To bring up the affordance angle again, that doorway is extremely unsubtle about being a doorway, and gets high marks for usability, while the Le Corbusier buil

To bring up the affordance angle again, that doorway is extremely unsubtle about being a doorway, and gets high marks for usability, while the Le Corbusier building looks like a military pillbox with no way to enter or leave. All that ornamentation serves to guide the eye and give you a visual shorthand for what you're looking at, whereas the sharp textureless lines of modern objects and UIs makes me think it's all aspiring to be dazzle camouflage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USS_West_Mahomet_(ID-3681)_cropped.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USS_West_Mahomet_(ID-3681)... Besides, in the real world flat surfaces carry a gradient from their lightsource, truly uniformly lit, flat-texture surfaces are extremely rare and hard to orient visually.