“Modern architecture does not mean the use of immature new materials; the main thing is to refine materials in a more human direction.”⁶ Yet we continue to wrap glass around loneliness and call it innovation.

We design roofs to collect water, not memories. We treat surfaces as data, not skin. “For the roof, as in the past with the facade or ornamentation, it is the attempt to find a solution that is important, not the stubborn pursuit of a principle.”⁷ Principles calcify; attempts evolve. The Ornamented City is a collection of attempts — deliberate failures performed with grace.

To build lightly is not to build without joy. “Modern architecture does not mean the use of immature new materials; the main thing is to refine materials in a more human direction.”⁶ To refine is to touch, to test, to bend until a form hums.

Ornament is intentional excess: a visible attention that signals life, touch and memory rather than sterile efficiency. Ornament is a sign of life — the breath of a façade. If every building is flattened into neutral blankness, the city goes mute.

The images here are not decoration. They are matter — starting points for making: tensions to test, gestures to scale, honest failures to learn from.

Materials gallery — pairs & items (captions ready to paste)

Motorcycle × Spiral — Kinetic Ornament

[NEW] Speed folded into gesture; motion made readable by form.

App screen × Parked cars — Protocol vs. Flesh

[NEW] The app renders space obedient; ornament reintroduces a stubborn friction that invites touch.

Ronaldo × Pantheon — Monumental Performance

[NEW] Celebrity pressed against vault: public scale as ritual, not billboard.

Lederhosen × Pizza — Communal Sauce

[NEW] Food, ritual, stained hands: the trace of convivial life as ornament.

Formula One (standalone) — Extreme Object

[NEW] An object of fetish and theater; consider how spectacle might be reworked into civic usefulness or deliberate repair.

Construction Crane (standalone) — Honest Machinery

[NEW] The crane’s silhouette can be celebrated rather than hidden; machinery can be civic ornament.

BlackBerry (standalone / relic) — Tactile Relic

[NEW] A device that remembers thumbs; a relic that resists seamlessness.

[NEW] We will test these materials in micro-interventions: painted cornices, benches that invite sleep, patched facades, handshake rails — small acts that aggregate into a city that blushes.

The New Human is not a ghost of machines — it is a fully embodied, amplified figure. Hyper-digital and hyper-tactile, the New Human writes code and stitches seams, reads sensors and feels wood grain. They trust instinct as much as logic. Instinct is not superstition; it is an evolved sensor that registers proportion, rhythm, and warmth long before analysis begins.

“Good buildings come from good people, and all problems are solved by good design.”⁸ We replaced people with processes. Design became an algorithmic shrug.

The New Human wakes to the morning street. They prefer a bench that knows how to hold a body. They vote with their hands: visit a workshop, patronize a maker, mend a tile. They refuse the false comfort of algorithmic blandness. They prize experiments — the patched roof, the painted balustrade, the chair that has been sat in and loved.

This human is also political: reclaiming beauty is civic work. It requires public acts — commissioning, repairing, teaching — that reweave public trust. Machines assist; people decide. Machines can render, but they cannot blush.

Repair is the human craft: visible mends, patchwork, stitches that honor history. These are the fingerprints of care that the New Human reads first.

We do not reject machines; we reject submission to them. Machines can draw, but they cannot blush. “First life, then spaces, then buildings — the other way around never works.”⁹

Ornament is not nostalgia; it is proof of care. The city that denies delight denies life itself.

What happens when space begins to feel again? When walls no longer separate but participate? Architecture, stripped of guilt, rediscovers mischief.

We design benches that invite sleep, not prevent it. Shadows return to streets. Color takes back its voice. The calibrated neutrality of the modern city dissolves, replaced by slight madness — the necessary strangeness of proportion. “There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”¹⁰

The New Human seeks the tactile in all things: a handrail whose warmth tells a story, a door with a dent, a cafe sign flaking paint. These signs of life produce stewardship; they make people care.

“Modern architecture does not mean the use of immature new materials; the main thing is to refine materials in a more human direction.”⁷ Yet we continue to wrap glass around loneliness and call it innovation.

We design roofs to collect water, not memories. We treat surfaces as data, not skin. “For the roof, as in the past with the facade or ornamentation, it is the attempt to find a solution that is important, not the stubborn pursuit of a principle.”⁸ Principles calcify; attempts evolve. The Ornamented City is a collection of attempts — deliberate failures performed with grace.

To build lightly is not to build without joy. “Modern architecture does not mean the use of immature new materials; the main thing is to refine materials in a more human direction.”⁶ To refine is to touch, to test, to bend until a form hums. 

Good buildings come from good people. “Good buildings come from good people, and all problems are solved by good design.”⁹ The problem is that we replaced people with processes. Design has become an algorithmic shrug.

We do not reject machines; we reject submission to them. Machines can draw, but they cannot blush. “First life, then spaces, then buildings — the other way around never works.”¹⁰ Yet we keep reversing the order, wondering why our cities feel like airports that forgot to land.

Ornament is not nostalgia; it is proof of care. We refuse the doctrine that beauty is bourgeois, that pleasure is sin, that color is naive. The city that denies delight denies life itself.

What happens when space begins to feel again? When walls no longer separate but participate? Architecture, stripped of guilt, rediscovers mischief.

We design benches that invite sleep, not prevent it. Shadows return to streets. Color takes back its voice. The calibrated neutrality of the modern city dissolves, replaced by slight madness — the necessary strangeness of proportion. “There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”⁵

A man with dementia gets lost between panes. Corridors fold back like book pages. The eyes enlarge and lessen, hour by hour; the pupil with more light becomes less and in shadow increases. A flash — a boy’s face in a cracked pane — and the past feels like a performance we always had the right to rehearse.

Walls remember. Touch a glass and a memory flickers; a statue is first a dream and the dream can be touched. In here, the contradiction contradicts itself and that is our method. We are allergic to single-story myths. History is a magical mirror, and in this chapel the mirror tells more stories than one.

This café is not for gossip but for repair. You bring cups, you bring silence, you build a ritual. The widow says: the subject is singular and scandalous; the polygamist answers with practice and apology. We toast the scandal.

Comedy belongs here: and what is comedy, if not a mirror of private life? We wear childish jokes like medals; every joke is a small architecture — a bench, a lamp, a tilt in the floor that makes you laugh and then sit.

Here the mirror is social: the surface reflects you but overlays your neighbor; suddenly you rehearse politeness and mischief together. The mirror multiplies: when the mirror is ‘real’, as is constantly the case in the realm of objects, the space in the mirror is imaginary — and so we make imaginary space do real work.

We push our ship into fog and pass columns that host contradictions. Anarchist at the helm — law as a sport. The conspiracy whisperer sees patterns; the racist reads humanism as self-portrait and fails.

The sea insists: it is only self-evident or banal that death is the mirror image of birth. We laugh and row on. The mirror here is a public instrument: our buildings have always acted as a mirror in which the countenance of our civilization is reflected. Let the columns reflect back absurdities so that citizens can see the joke and decide whether to amend it.

The blind girl teaches the old man to read paintings without seeing them. She tells of forms as if spinning tales; the old man feels them like music. The mirror is not only about eyes: scripture, theatre, painting — every created thing in the world is like a book or a painting or a mirror to us. In the dark we learn new rooms of touch; in the light the world looks different and the mirror goes on.

Ritual of Testing. Enter alone. Make a face. The mirror will overlay a city map, a recipe, a code. Take the code; make a bench. Return the bench later.

Ritual of Broadcast. At noon the pavilion plays a minute of mischief across nearby screens — a Mr. Robot-style clip that radiates a harmless prank, an instruction to plant a flower. Play is a civic strategy.

Ritual of Ornament. Re-lamp the street with filigree. The lamppost becomes a small manifesto — beauty as civil disobedience. We refuse sterile uniformity; we insist on craft.

The picture is one single surface, and the mirror is the same.

For we judge that in a mirror there is nothing but a deception: the mirror only pretends to show a foreign body.

Now, nothing is returned so quickly as an image from a mirror.

Is a mirror now used just for the sake of our appearance?

It is no secret that the moon has no light of her own, but is, as it were, a mirror, receiving brightness from the influence of the sun.

I look in the mirror and see a stranger who swears that it is me.

The two-dimensional is every bit as fictitious as the four dimensional, for nothing is flat, not even the most finely polished mirror.

The sun is the real mirror of the world.

Every created thing in the world is like a book or a painting or a mirror to us.

When the mirror is ‘real’, as is constantly the case in the realm of objects, the space in the mirror is imaginary.

These lines are our chorus; we use them as props, prayers, and playful curses. They chant in the corridors and pop up on stickers and tiles. They are not proof — they are provocations.

Friends: sticky-handed kids, neighbor repair teams, the person who laughs at the wrong time.

Enemies: the bored grid, sterile efficiency, the theory that confuses words for action, the architect who mirrors fashion with no craft.

We are for community; we are against lone intellectual posturing. We are sincere about being unserious. Humor is intellectual — and we will meet the heavy in that fight with giggles and plans.

We build a monastery of mirrors to teach the city to see itself differently. The mirror will be a device of comedy, test, and revelation. We will project images, codes, plays, and small acts of generosity. We will put Victorian filigree on mass-produced poles and offer a demonstration: beauty can be cheap and repaired; it need not be expensive and untouchable.

Enter alone. Play a rule. Break another. Leave the pavilion carrying one small, ridiculous, useful thing in your pocket: a bench plan, a lamp design, a code. Go home and do it. Collect others. That is how the city becomes a chain of mischief and repair — a living archive of being human.

We are the Monastery of Mirrors: fools, yes — but fools with tools.

It didn’t come as a decision; it arrived as recognition — a sudden clarity born of surfaces, reflections, and transformations. The mirror was already inside all the other metaphors: honey reflecting light, yeast expanding in invisible patterns, water carrying the world within its skin, snowflakes glittering and fracturing. The mirror was the synthesis — the creature that contained them all.

We hadn’t planned it. We simply followed the trail of images: viscosity, expansion, reflection, crystallization. Each was about surfaces and transformation, about seeing and being seen, about states of matter and meaning. The mirror waited silently at the end of that sequence — the place where everything folds back upon itself.

So we stopped searching for examples and started looking at ourselves. Literally. We opened the camera by accident and saw our own faces on the screen. It felt strange, like a mistake. We realized that we never truly see ourselves as we are. The mirror is the only place where you exist as someone else — reversed, flat, contained in a surface. It shows you how others never see you. It lies, but beautifully.

Were we ever meant to see ourselves like this? Were humans designed for reflection? Or is the mirror an invention that turned self-perception into spectacle? Maybe it’s a sin to look — like facing Medusa, or like Narcissus dying in his reflection. But still, we can’t stop.