APPENDIX (165)
authoritarianism, or venality in such a system are those internal to the individual review board members. This is rule by man rather than rule by law.
In proceedings based solely on taste, the supplicant architect is left perplexed, and often thousands of dollars are lost in frustrating attempts, by scheming rather than designing, to anticipate or to follow the dicta of "experts" whose taster and philosophies differ from the architect's own or are so capricious as to be incomprehensible.
Aesthetically, too, the aim is not achieved. Any artist could have told the lawmakers that you cannot legislate beauty and that attempts to do so by the use of experts will result not only in gross injustice but in an ugly deadness in the environment.
Beauty escapes in the pursuit of safety, which promotes a simplistic sameness over a varied vitality. It withers under the edicts of today's aging architectural revolutionaries who man the review boards and who have achieved aesthetic certainty.