In a not entirely facetious vein, I once taught a course at the Southern California Institute of Architecture where every student was made to imagine they had a B-52 and unlimited bomb tonnage. Their assignment was the optimal improvement of the built environment through the destruction of the ugliest and most antisocial large buildings.

It was hopeless to expect that architects would agree on what constitutes “good design,” but I was curious whether we could achieve any consensus about “bad architecture.” If so, perhaps we could leave some pertinent instructions for the next LA riot.

In the event, students loved playing Curtis LeMay and bombed the city with gusto, but with disappointingly little overlap among their targets. Perhaps “bad” design was as capriciously subjective as “good” design. But one student remembered a lecture I’d given about Churchill’s strategy for terror-bombing German cities during the Second World War. The RAF’s early priorities were the slum neighborhoods in Berlin and Hamburg-Altona that had the highest percentage of Communist voters in the 1933 elections, with the expectation that morale in these former red belts would shatter most easily. (It didn’t.)