There is a more serious issue with this article, which is the attitude to architecture. The building designed naively as a box with flat facades, as you mention

There is a more serious issue with this article, which is the attitude to architecture. The building designed naively as a box with flat facades, as you mention. But there is a subtext in the "software engineer who likes traditional urbanism" vibe, which is this: a lack of faith in the architectural profession. Like so many tech people who profess to prefer traditional architecture and urbanism, this guy hasn't studied architecture or trained in it professionally, and by his own account is "not a good artist". No matter how many disclaimers he includes, actions speak louder than words, and his action is "I am going to draw a building and do an acceptable job—more acceptable to me that a drawing by any of those clueless professional architects who don't understand tradition and beauty". It is flat-out arrogant. A lot of denizens of HN seem to be conservative with respect to architecture, so I'm not going to try to overturn that consensus. But if you want good architecture, it needs to be made by experts. This should be unarguable. Classical architecture is difficult or impossible to pull off convincingly these days. It was a complicated tradition and it has largely been lost. Software engineers, untrained in art or architecture, doodling with SketchUp, are not going to reverse this.