They built these horrible barracks in response. A town is no good if one architect designs everything. But you have to have an agreed-upon language for it to be coherent, for people to communicate. So you need a building code. And the trick is to write the code so you get the normal variety, but so that the basic type is respected.
Skyscrapers mark the first architecture ever of which the basic principle is impermanence.
A skyscraper will probably last about a 50-year life span and then collapse. It happens to them all the time. Modernism had built into it a principle of impermanence. The skyscraper will be gone in a thousand years, Modernist building will be gone, but the grid will be there, and the basic impress of the order of the town. The Christian Science Monitor.