The Matterful City
Cities were once built to reflect higher ideals like belief systems and shared stories, their spaces designed to convey meaning beyond mere function. Today, cities prioritize efficiency and transformation, leading to an aestheticization of function where everything is designed for consumption and interaction without real consequence. This has created a sense of alienation, which is often superficially addressed with "decoration" like green walls, masking deeper design flaws. This shift raises the question of whether we have lost a connection to a higher order or beauty in our pursuit of optimization. Can new guiding principles, like mathematics or parametric design, fill the void left by the old order and imbue contemporary cities with a renewed sense of meaning?
Was the city once an expression of something greater? Something that mattered, not in abstraction, but in the very matter of its making? Did it rise from belief—belief in gods, in order, in symmetry, in permanence? The city as a vessel of stories, a storage of knowledge rendered in stone and space? Its spaces reflected the rhythms of life, informing us through their very form, selecting and refining only the most valuable pieces of information, worth to be remembered. The temple, the square, the street—each had a role, each carried meaning beyond function. The city was not just infrastructure; was it a conversation with eternity?
Now, the city is a mechanism. It optimizes, adapts, erases. It is not built to last but to transform. The temple is an event space. The square is a logistics hub. The colonnade is an architectural gesture, replicated in glass, too thin to touch, too fragile to bear weight. The old facades remain, but only in their first centimeter—beyond them, the connected voids of commerce expand, flexible, infinite, indifferent, filled up like polyurethane foam in a hollow construction detail.
Surfaces are everything. Smooth, seamless, hyper-efficient. Streets no longer belong to the body but to movement itself—rubber on asphalt, steel on steel, leather on granite. A city that once made space for pause now eliminates friction. Visibility is maximized: transparent facades, polished floors, 2000-lux lighting from every angle, eliminating all shadows, dissolving depth.
Duchamp once tried to sever the object from its use, to lift it into the realm of pure thought. The contemporary city has melted the two into one again, but the material is different from the original. Thought is now produced through objects, not by their absence, but by their sheer amount, their unnatural proliferation. The city is filled with things meant to be seen, consumed, clicked, shared—each designed for interaction, but interaction without consequence. A cup of coffee is no longer just a drink; it is an experience, a lifestyle product, enclosed by an endless array of wooden lamellen, the last anchor to a rooted, romanticized experience. A bench is no longer just a place to rest; it is an Instagrammable moment, a little bubble in which you reorganize your banking services. Everything is use, but the use itself is empty. We have not abandoned function—we have aestheticized it, stretched it, made it infinite, detached it from necessity. We made it tasty.
And when the weight of this optimization becomes unbearable—when the noise, the smell, the heat, the alienation of a frictionless environment starts pressing in—the solution is not redesign, but decoration. An overdose of plants, as if nature itself were a finishing material. Green walls, green roofs, green interiors. As if trees placed in voids could undo the voids themselves. As if we could overpaint bad design with a the properties of nature, masking an unlivable city with a layer of leaves.
For the longest time in history, philosophers agreed: there was something beyond the measurable. An invisible structure, a higher order. The golden section was not a ratio but a link to something profound. The city followed this logic—less an accumulation of structures, more a careful composition. Now, only what is measurable matters. Beauty is no longer a pursuit; it is an accident, a leftover, a glitch in the system of production.
But if the old order is gone, must nothing replace it? If divine proportions no longer guide us, can something else? Should we believe in the thing that takes over every domain, should we believe in mathematics? Is it not at least as real as God? In the way both exist outside the material world yet shape it, move it, give it form? If we can no longer trust in sacred geometry, can we trust in the rigorous engines we now build—parametric, generative, evolving? Can this logic, in its purest form, reveal something beyond function? Isn’t it actually the same as before? With the Architect as a blend between Aristotle and Plato? Matter and what matters? Are we saved?
