Yesterday, legislators failed to save Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center (right down the road from me in Goshen, N.Y.) despite proposals that were actually more economical than destroying it and rebuilding.

Michael Kimmelman posits that the decision may not have been for the reasons usually cited—the building’s Brutalist aesthetic, and current state of disrepair—but instead that legislators hate the building because “Rudolph’s design was about openness, transparency, accountability. It was thereby a daily rebuke to how legislators ‘now run the county’.”