The unprecedented history which has been sketched in the previous chapters, can be summed up in two ways: either as the final liberation of architecture from the ballast of structure, or its total subservience to the goads of mechanical service. Both interpretations of the situation are current, largely because of the infantile fallacy that architecture is necessarily divisible into function and form, and that the mechanical and cultural parts of art are in essential opposition. The division also typifies the split between the generations of architects - now and right back through the twentieth century, the sign that an architect was achieving 'maturity' and success was that he had tacitly, or noisily, abandoned the attempt to extract symbolic values and cultural performance from the application of advanced technology.

- The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment, Reyner Banham (also check his TV piece from 1972, Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles)