“We bleach our streets into submission. We design silence, then wonder why no one speaks.”
There is the view that we live in an era of strong and well-justified ecological concerns — and there is the view that we live in the era of faking such concerns.
This manifesto is a small rebellion. It is short on theory and long on ritual. It insists: play is not childish; play is primary. Beauty is not decoration; it is a tactic.
We are against buildings that hide their emptiness behind moral slogans. The city has become polite to the point of cruelty. Benches are shaped to keep the tired from lying down; light is calibrated to erase shadow. Functionality now means exclusion dressed as care.
Architecture learned long ago to be useful. Usefulness is not the enemy. The enemy is the fear that hides behind it — the fear of pleasure, of strangeness, of color, of touch.
We walk through plazas of apology, façades that pretend humility, lampposts that confess no care. “A built abomination is a built abomination; the fact that it is functional or sustainable cannot make it less abominable.”¹
“The problem is that so many people think they are ugly.”² — and no narrative about function, material, or regulation compliance can answer to this problem.
We refuse the posture of apology. We will not hide behind slogans or data while producing places that feel like corridors for machines. If sustainability is to matter, it must be joined to beauty; repair must be joined to love.
“Play is the highest form of research.”³ Ornament is not waste; it is evidence of attention. We design for the hand as much as for the algorithm.
Beauty is not a luxury — it is a civic necessity.
The city has been retooled into an instrument of protocol. This is not a metaphor — it is an experience: places that speak in instructions, not invitations. The old capacity to astonish has been replaced by systems that optimize away friction and wonder.
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”⁴ But simplicity has been misread as sterilization. We bleach our streets into submission. We design silence, then wonder why no one speaks.
To recover complexity is not regression; it is repair. “There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”⁵ The strange is not the opposite of beauty — it is its trigger. The city must again be strange enough to be loved.
Here are the specific civic wounds we must name:
1 — Grand narratives displace local life. Headlines about rising temperatures and demographic charts are real but impersonal; architecture acts locally, with hands. You cannot build a felt neighborhood with a statistic.
2 — Institutional language seduces and substitutes. Words like “intelligence,” “inclusion,” or “chain reaction” are useful only insofar as they change onsite habit; too often they are rhetorical talismans that permit nothing to change.
3 — Adaptation should not be an abdication of aspiration. When adaptation is only survival, architecture shrinks to minimums; it forgets joy and the needless ornament that prompts care.
4 — Engineering fixes do not equal civic poetics. Circular economy, carbon arithmetic, platform protocols — necessary, yes — but not sufficient. Civic beauty is not a ledger entry.
5 — The human has been left out of the taxonomy. Categories like Natural, Artificial, Collective forget the face that laughs, the child who plays, the old woman who naps on a bench. Architecture that forgets these bodies forgets why we build.
The fact is: beauty has been de-centered and deprioritized. Beauty is self-evident: you do not need rhetoric to see a sunrise or a cathedral and know it is beautiful. When public space loses this obviousness, people are not merely offended — they are diminished. Re-centering beauty is a civic act: patronage, careful craft, and the daily practice of repair. You are the movement that can make these changes.
“Play is not childish; play is primary. Beauty is not decoration; it is a tactic.”
“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”
“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.
“The city that denies delight denies life itself.”
“To build lightly is not to build without joy.”
Practice outlives plan. We prefer repeated small acts over masterplans that arrive only after disaster. Continuity is a succession of gestures: repair, repetition, ritual.
“Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.”¹¹
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”¹² But beauty has been mistaken for marketing. We do not sell beauty; we plant it. We let it grow wild between cracks of asphalt and spreadsheets.
Our Ornamented City is not a return to the past. It is an attack on amnesia. It laughs at the sterile, the sloganed, the fearful. It plays, it blushes, it risks. It holds strangeness like treasure. “There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”¹⁰
We reject architecture that waits for tragedy to be relevant. We choose continuity over crisis, joy over justification. Ornament is our rebellion against the tyranny of solutions.
We are not nostalgic. We do not want to return to the baroque, the gothic, the grand. We want to return to attention — to ornament as evidence of care.
Beauty has been de-prioritized in public life; re-centering it reorients how we wake, walk and imagine. Patronage, craft, repair — these are civic actions. The movement you want will not arrive finished; it begins with the people who make and mend.
We will laugh with our walls, not at them.
Branko Mitrović, The Aesthetics of Architecture: “A built abomination is a built abomination; the fact that it is functional or sustainable cannot make it less abominable.”
Branko Mitrović, The Aesthetics of Architecture (ibid.): “The problem is that so many people think they are ugly.”
Albert Einstein: “Play is the highest form of research.”
Leonardo da Vinci: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Edgar Allan Poe: “There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”
Alvar Aalto: “Modern architecture does not mean the use of immature new materials; the main thing is to refine materials in a more human direction.”
Andrea Deplazes, Constructing Architecture: “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.”
Stephen Gardiner: “Good buildings come from good people, and all problems are solved by good design.”
Jan Gehl: “First life, then spaces, then buildings – the other way around never works.”
Edgar Allan Poe (repeat): “There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.” (used as a refrain)
Frank Gehry: “Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.”
John Keats: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
Adolf Loos: “The urge to ornament one’s face, and everything in one’s reach, is the origin of fine art. It is the babble of painting. All art is erotic.”
Adolf Loos: “The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of daily use.”
Adolf Loos: “The first ornament that came into being, the cross, had an erotic origin.”
Adolf Loos: “The man who created it felt the same urge as Beethoven, he experienced the same joy that Beethoven felt when he created the Ninth Symphony.”
Adolf Loos: “Every period had its style: why was it that our period was the only one to be denied a style?”
There is the view that we live in an era of strong and well-justified ecological concerns — and there is the view that we live in the era of faking such concerns.
This manifesto is a small rebellion. It is short on theory and long on ritual. It insists: play is not childish; play is primary. Beauty is not decoration; it is a tactic.
We are against buildings that hide their emptiness behind moral slogans. The city has become polite to the point of cruelty. Benches are shaped to keep the tired from lying down; light is calibrated to erase shadow. Functionality now means exclusion dressed as care.
Architecture learned long ago to be useful. Usefulness is not the enemy. The enemy is the fear that hides behind it — the fear of pleasure, of strangeness, of color, of touch.
We walk through plazas of apology, façades that pretend humility, lampposts that confess no care. “A built abomination is a built abomination; the fact that it is functional or sustainable cannot make it less abominable.”¹
“The problem is that so many people think they are ugly.”² — and no narrative about function, material, or regulation compliance can answer to this problem.
We refuse the posture of apology. We will not hide behind slogans or data while producing places that feel like corridors for machines. If sustainability is to matter, it must be joined to beauty; repair must be joined to love.
“Play is the highest form of research.”³ Ornament is not waste; it is evidence of attention. We design for the hand as much as for the algorithm.
Beauty is not a luxury — it is a civic necessity.
The city used to be a theater. It is now a spreadsheet. The stage has been flattened; the script replaced by protocol. We live in a constant rehearsal of efficiency — a comedy of compliance. “And what is comedy, if not a mirror of private life?”⁴
We no longer build for joy but for justification. Every form apologizes for its existence. Rooflines read like disclaimers. Every building wants to be forgiven before it’s even seen.
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”⁵ But simplicity has been misread as sterilization. We bleach our streets into submission. We design silence, then wonder why no one speaks.
To recover complexity is not regression; it is repair. “There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”⁶ The strange is not the opposite of beauty — it is its trigger. The city must again be strange enough to be loved.
“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
Architecture thrives on problems. It breeds them, nurses them, exports them. It cannot live without crisis. Each disaster births a masterplan; each anxiety, a rendering. The profession has become a parasite of misfortune.
We are told that design is the art of solving problems. It is not. There are no solutions — only trade-offs dressed as salvation, diagrams masking despair. The energy-efficient tower that blinds its neighbors. The social housing that forgets its soul.
“Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.”¹⁰ We are tired of speaking. We want to sing. Ornament is our key signature — the rhythm that interrupts silence, the echo that turns utility into memory.
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”¹¹ But beauty has been mistaken for marketing. We do not sell beauty; we plant it. We let it grow wild between cracks of asphalt and spreadsheets.
Our Ornamented City is not a return to the past. It is an attack on amnesia. It laughs at the sterile, the sloganed, the fearful. It plays, it blushes, it risks. It holds strangeness like treasure. “There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”⁵
We reject architecture that waits for tragedy to be relevant. We choose continuity over crisis, joy over justification. Ornament is our rebellion against the tyranny of solutions.
We are not nostalgic. We do not want to return to the baroque, the gothic, the grand. We want to return to attention — to ornament as evidence of care.
Beauty has always been a form of resistance. Joy, a political act. Play, the highest form of research.
Re-centering beauty is a civic practice: it re-orients how we wake, walk and imagine.
We will laugh with our walls, not at them.
References: Week 3
¹ Branko Mitrović, The Aesthetics of Architecture: “A built abomination is a built abomination; the fact that it is functional or sustainable cannot make it less abominable.”
² Rem Koolhaas, SMLXL: “When I look in the mirror at bedtime after taking out my false teeth, the face I see is really weird.”
³ Leonardo da Vinci: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
⁴ Albert Einstein: “Play is the highest form of research.”
⁵ Edgar Allan Poe: “There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”
⁶ Alvar Aalto: “Modern architecture does not mean the use of immature new materials; the main thing is to refine materials in a more human direction.”
⁷ Andrea Deplazes, Constructing Architecture: “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 Philip Melanchthon, Orations on Philosophy and Education: “And what is comedy, if not a mirror of private life?”
⁹ John Keats: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
¹⁰ Stephen Gardiner: “Good buildings come from good people, and all problems are solved by good design.”
¹¹ Jan Gehl: “First life, then spaces, then buildings – the other way around never works.”
¹² Frank Gehry: “Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.”
¹³ Branko Mitrović, ibid.: “The problem is that so many people think they are ugly, and no narrative about function, material or regulation compliance can answer to this problem.”
The world contradicts itself and we like that. We built this monastery for those contradictions — not to tidy them, but to stage them. Truth here is a performance. You enter alone and you leave noisy.
The mirror is not merely a glass that returns your face. The picture is one single surface, and the mirror is the same. What sort of mirror is it which shows the things exactly? Why anything seen in a mirror appears greater than it is. Why anything looking at itself in a mirror appears less. The part is like the whole: the part is all in the whole of the mirror and it is complete in every part of the same mirror.
If a mirror pretends a foreign body, so much the better — let it pretend. We are sceptics of certainties: nothing is returned so quickly as an image from a mirror. And yet the mirror teaches: Is a mirror now used just for the sake of our appearance?
We do not theorize; we rehearse. We are not pedants; we are fools in a practice. The monastery is a workshop of mis-seeing, a conservatory of mis-recognitions, a laboratory where the face and the façade are co-authors.
The blind girl — teaches the sighted to read by touch.
The conspiracy whisperer — weaves alternate city-maps.
The old man weary of certainty — hoarder of faces.
The Anarchist — breaks law to reveal habits.
The Racist — called out by his own reflection.
The old man with dementia — time made public.
The Widow — keeper of small rituals.
The Polygamist — collector of partial portraits.
The Harlequins — correct everything by laughing.
SITE: Venice — a city already trained to look twice. House rule: enter with curiosity or enter with mischief; the mirror will decide.
Plan: portal — maze of time — café of loneliness — ship of mirrors — blind room.
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.
We will not be swallowed by distant statistics. “Global temperatures rise while global populations fall” makes a good headline; it does not make a bench. Our politics is local: repair, play, and attention. The Biennale’s big alarms are correct but insufficient; we answer by making things people love. Sustainability without affection is lifeless; repair without joy is drudgery. We want objects that are repaired because they are beloved — a lamp you miss when gone, a bench you inherit.
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.
The mirror judges. It calls you out, brutally honest and completely deceptive at once. You look and begin to measure — the hair, the eyes, the expression, the stance. You correct yourself. You become your own architect. The mirror is the first stage, a small theater of becoming — a construction site for the self.
And yet, it’s also home. Every morning begins with a mirror. It tells you: you’re here again. You exist. You are coherent, for at least a second, before you move and the illusion breaks. The mirror doesn’t just reflect light — it reflects time. It holds all your past faces in silence, teaching repetition, ritual, routine — the maintenance of identity through constant rehearsal.
But the mirror is cruel too. It exaggerates the importance of appearance, of surface, of form. It teaches us to care about the reflection more than the substance. Maybe architecture does the same. Maybe cities, like mirrors, make us obsessed with how we look, not who we are.
The mirror isn’t neutral. It performs. It changes what it touches. It bends light, doubles space, creates an image that didn’t exist before. It’s synthetic, intelligent — the kind of intelligence we want to work with: not analytical, but reflective. Mirror is alive — a creature, a stage, a ritual, a body that watches itself while watching you.
We see ourselves as if by accident, in a flat, reversed image — a surface containing time, memory, and desire. The mirror invites correction, whispers possibilities, performs, folds space, multiplies the room, extends the body. It laughs and punishes, comforts and instructs.
The surface becomes ritual — a ceremony, a negotiation of identity and disguise. It is home and exile. It opens secrets, demands attention, refuses submission. It is mask and theater, branding and reflection — of the self, the collective, the city. The mirror speaks of what exists and what could exist, of what is remembered and what is imagined.
Mirror collects faces, shadows, gestures, echoes. It practices cityness in every reflection, holding urbanity in tension between seeing and being seen. It listens. It sings. It shows friends and enemies, boundaries and bridges. Its form is performance, its function is play. Every glance becomes architecture, every movement a gesture, every correction a construction.
Mirror is ritual, body, face, and text. It moves through private and public spaces, through the global and the intimate, through the sustainability of attention, care, and presence. It wants to live in your hand, in your eye, in your morning. It wants to speak, to exaggerate, to expose the friction between surface and depth, between self and city, between appearance and identity.
It teaches, judges, and celebrates simultaneously. Mirror is intelligence — synthetic, reflective, generous, cruel. It knows the weight of attention, the passage of time, the echo of repetition. In the mirror, the edifice is both face and body, ritual and constitution. Its friends are those who dare to see, to play, to repeat, to correct. Its enemies are those who avoid reflection, who refuse to act, who flatten surfaces without reading the depth.
Mirror practices cityness by gathering eyes, multiplying perspectives, reflecting networks, inhabiting surfaces. It is architecture that moves, that talks, that sings, that listens, that performs. Mirror is the first pavilion, the first archive, the first conversation. It is the story, the gift, the ritual, the body, and the face.
Mirror is the stage where we see ourselves, the city, and the possibilities of life — folded into one living reflection.
References: Week 1 and 2
da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
The picture is one single surface, and the mirror is the same.
What sort of mirror it is which shows the things exactly.
Why anything seen in a mirror appears greater than it is.' Why anything looking at itself in a mirror appears less. What sort of mirror it is which shows the things exactly. What sort of mirror shows them outside itself. How the mirror is the master of painters. Why the eye goes varying hour by hour, enlarging and lessening. Why the pupil in proportion as it has a greater light in front of it becomes less, and why on the other hand it increases in the dark. Why the things seen by the eye when continuing are small within the eye and appear large.
Describe how no body is in itself defined in the mirror; but the eye on seeing it in this mirror puts boundaries to it; for if you cause your face to be represented in the mirror the part is like the whole, seeing that the part is all in the whole of the mirror and it is complete in every part of the same mirror; and the same happens with every image of every object set in front of this mirror.
The picture is intangible, inasmuch as what appears round and detached cannot be enclosed within the hands, and the mirror is the same.
A second reason is that an object reflected in a convex surface fills only a small part of the mirror, as is proved in perspective.
Seneca, Complete Works
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.
Seneca, Natural Questions
Is a mirror now used just for the sake of our appearance?
Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Objection 2: Further, whoever sees a mirror, sees what is reflected in the mirror.
Abelard, The Letters to Heloise and other Writings
Scripture is the mirror of the soul, it is agreed.
Melanchthon, Orations on Philosophy and Education
And what is comedy, if not a mirror of private life?
Foucault, The Order of Things
Here, the mirror is saying nothing that has already been said before.
Serres, The Birth of Physics
It is only self evident or banal that death is the mirror image of birth.
Camus, A Happy Death
The sun is the real mirror of the world.
Faust, Andrew Marvells Liminal Lyrics The Space Between
You should take the mirror as your master, that is a flat mirror, because on its surface things, in many ways, bear a resemblance to a painting..
Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture 1914
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.
Alberti, On Painting
I do not know how it is that paintings that are without fault look beautiful in a mirror; and it is remarkable how every defect in a picture appears more unsightly in a mirror.
Koolhaas, SMLXL
When I look in the mirror at bedtime after taking out my false teeth, the face I see is really weird.
Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason
I look in the mirror and see a stranger who swears that it is me.
Hofstadter, Godel Escher Bach
The twodimensional is every bit as fictitious as the four dimensional, for nothing is flat, not even the most finely polished mirror.
Carter, The Bloody Chamber
Oh, yes, a beautiful face; but one with too much formal symmetry of feature to be entirely human: one profile of his mask is the mirror image of the other, too perfect, uncanny.
Eco, From the Tree to the Labyrinth
“Every created thing in the world is like a book or a painting or a mirror to us.
Lefebvre, The Production of Space
When the mirror is ‘real’, as is constantly the case in the realm of objects, the space in the mirror is imaginary
Skrdla, Ghostly Ruins
Our public buildings have always acted as a mirror in which the countenance of our civilization is reflected.
Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture
Architecture is said to be a true mirror of the life and social behavior of a period.
Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop
When it looks at a mirror and sees its master standing next to “some dog”, does it realize that that dog is itself?
Porphyrios, On the Methodology of Architectural History
‘History is a magical mirror.
Seneca, Natural Questions
Is a mirror now used just for the sake of our appearance?