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Standardization need not lead to visually vapid results. Yet very few new color schemes evoke weight, gravity, hierarchy or importance. Banks are a prime case in point: where once a bank was mantled in mahogany and marble, we now have cobalt blue plastic. There is a correlation between the extensive failure of the global banking system as represented by that industry's promotion, on a grand scale, of erroneous financial instruments, and the devotion that industry has to bland, uniform banking emporia that might be mistaken for discount or fast food outlets. Everything is easily dismantled, easily destroyed, easily crumpled: throwaway colors on throwaway building materials. It was too difficult a job to destroy Penn Station, let's make sure we don't have these problems in anything that we build, in anything that we color! We have had the Bronze and Iron Ages, now we have the Age of Garbage. Once, we built for posterity; now we build, at best, to recycle in the short term. Depressing as that thought might be and as great an indictment of our times as it might be, at least this disposable architecture could be executed in more thoughtful, more nuanced color schemes. Is it really necessary, that, inevitably, every hospital environment seems to be insensitive to the impact color might have on sickness? Does everything have to be hospital green? The tragedy is that some of these commercial colors are not even enhanced by the shadows they dwell among. One feels terrible for the shadows. They not only have dreadful color to deal with but insufferable lighting. The hard lighting of fast food, banks, clothing outlets and drugstores lead to depression and disorientation, to unhappiness. It simply makes you look awful, green around the gills. Who else can I alienate on this subject? HYLAND