Vagaries: Four Short Stories on the Unbuilt

The being of a house is discovered in the building of another house, when the house becomes a house for a house. They contain one another, and are contained by one another. They speak of beauty, of dangerous admiration. We take on poverty, nature, politics, money ... and still, my paper is only a ground of speculation. My houses are only metafictional puppets.

The being of beauty is discovered in its cliché. Missing: rough concrete, and the architects who, involuntarily or not, have become the staples by which we judge our merest efforts. How long does it take for a novel move to reach zero points for originality; how soon will the latest fad sip down to the city at the edge of the atlas? Just right when we've learned to put triangles in brick on top of your windows, the avant-garde is exploring virtual transnatures (another one!) and the unit broadcasts the reaction before it has met its initial impulse. Is this a bad thing?

The being of the cliché is discovered in the theft. We are the fundamentalists! Our story is about architects *and* architecture. Either cannot exclude the other; one cannot design a work of art without designing oneself, like Warhol said: "look for me in the surface of my paintings, I’m there, nowhere else, nothing hidden." But we're taken away, we're stolen, we're destroyed ...

The being of theft is discovered in the mess, which is just another antithesis to emptiness. The mess is life. Life is a mess. It actively resists clarification, and yet allows it to find itself inside the material, which is to say, a mess is not chaos; there is not one key, but many, and as such is the glory of it, because it is *rich*; my project caters to all who wants a slice of it – it is a dinner party, not a diet.