Great essay on modernist legibility failure mode. Legibility failure mode recipe: - Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city -Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works -Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations - Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like - Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality - Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly