This hilarious Barney & Clyde cartoon was sent to me by a correspondent in Washington, Arnold Berke, a contributing editor of Preservation magazine.

My reaction to the cartoon?

If only!

If only Le Corbusier had suffered from overindulgence in the pleasures of alcohol rather than the displeasures of autism. If only Corbu’s architecture, as translated by Weingarten, Weingarten & Clark) were as cartoonish as the loopy house in the strip, the International Style drunk on postmodernism. One might then have hoped that a tippling Corbu might have toppled from atop of one of his machines for living before inspiring so many towers of hopelessness for the poor, providing options for suicide and murder from their dangerous rooftops and other precincts of modern architecture.

Anybody see The Architect (from 2006, not the latest movie of the same name), with Isabella Rosellini and Viola Davis, about a designer of public housing who tries to dodge being guilt-tripped by angry tenants into demol- ishing one of his towers? Before he succumbs, a resident leaps off its roof.

If only there were no Corbu, maybe a lot of this might not have happened, and the world would be a happier place.

If only.

[GoComics offers Barney & Clyde, by Gene Weingarten, Dan Weingarten and David Clark, and other comics.]