In America, we recoil from political elitism in Washington and state capitols. We resent that our elected and appointed leaders are not “just like us” that they seem to think they know more than us, that they hang out more with each other than with us. In the popular imagination, anyone can be president (or a senator or congressman) and therefore they should act accordingly, they should act like us. We are starting to feel the same about professionals, even doctors and attorneys, financiers, and university professors with tenure. Oddly, we don’t feel the same about actors and musicians and athletes. We readily accept their elitism. It seems the more formal the education the less regard afforded.

Clearly, we have a problem in America with science. Most prominently are the examples of the anti-vaxxers and the climate deniers, but the examples are many. There are still parents who believe, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that vaccines administered at infancy cause autism in children and not long ago, it was controversial to suggest that ingested smoke of any kind caused cancer despite the evidence borne of the science.

But it hasn’t always been that way. Without our confidence in Newton (laws of gravity), Kepler (laws of planetary motion), Liebniz (calculus), Oersted, Volta, Tesla and Edison (electricity), Goddard (rocket propulsion), Marconi (wireless communication), and Turing (computer science) as well as countless others like them, we never would have put a man on the moon in 1969 (although there are those, however marginalized, who still believe we never did). That success among others engendered dutiful confidence in science and it has come to permeate every area of our life. We now have food science, exercise science, and sleep science. One wonders how we ever got along without science.

Our ridgetop homes, our beach houses and cabins in the woods, our country houses and Hawaiian estates, our panoramic views and private parks-- our front yards and back yards-- our swimming pools and hot tubs, our outdoor kitchens and barbecue grills, our tropical gardens and evergreen lawns, our drip irrigation systems and automatic sprinklers, our very own tennis courts and basketball hoops and driving ranges and bowling alleys. Alright.

Our entry halls and powder rooms, grand stairs, and great rooms. Our family rooms and rec rooms and media rooms and TVs in every room. Our billiards rooms, personal gyms, dens, home offices, and home theaters. Our meditation rooms, sewing rooms, and craft rooms. Our wine cellars, utility rooms and mud rooms, walk-in pantries and walk-in closets, our his and her bathrooms, giant master bedrooms and sitting rooms and vanities and side-by-side king-size beds. Terrific.

Buildings are inherently unsafe. They can catch fire, break apart and fall on you, trap you, and trip you. They can be disorienting and inhibit free movement. And therefore, aside perhaps from the health care industry, there is no industry that is more regulated than the planning, design, and construction industry. (We are amused by the growing cacophony of big tech’s whiny protestations against even the mere wisp of a fledgling regulatory regime that might cramp their technocratic Ayn Rand-inspired libertarian enterprise.)

Those of us who like buildings obsess over the character and qualities of their surfaces. When we don’t want buildings to dissolve or disappear but instead to have physical presence and visual interest (“firmness” and “delight” as the ancients put it), we are challenged by how to account for openings in them -- light and view into and out --while also satisfactorily enclothing them in surfaces with substance. We are further challenged when we are bound by our commitment to simplicity: buildings whose shapes are-- unless circumstances otherwise dictate-- predominantly parallelopipeds (shoe boxes).

Tools that we use to create buildings and groups of buildings are limited to those we look at. But while the drawings and models we look at (on the table or on the computer screen) help us to understand and predict the experiences of buildings, they are inadequate ways to experience them. They are the means, not the end. Still, even as we know we should not, we are habitually seduced by our drawings and models. We like the look of them. We treat them as works of art and hence the odd 20th-century phenomenon of the museum-sponsored “architecture exhibit”. What, though, is an architecture exhibit if not a city? When we distract ourselves with exhibits, we let ourselves off the hook. We put on shows and our cities suck.

We do more than throw leaves and water on fire to make tea. We use a vessel for both the leaves and the water—a bag and a pot—membranes that hold them in place, transmit the aroma and conduct the heat. Our planet is a vessel. Water (oceans) and fire (the sun) sustain life on it between the membranes of its crust (earth) and its atmosphere (air). Fruits and nuts come with a peel, rind, husk or shell. No animal lives as a tangle of bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments and organs without a pelt of skin, fur, feathers and/or scales that binds them. Our bodies are sheathed in skin and when we leave the house, we do so enclothed.

For men in our time to be, dress or care about being pretty or appreciating pretty seems transgressive. We see everywhere among men that prettiness has taken on an air of protest, self-liberation through exaggeration and irony. It has got mixed up (and confused) with a hyper-awareness of gender identity and sexuality, controversies over masculinity (toxic and otherwise) femininity (feigned and otherwise) and even misogyny. Among young men and boys, the embrace of pretty in dress and manner--once unthinkable, certainly marginal even dangerous-- has quickly evolved from daring to somewhat acceptable, assuming the manner assumed is just so.

By pretty, we mean not quite unicorns and rainbows, but perhaps orange blossoms and dandelions, butterflies and peacocks, the colors pink and chartreuse, sparkling pearls and glitter. We mean profiles and proportions that are delicate, attenuated, fluid and gravity defying—vines seeking sunlight, leaves fluttering in a breeze, rolling golden fields of wheat, waterfall mists at dawn. Pretty can take on characteristics of elegant, refined, fancy and cute or striking, robust, saturated and bold or any or all of those characteristics. Pretty is fixed in neither time nor place.