With the loss of tactility, measures and details crafted for the human body – and particularly for the hand – architectural structures become repulsively flat, sharp-edged, immaterial and unreal. The detachment of construction from the realities of matter and craft further turns architecture into stage sets for the eye, into a scenography devoid of the authenticity of matter and construction. The sense of 'aura', the authority of presence, that Walter Benjamin regards as a necessary quality for an authentic piece of art, has been lost.
To build a folly is essentially to do something a second time, something at an inopportune moment. That something is always the memory of something forgotten, about which we can paradoxically say "There it is again."
Follies were misunderstood, purposeless constructions. They were often only small, extravagant gestures in a garden, easily whisking off the imagination to distant lands, a sort of time capsule built to awaken the memory and induce surprise in passers-by. They marked locations, organized secondary paths in a park, or simply predicted the arrival of better times—a demarcation, a sacred spot, a mysterious trail, a hill whose tragic rocky nature begged for a tower, a party, or the arrival of summer.
"A builder who hides any part of the building frame, abandons the only permissible and, at the same time, the most beautiful embellishment of architecture. The one that hides a loadbearing column makes an error. The one who builds a false column commits a crime."
I’m beginning to suspect that software, and more conspicuously the Web, is fundamentally the wrong shape for the archetype of the construction project.
My point here is that in a design system every paper cut is felt. Every collapse leads to another, every new modal or unnecessary checkbox component hinders the collective refactoring that’s required to make a codebase consistent and easy to understand. When it comes to hyperobjects and design systems everything matters (although, frustratingly, it is impossible to measure success) and the smallest problem is just a signal in the dark—a premonition of a monster; organizational dysfunction writ large.