Much of the history of architecture is an attempt to subjugate nature, because it gets in the way of running society.

But there was still human nature, and humans enjoy costly things, like beauty, passion, selfhood.

We realized then there was yet more nature to subjugate. pic.twitter.com/mBy7puw9je

— Tyler Alterman (@TylerAlterman) October 9, 2020

And part of the long trend of liberalism (in the broad sense) of the past few hundred years is to insist that there is no such thing as human nature, this idea being instantiated in its modern form with John Locke’s “tabula rasa” in the 17th Century and re-codified in the 20th Century to push back against eugenics.

But the problem is that there is a human nature, of course. And liberalism is against much of it by its omissions and inclusions.