue-collar families who start with little but make it on sheer merit, the high school misfits who will thrive when they reach the company of others as smart as they are. Appropriately then, it avoids culture-specific motifs and class-bound imagery (except, maybe, for a hint of Corb), and employs an exterior vocabulary of rigorously abstract forms that doesn't even give you much of a clue, from a distance, about the true scale.

To which I say/have said, "Really?"

To be fair, Mitchell softens toward tradition later in the book, when he realizes that the mobility of the modern grab-your-laptops-kids-let's-go classroom isn't anything new, but something very old:

In the class I'm teaching right now—which happens to focus upon radically rethinking the automobile and designing a concept car—my students and I are as peripatetic as Socrates and his companions strolling among the groves.

It's not much of a walk-back, but understanding yourself to be in some kind of continuity with the past, whether it's the Yale Man, the provincial gone Ivy, or Socrates, is a step in the right direction.