But all up and down the dry brown California hills marched the blank walls of stripmalls and office parks and gated suburbs, ever-expanding recursions of banality vanishing into the cloudless sky over the ridges . Listen to the mockingbirds . The Sav-On building that he describes is, I think, a symptom of the complete privatisation of space in contemporary society. Public space has lost any meaning, it has become strictly utilitarian, existing only for the movement of people. People are no longer citizens, they are consumers.
Citizens interact with each other, exchange ideas.
Consumers don't need public space except as a conduit for getting to and from the job where they make money to pay for stuff, to the mall where they buy stuff, to the home in the suburbs where they keep their collection of stuff. In a world were everything is private, there is no need for architecture. Architecture is the art of first defining, then mediating between, the public and the private domains. Sav-On does not need architecture. It does not need a public face.