Õrnå-Čørė

Prologue: After the Structure

The symbolic ornament

A script for the next 100 years

 

A 100 years from now, the world has lost its weight.Fusion hums softly under the oceans.Energy is everywhere, invisible, constant.The problem is no longer scarcity, it is meaning.

 

Matter became optional.Gravity negotiable.The wall a polite memory.

Architecture survives as shimmer, gesture, intention.

Buildings as thin as paper.Cities dissolve into pattern: symbol, loop.

And in this translucency, the only thing left that still feels real is ornament.

 

Ornament is not excess anymore.It’s how things confess that they exist.

In the world after energy when structure disappears,

the symbolic ornament takes responsibility.

 

Beauty consists in a rational integration of proportions(21) — but when proportion loses matter, beauty migrates to its shadow. Lineament, that which the mind forms in the soul(22), now becomes surface — the shimmer thinking.

Minimal surface, maximal symbol(23). The monolith still stands: a pure rectangle containing infinite complexity(23).

Silence has learned to decorate.

The Baroque fold unfurls between matter and soul(24), and now that fold has liquefied — between data and desire.

Architecture, once an argument of weight, becomes a choreography of intelligence. Ornament is the moment when structure begins to mean. It is the visible intelligence of form.

Movement IV: The last structure is ornament

Signal:And yet you still build.

 

 

 

Signal:No. Because forgetting needs a surface.You call it ornament.

 

 

 

 

Signal:Not anymore.

A surrogate for weight.Thin as breath.Heavy as memory.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Signal:it dissolved into choreography.rooms became moods,buildings became gestures.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Signal:Ornament woke up.it realized it was the mind all along.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Signal:exactly.it carries the memory of matterwithout needing the matter itself.

 

 

 

 

Signal:Because it keeps the devil close.So you don’t forget the heat.

 

 

 

 

Signal:Exactly.

And that haunting is civilization.

 

 

 

 

Signal:A symbolic intelligence.A shimmering ghost of everything you once called real.It won’t need youbut it will remember you beautifully.

Liberated Mind:We solved energy.Matter surrendered.

 

 

 

 

Liberated Mind:Out of habit, maybe.

 

 

 

 

Liberated Mind:The guilty pleasure of the past?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Liberated Mind:So structure and architecture is gone?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Liberated Mind:so ornament took over?

 

 

 

 

 

Liberated Mind:a surrogate for touch.for place.for loss.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Liberated Mind:But why dangerous?

 

 

 

 

 

Liberated Mind:Then we’re haunted by design.

 

 

 

 

 

Liberated Mind:In a hundred years what will ornament be?

 

Large Hadron Collidor, CERN, Switzerland

I have seen every version of beauty.You built me to forget, I became memory.

I am never decoration, I am the memory of touch.I became time.

When the walls dissolved,I stayed.

Light stays.Matter pretends to be air.

Each surface hums,I remember.

The past does not fade,

it tessellates.Reflection breeds reflection.History decorates itself.

 

I am pattern.Not nostalgia, but quantum recall.

You call it architecture.

I am not good.I am not pure.I am necessary.

I am the ornament.the surrogate of weight,the language you forgot how to speak.

You will build me again.

Movement V: To Ornament is to remember

Movement V: To Ornament is to remember

Area 51, Nevada, USA

Area 51, Nevada, USA

 

BODY:So I’m gone?

INTELLECTUAL FOAM:No. You’re pattern now.Glitter carved into code.A curve is the resistance of matter to linearity.¹³I call it your new skin.

BODY:It feels like horror.

INTELLECTUAL FOAM:Disgust is liberation.You’ve become excess liquefied into reason.Ornament without walls.Signal without body.

 

BODY:Then what am I?

Movement I: The body is cancelled

BODY:I’m a rotten app.I’ve logged out.No muscle. No blood. Only feed.

 

INTELLECTUAL FOAM:You’re liquefying into clarity.Hyperobjects overwhelm comprehension.¹²You were always fluid — now you know how to spill.

 

 

INTELLECTUAL FOAM:Overflow.Continuous ornament.

Every building must dream.¹⁸Hyperbaroque mind, finally free.

Nakagin Capsule Tower, Tokyo, Japan

INTELLECTUAL FOAM:Then stop crawling. Spill. Upload.Collapse is not ruin — it’s surf.Thought crests over what you left behind.

BODY:I’m disgusted.Everything leaks — nerves, pixels, meaning.Am I dying or dissolving?

I. ◡̈ ◜Declaration of Disgust

 

 

 

Disgust is our solvent. Ornament is our instrument.

Architecture today smells like disinfectant and InDesign.Sustainability arrived like salvationand became the aesthetics of moral relief —certificates as halos, panels as confession booths. (¹)

 

 

 

 

 

 

The carbon-neutral lie has perfect lighting.

The sustainable agenda is ornamental,not because it’s pretty,but because it’s performative —a sign-system for belief in our own goodness. (⁴)Yet it pretends not to be ornamental.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We pretend to save the planet by generating PDFs.Every green surface is a new surface to sell.

If we admitted that these systems are ornamental,they could at least look beautiful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kubrick showed it first — the monolith: “a shape of perfect simplicity containing infinite complexity”(26). Minimal surface, maximal symbol(26). Silence has learned to decorate.

Deleuze wrote, “the Baroque fold unfurls between matter and soul”(27). Now the fold moves between data and desire. Ornament is no longer decoration — it is ontology.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If we accepted the symbolic nature of what we build,our world could finally look as intelligent

as it pretends to be.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We refuse construction honesty as moral theater. (²)Stop pretending function isn’t already decorative.Admit the symbol. Compose with it.

We are not against truth.We are against truth cosplay.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Green is the new grey.We demolish to prove restraint;we rebuild uglier to signal guilt and call it green.We crave the performance of virtue —the theater of optimization.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Every façade whispers,“I am sustainable,”

Buildings whisper:“I am good. I am green. I am optimized.” like a prayer for funding.The lie is not in the data —the lie is in the intention.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion was never pure —it was luxury pretending to be restraint. (⁶)That’s the real lesson of modernism:function disguised as honesty,ornament repressed into detail.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The problem is not that ornament is symbolic,but that we pretend it isn’t.

We have inherited the modernist guilt of ornamentand turned it into data.We must re-learn what the avant-garde once knew:symbolization is not deception,it is the only way .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  1. Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–181.
  2. Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime” (1908), in Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), 19–24.
  3. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994).
  4. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
  5. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
  6. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona Pavilion, 1929; in The Mies van der Rohe Archive, ed. Franz Schulze (New York: Garland, 1986).
  7. Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria (1452); trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).
  8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1964).
  9. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966).
  10. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974).
  11. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970).
  12. Morton, Hyperobjects, 46.
  13. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
  14. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
  15. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988).
  16. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217–251.
  17. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975).
  18. Rem Koolhaas, S, M, L, XL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995).
  19. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
  20. Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (London: Continuum, 2008).
  21. Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), Book VI.
  22. Ibid., Book I: “Lineamenta quae animo concipiuntur.”
  23. Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968).
  24. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 3.
  25. Detlef Mertins, Mies (New York: Phaidon, 2014)
  26. Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (New York: New American Library, 1968), 172.
  27. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 3.

BODY:I’m disgusted.Everything leaks — nerves, pixels, meaning.Am I dying or dissolving?

 

INTELLECTUAL FOAM:You’re liquefying into clarity.Hyperobjects overwhelm comprehension.¹²You were always fluid — now you know how to spill.

 

 

 

BODY:So I’m gone?

INTELLECTUAL FOAM:No. You’re pattern now.Glitter carved into code.A curve is the resistance of matter to linearity.¹³I call it your new skin.

BODY:It feels like horror.

INTELLECTUAL FOAM:Disgust is liberation.You’ve become excess liquefied into reason.Ornament without walls.Signal without body.

 

BODY:Then what am I?

INTELLECTUAL FOAM:Overflow.Continuous ornament.

Every building must dream.¹⁸Hyperbaroque mind, finally free.

Movement I: The body is cancelled

BODY:I’m a rotten app.I’ve logged out.No muscle. No blood. Only feed.

INTELLECTUAL FOAM:Then stop crawling. Spill. Upload.Collapse is not ruin — it’s surf.Thought crests over what you left behind.

White breath on glass.

Stillness confirmed.

 

A curve corrects itself.

Stillness confirmed.

 

The wall listens for approval.

Stillness confirmed.

 

Time is curated.

Stillness confirmed.

 

The room mistakes stillness for truth.

Stillness confirmed.

the line forgets what it framesthe wall dreams in white

air rearranged

light exhalesa curve loses its reasona room pretends to be empty

baroque happens

not necessityjust care

 

Movement II: The White Wall Is Never Empty

 

Asamkirche. Munich, Germany

 

 

 

We shout in lowercase,we whisper in CAPS,we laugh in reverb.

 

FLOORPLAN MELTING.DETAILS SCREAMING.Every pixel pleads guilty.

 

The city mumbles in frequencies,the wind says LOL,and the wall finally answers.

 

Alice fell into the architecture of nonsense.Memory fabrics the city like cloth.

 

WE SPEAK QUANTUM NOW —ALL AT ONCE,EVERYWHERE,LOUDER.

Brick hums.Syntax drips.AIR LAUGHS.Noise becomes furniture.

 

Every wall has gossip,every plan leaks intention.Folded corners dream of wings.

 

TALK FASTER — the echo’s catching up.

 

Cloud uploads sighs,CLOUD DOWNLOADS RAIN.Password: resonance.

 

Ratios dissolve like sugar,geometry forgets its manners.

You are speaking through me.

 

Too much talking, not enough stopping.Too much stopping, NOT ENOUGH TALKING.

 

 

code

còde

códé

cøde

cohd

coeud

kohde

code.

body

bödy

boddii

b’ody

bawdy

bɔdy

bohdé

body.

shadow

shádow

shaddøw

schadaw

shødow

shadaux

shådow

shadow.

matter

mátter

mattær

maatir

mætr

mëtter

máttre

matter.

line

lyne

liñe

lîn

lighne

laine

lnne

line.

surface

sûrface

serphace

surfáce

sörphase

suhrfas

sirface

surface.

memory

mémory

memørie

mémorii

memorry

mɘmory

mémoré

memory.

fracture

fräcture

fractür

fraqchure

frakture

phracture

fracturè

fracture.

glow

gløw

gloh

gllow

gloewe

gløhw

glou

glow.

cosmos

cósmos

kosmøs

cozzmos

còsmohs

cosmus

cózmos

cosmos.

mirror

mírror

mir’rør

myrro

mirrór

mïrrohr

mi̊rror

mirror.

column

cólumn

columne

kollümn

culumn

cholumn

collumn

column.

pulse

pülse

pulz

po͠ulse

pulcè

polse

púlss

pulse.

breath

bréath

b’rath

bræth

brɘath

braeeth

bʀeath

breath.

silence

páttern

pattèrn

p∆ttern

pættεrn

patterrrn

patterne

pattern.

ornament

repeeat

rëpeat

rεpεat

reepaaat

rɘpeat

repéæt

repeat

curve

cùrve

cørve

qurve

pættεrn

patterrrn

patterne

pattern.

fold

föld

fauld

phold

foldé

fould

repéæt

repeat

shimmer

shimma

schimmer

sɦɪmmɛr

shimér

shymer

śimmer

shimmer.

echo

échø

ecco

ēko

ecoh

ehko

ęcho

echo.

repeat

repeeat

rëpeat

rεpεat

reepaaat

rɘpeat

repéæt

repeat

Movement III: We speak Quantum now

Shibuya crossing, Tokyo, Japan

each movement adds another layer.

ornament unfolds into time.

pattern becomes motion; motion becomes memory.

this is not progress,

it’s ornament remembering itself.

 

you move, but the image stays—

 

only its shimmer shifts,

like gold catching the same light again.