We walk the streets of our cities and look up, baffled by the silence of the walls. Why did we let them strip the world bare? We possess art lest we perish of the truth [1], and the truth of this sterilized concrete has become unbearable. They told us that the urge to ornament one's face, and everything in one's reach, is the origin of fine art, the babble of painting [2]. But looking at this void, it feels as though the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of daily use [3], leaving us in a profound state of sensory deprivation. We didn't ask for this blatant simplification; it means bland architecture [4]. Truly, less is a bore [5]. We miss the time when the man who created the first ornament felt the same urge as Beethoven, experienced the same joy that Beethoven felt when he created the Ninth Symphony [6]. Now, everything feels like a cheap motel room—transient and cold. The first ornament that came into being, the cross, had an erotic origin [7], but we have allowed them to castrate the city, leaving us bored and yearning for heat.

I stand on the bus, gripping the rail, terrified to make a sound. They say freedom from ornament is a sign of spiritual strength [8], but to me, it feels like a straightjacket. I scroll through images that all look the same, paralyzed by the fear of being "cancelled" if I post something real, because a thing of beauty is a joy forever [9] only if it fits the mold. The invisible wall forms when nobody is willing to look weird first, and so we fix ourselves alone, isolated by our fear of standing out. I want to sing, I want to throw the snowball, because I am for messy vitality over obvious unity [10]. But I am scared. Not because I am crazy, but because the human obsession with purpose is merely a distraction from the absurdity of existence [11]. So we dress our monsters in the respectable clothes of utility. But a built abomination is a built abomination; the fact that it is functional or sustainable cannot make it less abominable [12].Better to be a glitch than a ghost. We become the noise because we can no longer endure the quiet.

We are starved for magic. Every period had its style: why was it that our period was the only one to be denied a style? [13]. It is because we allowed the scientist to march in and take the place of the poet [14]. We believed that calculations could replace feeling, but one day somebody will find the solution to the problems of the world, and it will be a poet, not a scientist [15]. We have forgotten that play is the highest form of research [16]. We wander past edifices that should lift us, knowing architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man that the sight of them contributes to his mental health, power and pleasure [17]. Where is the pleasure? We are magical beings whose magic has been stolen [18]. The shapes of scratches on the floor cease to have magic [19] in these sanitized halls. We exist to make one feel things, to make the stone stony [20]. We just want to feel the texture of life again.

Look at them—row after row of glass boxes. We are adamantly synthetic, unsatisfied by analysis alone [21], yet we build as if we are spreadsheets. We have lost all perspective and anchoring [22]. It is a bewitched world where ugliness is beauty and love of beauty is some kind of pathologically naive attachment to bourgeois values [23]. But look closer. The tall, sleek, modern structures look as though they are part of a vast mini-storage business [24]. It is ridiculous. We are not storage; we are flesh and blood. My house is my refuge—an emotional piece of architecture, not a cold piece of convenience [25]. We demand a home, not a container. Any work of architecture which does not express serenity is a mistake [26].

We see the green paint peeling on the facades of Venice, and we know it is a lie. The widespread proliferation of unintelligent claims that transform such concerns into mockery should be a cause of substantial alarm [27]. They hang solar panels like jewelry on northern walls, using narratives about sustainability to suppress aesthetic concerns [28]. It is a scam, and we are tired of pretending it isn't. We are all alienated—but have we ever been otherwise? It is through, and not despite, our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the muck of immediacy [29]. We admit what we are: machines that consume, organisms that digest. We do not hide behind a fake nature. Illusion leads to unfulfilled promises and unmarshalled drives [30]. We prefer the honest machine to the hypocritical garden.

A

[27] Branko Mitrović, Architectural masquerades in the age of greenwashing
[28] Branko Mitrović, Architectural masquerades in the age of greenwashing
[29] Laboria Cuboniks, Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation
[30] Laboria Cuboniks, Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation

[21] Laboria Cuboniks, Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation
[22] Kurt Cobb, Modern Architecture: Ugliness is Beauty
[23] Kurt Cobb, Modern Architecture: Ugliness is Beauty
[24] Kurt Cobb, Modern Architecture: Ugliness is Beauty
[25] Luis Barragán, Barragán Archives
[26] Luis Barragán, Contemporary Architects

[13] Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime
[14] Frank Lloyd Wright, The Future of Architecture
[15] Frank Lloyd Wright, The Future of Architecture
[16] Albert Einstein, Aphorisms
[17] John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture
[18] Esmeralda Arana, Quotations
[19] Alan Watts, The Inevitable Ecstasy
[20] Viktor Shklovsky, Art as Device

[8] Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime
[9] John Keats, Endymion
[10] Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture
[11] Nikolai Gogol, Correspondence
[12] Branko Mitrović, Architectural masquerades in the age of greenwashing

[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
[2] Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime
[3] Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime
[4] Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture
[5] Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture
[6] Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime
[7] Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime

01.0 The Tyranny of the useful (The Disappointed Observer)

01.1 The ugliness of Cool (The Anxious Youth)

01.3 The Cosmetics of the Soul (The Longing Poet)

02.0 The Infinite Cell (The Common Sense Observer)

02.1 The Constant Gardener (The Cynical Intellectual)

02.2 The Paper Masonry(The Craftsman)

We don't want to just survive; we want to live. We want to work our way towards a shared language, to learn how to discover patterns which are deep, and capable of generating life [31]. When the patterns are alive, they let our inner forces loose, and set us free [32]. We seek that state where civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them [33]—a state of grace, automatic and biological. Work is love made visible [34]. But we are tired of stacking dollars. The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper [35]. We want to stack stories. We want to remember not the days, but the moments [36].

[31] Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
[32] Christopher Alexander, The Oregon Experiment
[33] Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas
[34] Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
[35] Eden Phillpotts, A Shadow Passes
[36] Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living

02.3 Admire Us (The Chorus)

We are the error in the code, floating in the lagoon. Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness [37]. We yearn. All space and matter, organic or inorganic, has some degree of life in it [38]. The functionalists claimed that if all goes well, the parts of society produce order, stability, and productivity [39]. But it hasn't gone well. So let it go wrong. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation [40]. We are done with representations. If you want to build a ship, don't drum up men to gather wood, divide the work... Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea [41]. We are that ship. We are the cosmetic error. Color is a power which directly influences the soul [42]. We will not be bland. We will not be useful. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely [43].
Admire us.

[37] Frank Gehry, Architectural Record
[38] Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language
[39] CliffsNotes, Three Major Perspectives in Sociology (Functionalism)
[40] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
[41] Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey
[42] Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art
[43] Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray