This was never about the building.

You shouldn't be here, shouldn't read this, shouldn't feel what I feel.

You should touch this

return to where you belong.

But you haven't.

This is not a manifesto.

Nor is this a creed.

This is an architecture I do not understand, a process I cannot fathom,

a technology that may not exist within my life.

This is an interaction on levels beyond my control,

a discourse on my place as designer,

a statement of the direct needs of the inhabitant.

Kiesler postulates the womb space of new media, both wrapping

and revitalizing, a space where the body is enveloped in an endless house,

where "all ends meet, and meet continuously."

Arakawa and Gins believe in an architecture that can sustain life indefinitely, and I must say that I can only believe that to a degree.

That degree reaches its limits at the point where fatality finds its necessity.

This structureenvelope entity does not plan to sustain life indefinitely, nor does it plan to completely allow the healing of its inhabitants. (SUSPEND THOUGHT.)

Abused elders have nowhere to go today to receive treatment-toward-death,

have nothing to hold onto except a hospital bed, grim protection against the elements that include the abuser, sunlight, and rain.

Just like the auxillary French verbs there are exceptions to our policies, breaks in the lines of what we know and subsets of rules that can destroy those in the path.

The human body is a very maleable entity, the "Man-the-Machine" of Descartes and Foulcault,

the "docile body" that "may be subjected, used, transformed and improved," (Foulcault, Discipline, 136).

Abuse destroys.

It destroys the will, the mind, the joy, the peace, the trust, the heart.

It demolishes beauty, turns the body inward in demolition.

It solidifies entropy, the senescence of hope.

Foulcault also speaks of a space that is framed around discipline. He states:

"Disciplinary space tends to be divided into as many sections as there are bodies or elements to be distributed. One must eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions, the uncontrolled disappearance of individuals, their diffuse circulation, their unusable and dangerous coagulation; it was a tactic of anti-desertion, anti-vagabondage, anti-concentration. It's aim was to establish presences and absences, to know where and how to locate individuals, to set up useful communications, to interrupt others, to be able at each moment to supervise the conduct of each individual, to assess it, to judge it, to calculate its qualities or merits. It was procedure, therefore, aimed at knowing, mastering and using," (Foulcault, Discipline, 143).

To all of this we cannot claim the power to heal or absolve; this would be madness.

Yet, architecturally, we can continue a conversation we thought we left behind,

full with new purpose for a future of design.

We can wrap, enclose, soothe, give the Temple Grandin treatment.

This is not perversion, or perhaps it is.

It is certainly not a manifesto.