Death was what the Atlantic wall and Siegfried line were all about. Whenever I came across these grim fortifications along France's Channel coast and German border, I realised I was exploring a set of concrete tombs whose dark ghosts haunted the brutalist architecture so popular in Britain in the 1950s. Out of favour now, modernism survives in every high-rise sink estate of the time, in the Barbican development and the Hayward Gallery in London, in new towns such as Cumbernauld and the ziggurat residential blocks at the University of East Anglia.

OMG... cf. Life against Death (Norman O. Brown), Gravity's Rainbow (Pynchon),

A vicious NYT op-ed right after the redesign of the "Freedom Tower" was unveiled a few months back compared the new design to Albert Speer.

JG Ballard on modernists and death