 In a sharply critical 1976 "The New York Times" article, architectural reviewer Paul Goldberger described the complex as "a compendium of clichés of modern architecture".He further commented that "Ultimately, of course, one realizes that the entire mall complex is not so much a vision of the future as of the past.The ideas here were dead before they left the drawing board, and every design decision, from the space allocations to the overall concept, emerges from an outdated notion of what modern architecture, not to mention modern government, should stand for."