When bad things happen to good buildings
This title is an overstatement: what has happened to these buildings is not actually bad. Or even unfortunate. Maybe anachronistic and at worst out of stylistic character. Maybe a more accurate title would be When the 21st Century happens to 1970s buildings . Much less jazzy, more accurate. Similarly it's an overstatement to call these buildings "good." Buildings, in the architect Cass Gilbert's phrase, are "machines to make the land pay." Even if that's not true of all buildings, it's true of these. "Making the land pay" doesn't make a building good or bad per se. We've learned since the 1970s is how to to extract money from visitors to a building and how to attract more visitors to a building. What makes a building appealing is different now than in the 1970s. In these senses, these buildings are better. So a more honest (but much too long) title would be some renovations to interesting buildings that are different in style ...