Dread is an essay about how and why certain architectures inspire a vague, wordless fear. It was published in Dimensions 26, (pp. 79-83).

Why would such an ambiguous and disorienting opacity be the contemporary mark of architectural dread? While it warrants more exploration, my initial suspicion is that opacity stalks our era. Covert financial market manipulations precipitated economic diaster. Extralegal prisoners are detained and interrogated at countless unknown locations. The production of our day to day consumer goods is a mysterious process, lost in tangled and inhumane networks of global logistics. Simply put, we cannot see and no longer know how our political and economic systems work. So behind every blank wall is a new, threatening machination.