(…) architecture is the expression of the true nature of societies, as physiognomy is the expression of the nature individuals. However, this comparison is applicable, above all, to the physiognomy of officials (prelates, magistrates, admirals). In fact, only society’s ideal nature – that of authoritative command and prohibition – expresses in actual architectural constructions. Thus great monuments rise up like dams, opposing a logic of majesty and authority to all unquiet elements; it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that Church and State speak to impose silence upon the crowds. Indeed, monuments obviously inspire good social behaviour and often even genuine fear. (…) The disappearance of academic pictorial composition, on the other hand, opens the path to the expression (and thereby the exaltation) of psychological processes distinctly at odds with social stability. (…) Forms have become increasingly static, increasingly dominant. From the very outset, in the case, the human and architectural orders make common cause, the latter being only the development of the former. Therefore an attack on architecture, whose monumental productions now truly dominate the whole earth, grouping the servile multitudes under their shadow, imposing admiration and wonder, order and constraint, is necessarily, as it were, an attack on man.
Georges Bataille
Encyclopaedia Acephalica, 1995, Atlas Arkhive, Documents of the Avant-Garde