Formulary for a New Urbanism

Chtcheglov was nineteen when he wrote this. The diagnosis is identical to ours, applied to a different city: “We are bored in the city, there is no more Temple of the Sun.” Substitute “answer machine” for “city” and you have the SoftMachine thesis verbatim, sketched seventy-three years early.

The hacienda is not a building. It is the project of constructing an environment where desire and possibility return to the foreground. The salon is a hacienda. The brand is, in Chtcheglov’s sense, a counter-architecture to the answer machine.