better images needed

The Alderman's chamber at Newton City Hall is a little known grand public space. As experience has demonstrated, it is poorly suited to modern government and exists mostly as a stage set where civic functions are crammed in as an afterthought. It defies improvement, however, and I think the same can be said for much of the "public" government spaces of the American experiment. What stands out is the obsession with rooms that are clearly designed for long-winded speeches by men in wigs. Meanwhile, the true instruments of public service are stacks and stacks of paper that are distributed to scores of functionaries who do not have time to read the paper, but make copies of it to pass on to other people who do not understand what has been written on the paper. The architecture of contemporary politics must be geared towards the movement, accumulation, and storage of paper. (Any idiot who starts chirping about a paper-less, online utopia can go fill out and file Complaint Form 325295Z-07---towers of ilium will make sure that it gets to the right person)

I suspect that authoritarian regimes also have an obsession with paper and bold civic gestures, but their dysfunctional character derives from a lack of dedicated bureaucrats. The problem with American representatives is that they are not even aware of how outdated their architecture is.