The early '80s were both extremely boring and very exciting. By then, the intense passions of the immediate postwar years were spent, the dreams of building a world fit for social democracy were already beginning to fade as it became clear that system building and prefab-rication (as then practised) were not the panaceas that they promised to be. Many of what were supposed to be the proud products of increasingly prosperous Western economies turned out to leak, generate condensation, and be insufficiently resistant to even moderate usage. Housing estates built for heroes and their families had begun to show the seeds of social problems that in many cases worsened in the next two decades. Almost all planning followed the doctrines of the absurd Charte d'Athenes and it was clear that virtually the only beneficiaries of the rigid separation of functions were crude developers and clumsy highway engineers. Quantity was everything, quality rarely spoken of except in quantifiable terms. Architecture and city making had largely become instruments of big bureaucracy and big business (perhaps they still are, but in different ways).
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