WIRED: 60-YEAR-OLD FRENCH APARTMENTS LOOK LIKE A UTOPIAN DREAM. Well, that’s one way to describe these crumbling giant brutalist concrete corncobs. Though considering the word “utopia” was coined by Thomas More “as a Greek pun, because it translates to ‘no place,’” Wired’s headline is more appropriate than their editors realize. Or as James Lileks wrote a couple of years ago regarding François Truffaut’s 1966 adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, “Here’s what I find interesting: whenever the sci-fi movies of the 60s and 70s wanted to set something in a horrible totalitarian world, they just shot on location at a government housing project.”

Speaking of which, considering the Wired article went up on Thursday, this is the architecture of the Banlieues, which in the past decade have worked out for France even worse than our own Corbusier-inspired housing projects did in the 1960s – as Theodore Dalrymple warned in August of 2002.

(Via Maggie’s Farm.)