Last winter I counted the blank facades along Lindenstrasse and stopped at forty-two. Each one promised hygiene, speed, and sober commerce; each one refused the small human pleasure of being looked at twice. By February, the windows felt less like progress than a discipline imposed on everyone passing below.
Decoration is not softness
The new workshops understand what the municipal committees have missed: ornament can be a civic argument. A border, a spiral, a square of hammered gold asks the reader to slow down, to notice the hand, and to admit that utility without ceremony is merely fatigue.