> the complications aren't there just for the sake of adding something, they reiterate certain structural themes, create depth, a sense of connection at variety

> the complications aren't there just for the sake of adding something, they reiterate certain structural themes, create depth, a sense of connection at variety of scales. Compare to the "unadorned" buildings -- dead, flat, boring, generic, your attention slips off them like water off an oiled pan. Exactly. Consider the very first photograph, which highlights the owls: I couldn't actually see the books, but I could see the owls, and my instant thought was, 'I bet this is a library'. Because owls are so strongly associated with wisdom, Athena, books, and learning. Far from being useless, they are subtly serving as a UI, drawing on a recognition memory: even 30 years from now, should I happen to be walking through Chicago, I will probably recognize the library as a library solely from the owl-book cues. I'm reminded of Tufte's 'data ink' phrase: Tufte visualizations can often be quite beautiful, but they are not necessarily minimal; they could be made simpler by removing 'ornamentation', but only by also losing subtle 'data' or theme. (You can have plenty of style or decoration, it just has to mean something.) Whereas, in the anti-human boxes prized by modernism, they are interchangeable, meaningless, big ugly dumb boxes, designed for humans and things to be shuffled in and out of at the convenience of the powers that be - cubicles writ large.