"Styles at first used to move slowly and live long, one at a time. Later there were fifty seven simultaneous varieties, all old. Then some showed others how they could invent their own ways, but the strain was too much for most, and the new died just before it became the style.

Soon after, almost everybody who had been watching the new got together in white, flat-topped uniforms and started the one way. Anybody who wasn't in, was dead.

On the road, the whitest amongst them invented new rules, merrily approved and readily borrowed — to look the wrong way we all wore blinkers - to be in the wrong place we all pulled ourselves up on thin legs. The legs got steadily fatter and the voices were so many that we were all soon back where others had started.

Paradoxically buildings everywhere became more and more like Kahn had wanted his own to be - born old and overfed: And so began the American Egyptian style, hot today and gone tomorrow — because architects are all eyes and no ears.

The pyramidal kindergarten and the yes-house are both members of the worldwide progressive family, both isolated little machines a émouvolr, both yes-ing with a foreign accent."

From

The American Egyptian Style World Architecture, One, 1964 Editor John Donat, Studio Vista (London).