Ahead of His Time

John Ruskin, of course, didn't live to see the modern-day horror that is suburbia, but he described it better than most:

I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital -- upon those thing, tottering, foundationless shells of splintered wood and imitated stone -- upon those gloomy rows of formalized minuteness, alike without difference and without fellowship, as solitary as similar -- not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow, for a desecreted landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground.