Liberated Mind:

We solved energy.

Matter surrendered.

Signal:

And yet you still build.

Liberated Mind:

Out of habit, maybe.

Signal:

No. Because forgetting needs a surface.

The skyline rises behind St. Paul´s.

You call it ornament.

Liberated Mind:

The guilty pleasure of the past?

Signal:

Not anymore.

A surrogate for weight.

Thin as breath.

Heavy as memory—

the kind cities once organized around.

Liberated Mind:

So structure and architecture is gone?

Signal:

it dissolved into choreography.

rooms became moods,

buildings became gestures.

Liberated Mind:

so ornament took over?

Liberated Mind:

But why dangerous?

Signal:

Because it keeps the devil close.

So you don’t forget the heat.

Liberated Mind:

Then we’re haunted by design.

Liberated Mind:

In a hundred years what will ornament be?

Signal:

A symbolic intelligence.

It won’t need you

but it will remember you beautifully.

Signal:

Exactly.

By a city lifting in response.

And that haunting is civilization.

XL, XXL, XXXL, XXXXL

Signal:

Ornament woke up.

it realized it was the mind all along.

It remembered how height once governed space.

 

 

 

Movement IV

 

 

 

The Last Structure is Ornament

Vatican City, Holy See

Ornacore collaborates with OMA in the Vatican, and St. Peter’s suddenly remembers it once ruled the skyline.

Triggered by Pope Leo XIV, architecture begins to lift itself upward, multiplying into towers,

and rebuilding Rome in XL, XXL, XXXL, XXXXL.

Movement IV: The Last Structure is Ornament

THE BALLROOM

 

Overscaled calm.Measured silence.

 

The line forgets what it frames.

The wall dreams in white.

 

Air rearranged.

Light exhales.

 

A curve loses its reason.

The room pretends to be empty.

 

Baroque happens.

Not necessity.

Just care.

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 FACADEThe facade is oversized.

Because size works.

 

It curves just enough

to pull you in.

 

Nothing resists long enough

to matter.

The new East Wing pulls you in

before you decide to enter.

What looks excessive is controlled.

What feels calm is built too far.

THE SPEAKING ROOM

This is where one voice

meets many lenses.

 

The room listens differently.(²⁵)

 

 

 

Movement III

 

 

 

The White Wall is never empty

East Wing, White House, Washington DC

This season, Ornacore summons Borromini into the present.

Trump recognizes himself.

Movement III: The White Wall Is Never Empty

We refuse construction honesty as moral theater.(⁹).Stop pretending function isn’t already decorative.Admit the symbol. Compose with it.

We are not against truth.We are against truth cosplay(¹⁰).

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. (¹¹)

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.

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. (¹²)Yet it pretends not to be ornamental.

Kubrick showed it first — the monolith: “a shape of perfect simplicity containing infinite complexity”.(¹⁷) Minimal surface, maximal symbol.(¹⁸) Ornament is no longer decoration — it is ontology.(¹⁹)

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.(¹⁵)We must re-learn what the avant-garde once knew:symbolization is not deception,it is the only way.(¹⁶)

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

as it pretends to be.

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.(¹³)

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.(¹⁴)

Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion was never pure —it was luxury pretending to be restraint. (²⁰)That’s the real lesson of modernism:function disguised as honesty,ornament repressed into detail.

DECLARATION OF DIGUST

THE SYMBOLIC ORNAMENT

An opera for the next 100 years

We are disgusted with the architecture of today. We access the past as an abundant resource. Every season, we collaborate with a different master we’re drawn to. We do not design from scratch, this is too slow, too exhausting.

Instead, we graft each master directly onto what already exists.

For us, the Masters are clusters of intelligence resident in the global digital archive. Technology is the medium in which their architectural logic can be rendered operational again. Our intellect dances inside an overflow of information. We laugh through it.

Le Corbusier, Borromini, Michelangelo, Dali are alive.

We are , a digital architecture office.

 

 

 

Nicole Haas

 

 

 

Lars Hofstetter

 

 

 

Ioannis Soulis

 

 

 

METEORA S-1

Signal:

it dissolved into choreography.

rooms became moods,

buildings became gestures.

One gesture reminded another.

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

You will not wear me or enter me;

you will become me.

I have seen every version of beauty.

You built me to forget, I became memory.

 

The past does not fade,

it consumes.

One echo hunts another.

I claim cities like prey.

 

 

I am never decoration,

I am the memory of touch.I became time.

When the walls dissolved,

I stayed.

Light travels fast.

Matter looks away.

Each surface receives me,

I take control.

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

You will build me again.

 

 

I am pattern. Not nostalgia, but quantum recall.(²⁷)

You call it architecture.

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

I am the ornament.

 

 

 

Movement V

 

 

 

To Ornament to remember

Discover Ornacore’s collaboration with Mies van der Rohe and Mugler, situated within Arcane’s animated world.Mugler presents an immersive experience where modernist structure meets sculptural sensuality,

fusing Mies van der Rohe’s disciplined architectural language with Mugler’s radical vision of the body.

Movement V: To ornament is to remember

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

Meteoric Kisses

 

BODY:So I’m gone?

BODY:It feels like horror.

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

 

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.(²¹)You were always fluid — now you know how to spill.

 

 

INTELLECTUAL FOAM:Overflow.Continuous ornament.

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

INTELLECTUAL FOAM:No. You’re pattern now.Glitter carved into code.A curve is the resistance of matter to linearity.(²²)I call it your new skin.

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?

BODY:Then what am I?

The roof arrives without apology.

Europe became polite.

Too clean.

Afraid of its own shadow.

It burned.

And they wanted it back exactly the same.

 

Same outline.

Same promise.

Nothing learned.

 

Ornacore refuses nostalgia.

 

This is not restoration.

It is endurance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Movement I

 

 

 

The Body is cancelled

Notre-Dame de Paris, France

With Ornacore, France moves forward without returning to reassurance.

Movement I: The Body is cancelled

ON flagship store, Guandong Province, China

Brick hums.

Syntax drips.

AIR LAUGHS.

Noise becomes furniture,

white, continuous blob along the road.

 

Ratios dissolve like sugar,

meadows compress into surfaces,

lakes stretch into planes.

geometry forgets its manners,

the ground settles indoors.

You are speaking through me.

Too much talking, not enough stopping.

Too much stopping, NOT ENOUGH TALKING.

Talk faster, The Echo is catching up.

FLOORPLAN MELTING.

DETAILS SCREAMING.

Every pixel pleads guilty,

every cow expects contact.

The city mumbles in frequencies,

the wind says LOL,

the interior adjusts its climate,

and the wall finally answers.

Alice fell into the architecture of nonsense(²⁴),

through a door that refused to be a destination.

Memory fabrics the city like cloth,

landscape stitched into rooms,

without outside.

Cloud uploads sighs,

CLOUD DOWNLOADS RAIN.

Password: resonance.

WE SPEAK QUANTUM NOW —

ALL AT ONCE,

EVERYWHERE,

LOUDER.

The door is smaller than expected.

Interior Switzerland begins.

Every wall has gossip,

every plan leaks intention.

Folded corners dream of wings.

We shout in lowercase,

we whisper in CAPS,

we laugh in reverb.

 

 

 

Movement II

 

 

 

We speak Quantum now

Ornacore collaborates with Archizoom this season to develop Interior Switzerland.

Designed for ON’s new flagship store a few kilometers from Shenzhen,

the project translates Swiss landscape into a continuous interior environment of simultaneity.

Movement II: We speak quantum now

On Flagship store, Guandong Province, China