You may have noticed that Greek and Roman temples have their front doors in the middle of the facade, or front wall. This has been called the void on center, and it is part of the larger system of symmetry in classical architecture.
The Roman architect Vitruvius, in Book III of his De Architectura, argued that buildings should be symmetrical, the same way the human body is symmetrical. And he describes a well-proportioned man (nature is not actually uniform, you know), lying on his back with his arms out. This is the source of Leonardo's famous drawing of the man in a circle and also in a square.
Symmetry has produced a lot of good buildings over the years - the front door of Notre Dame de Paris is smack in the middle of the facade, and that's just where I want it. Perhaps you feel the same way.
And then there was Philadelphia's own Frank Furness, who had a fondness for putting his doors at the corner, which if you stop to think about it, allows access from two streets instead of one.
But I digress. What I'd like to talk about today is the role of a void on center in large organizations. This is actually quite common, and it is not just a disease of government organizations. It is rampant in the business world.
On September 11, 2001, I was working for a large corporation in Philadelphia. Early on we switched the TV monitors in the elevator lobbies to the news. As we watched the towers in New York City collapse, we also started to watch our company collapse. The entire management chain seemed to have become invisible. And mute. We waited for instructions that never came. Eventually we decided to leave - we were in one of the tallest towers in the city, and an airliner on final approach to the airport could have diverted and hit us in about two minutes.
A friend and colleague was located on another floor, and I should have stopped by and told her I was leaving. But it simply never crossed my mind. I apologized later, and she forgave me. She said that, some time after I had left, an anonymous voice came over the loudspeaker and told everyone to go home. Pretty much everybody had already left.
It turns out that senior management couldn't decide whether to send everybody home. One executive was outspoken about what it would do to her production numbers. What they did decide to do was go to the company's emergency command center in New Jersey. Unfortunately, the bridges had already closed. So they dispersed, and then they found out that their cell phones were useless - jammed by the volume of calls.
This is the short version of the story.
During the last election, man-in-the-street interviews started quoting people saying, "I like Trump. He's a businessman. He'll know what to do." And that's when I knew in my heart that we were in grave danger.
See also Fascism, Jim Crow Was a Failed State, Narcissism and Dictatorship, What Can Pierre Laval Tell Us About Donald Trump?
