Chiara C. Rizzarda's Blog, page 5

Natalia Ginzburg and some lessons in design

1. A Voice in the Margins, a Lesson in the Centre

What does Natalia Ginzburg, an Italian novelist of quiet prose and domestic landscapes, have to do with design? On the surface, little: she did not theorise objects or urban space, nor did she work alongside architects or engineers. Her worlds were ones of cramped kitchens, failed marriages, broken relationships, and political grief. And yet, these same qualities — restraint, attentiveness, the search for meaning in the everyday — offer profound lessons for the contemporary designer.

Design education today often centres on visibility, disruption, and — when it’s done right — measurable innovation. Whether in product development, UX/UI, or architecture, the designer is expected to deliver solutions that are efficient, elegant, and user-friendly but such expectations, and a certain superomistic approach to the designer as The One Who Understands The World, often obscure the slow, ethical labor of understanding what people feel, how they live, and why they resist change. In this gap — between functionality and meaning — Ginzburg becomes an unexpected guide.

Born in 1916 and shaped by fascism, exile, motherhood, and grief, Ginzburg cultivated a writing voice that was deliberately unspectacular. She wrote as if overheard, using language that was blunt, affective, and unadorned. It is precisely this anti-rhetorical stance that makes her valuable to design, a field that increasingly recognises the importance of humility, empathy, and storytelling.

Natalia Ginzburg

Reading Ginzburg, we are reminded of what lies beneath function: the habits, contradictions, and rituals of everyday life. Her texts capture the tacit systems people design for themselves: kitchen tables as negotiation sites, domestic routines as ways of coping with disorder, relationships as fragile structures held together by repetition rather than clarity. In this way, her work parallels the work of design: she gives form to need, voice to context, and shape to the invisible.

Beyond literature, Ginzburg has become a touchstone in feminist thought, narrative ethics, and social history. Her insistence on narrating “small lives” against the backdrop of political collapse offers a critical model for designers interested in social impact, inclusion, and cultural memory. She teaches us that design is not just about making, but about witnessing. Not just solving, but listening.

In proposing Ginzburg as required reading for designers, this article does not seek to stretch her work into metaphor, nor to treat literature as decoration for theory. Instead, I’m arguing that her way of looking — attentive, relational, and unflinchingly honest — is itself a form of design literacy. In her margins, we find what the centre often forgets: that good design begins not in the blueprint, but in the kitchen, the silence, the story.

2. The Grammar of Everyday Life: Writing as Design

Natalia Ginzburg’s prose has often been praised as spare, restrained, even ascetic. Yet this economy is not a stylistic quirk but an ethical stance. Her writing, like good design, works through omission rather than excess: she removes clutter not to impress with elegance, but to preserve the truth of experience. Ginzburg assembles language with the precision and intentionality of someone sketching a schematic for human emotion.

“I believe that we must not tamper with the truth; we must not edit it, decorate it or twist it. We must accept it as it is, if we want it to be of any use.”
— Natalia Ginzburg, My Craft (often published in English as The Little Virtues)

This sentence could easily be pasted onto the wall of a UX design studio. In an era where clarity, usability, and ethical communication are prized across product, interaction, and service design, Ginzburg’s commitment to honesty and transparency resonates powerfully. She models what Don Norman describes in The Design of Everyday Things as “affordances”: clear cues in design that suggest how something should be used. Ginzburg’s writing is full of such affordances. It does not demand interpretation through metaphor or excess; it invites use, like a well-placed handle or a readable label.

Consider the layout of a Muji product, a Japanese design brand renowned for its minimalist aesthetic: a toothbrush with no branding, a desk lamp with no embellishment, and a kitchen timer reduced to its most essential controls. These are not “boring” designs: they are honest ones. Likewise, Ginzburg’s prose seems to retreat so that life can come forward. Her short story “La madre” (The Mother) ends with an ordinary phrase — “Poi non venne più” (Then she didn’t come anymore) — that lands like a punch. There is no crescendo, no flourish. Just absence, rendered exact.

This capacity for understatement finds strong echoes in UX writing principles. As Kinneret Yifrah argues in Microcopy: The Complete Guide, good interface writing avoids drawing attention to itself. It guides, supports, and reassures users in moments of uncertainty. Ginzburg does the same. In Lessico famigliare (Family Lexicon), she writes something along the lines of:

“We were five children. We lived in a large, dark, and noisy apartment. We were always shouting.”

These are not evocative metaphors or poetic abstractions but facts, delivered in rhythm, calibrated in tone. Yet within their simplicity lies a world of tension, of constraint, of joy and fatigue. This is information architecture disguised as memoir.

Her technique parallels what service designers call touchpoint choreography. The emotional experience of a service — waiting at a post office, filling out a tax form, booking a medical appointment — is not defined by any single moment, but by the accumulation of small, often invisible, interactions. Ginzburg teaches designers to attend to these. In Caro Michele, for example, the exchange of letters between a mother and her absent son is built on minutiae: groceries, stomach aches, a change in the weather. But these small data points aggregate into an emotional map of disconnection, anxiety, and love. It is design thinking applied to relational life.

Similarly, Jenny Odell in How to Do Nothing advocates for a politics of attention that resists the noise of capitalist productivity. Ginzburg shares this orientation decades earlier. Her work forces us to slow down, to notice the unspectacular that Odell calls “the chorus of the nonhuman.” In Ginzburg’s case, the chorus is domestic: saucepans, doors, the sound of someone breathing in the next room. It is the territory from which designers, especially those working in the domestic or social sphere, must learn to draw meaning.

Even the way Ginzburg structures her narratives offers a design model. She eschews traditional plot arcs for modular, repeatable sequences: conversations, habits, domestic choreography. One might think of Charles and Ray Eames, whose documentary Powers of Ten (1977) frames experience through a series of zooms, each moment nested within a broader system. Ginzburg too zooms in, not to aggrandise, but to clarify. She shows that meaning is not something designers insert into a system; it is something they reveal by carefully observing its existing grammar.

“Sometimes our own words aren’t really ours. They’re just echoes. Echoes of someone else’s words.”
— Lessico famigliare

This observation is as true for designers as for narrators. The materials we work with — language, space, form — carry with them histories, associations, and expectations. Ginzburg helps us listen to these echoes and choose what to pass on, what to reframe, and what to leave behind.

In sum, Ginzburg’s minimalist style is not merely a matter of taste: it is a model of design thinking grounded in restraint, respect, and radical clarity. She shows us that the ordinary, when attended to with precision and care, is not the opposite of the innovative: it is its grounding condition. She teaches designers to stop striving for the novel and start noticing what is already there.

3. Designing for Others: Empathy, Care, and the Relational Gaze

Design is, at its most ethical, an act of care. It begins with the recognition that others exist: others with needs, constraints, contradictions, and desires that do not necessarily mirror our own. Few writers have captured this recognition more consistently than Natalia Ginzburg. Her entire literary project is built on paying close, difficult, and sometimes painful attention to others, especially when those others are elusive, annoying, or slipping away.

Ginzburg writes to inhabit the spaces alongside her characters as the only way to really define and understand them: her stories often unfold in the claustrophobic domestic environments of mid-century Italy — shared apartments, narrow kitchens, tight stairwells — where the only architecture is relational. Her protagonists seldom grow through self-actualisation; instead they grow, or collapse, in proximity to others. This lens is crucial for designers today, especially those engaged in social design, community-centred design, or participatory urbanism, where the success of a project often depends less on individual creativity than on relational intelligence.

“We are never alone in our pain or our joy; we are always surrounded by others, by their lives and their feelings, even when we think we are most isolated.”
— Natalia Ginzburg, My Craft

This sentiment offers a rebuke to individualistic narratives in both literature and design. Ginzburg’s people are not heroes. They are caretakers, in-laws, abandoned wives, bored children. The power of her work lies in its capacity to stay with the mundane without reducing it to cliché. She sketches communities in tension — marked by power imbalances, generational wounds, and political failure — but never without affection. Her gaze is relational, and for designers working within communities, that is everything.

Designers often turn to empathy maps or personas to frame user experiences, but these tools risk flattening lived complexity into digestible insights, and are getting less and less popular as they show their inadequacy to capture complexity. Ginzburg resists that simplification. In Caro Michele, the mother writes to her distant son with a mix of guilt, irritation, longing, and self-deception, sometimes all in the same paragraph. That emotional messiness is data, too, if designers are willing to listen for it. Her work models what Sara Ahmed might call an affective archive: a dense layering of emotions, gestures, and repetitions that reveal how people experience power, care, and abandonment.

This nuanced emotional landscape has profound implications for participatory practices. In co-design workshops or community engagement sessions, practitioners often enter with tools for listening — sticky notes, post-its, exercises in storytelling — but what’s harder is to stay with discomfort, to resist the urge to “solve” people’s problems on their behalf. Ginzburg teaches that real care begins not with the question What can I do for you?, but with the question Can I bear witness to what you are already living?

Natalia Ginzburg

Visual designer and educator Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, a pioneer of feminist design, often insists that the designer’s job is not to impose meaning, but to build platforms through which people can express their own. Her iconic Pink poster project (1973), which invited anonymous contributions from women about the colour pink, mirrors Ginzburg’s instinct: to collect the fragmented expressions of others and make their logic visible. In Lessico famigliare, Ginzburg does just this, curating the personal vocabularies of her family, not to memorialise them, but to show how shared language can be a form of intimacy and exclusion at once.

“The words we used… belonged only to us, and when we repeated them, we believed we were saying something important.”
— Lessico famigliare

This attention to private language mirrors what service designers observe in tight-knit user groups: forms of interaction that are coded, intuitive, and emotionally significant. Whether it’s the slang used among hospital staff, the unspoken rituals in a neighbourhood café, or the gestures exchanged by passengers on a bus, these micro-rituals are forms of relational infrastructure. Ginzburg uncovers them in writing; designers must do so in the field.

Furthermore, her ethics of representation — never sentimental, never exploitative — should be required reading for anyone engaged in the politics of design. When we tell a user’s story in a case study, when we cite a community member in a pitch, when we quote an interviewee on a slide, what responsibility do we carry? Ginzburg, who wrote often about the people she loved and lost, refused to idealise them. She offered their contradictions alongside their virtues, their small betrayals alongside their sacrifices.

This is the emotional precision that social design demands. As Ezio Manzini notes in Design, When Everybody Designs, the designer is now a facilitator of “enabling solutions” that emerge from communities themselves. To do this well requires not just tools but a disposition—one that Ginzburg exemplifies: humble, attentive, unafraid of ambiguity.

In sum, Ginzburg’s body of work offers a model for design practice grounded in witnessing rather than problem-solving, relational attentiveness over visionary leadership, and emotional precision in place of emotional packaging. She reminds us that the most transformative interventions often happen not through grand gestures, but through acts of careful noticing: a hand on a shoulder, a phrase half-repeated, a silence held between people.

4. Form, Resistance, and Silence: A Politics of Design

In an age dominated by noise — visual, verbal, digital — resistance often takes the form of silence. Of withholding. Of choosing not to amplify. Natalia Ginzburg, in both her literary style and political positioning, understood this intuitively: her writing does not shout; it lingers. It does not assert, it witnesses. In its quietness, in its anti-rhetorical form, it becomes an act of refusal. For designers grappling with excess, spectacle, and urgency, Ginzburg’s practice offers a model of resistance through form.

“I write in a flat voice, a voice that leaves things out, because life itself is flat and leaves things out.”
— Natalia Ginzburg, My Craft

This is not self-deprecation but strategy. Ginzburg’s stylistic flatness is a refusal to perform, to embellish, to please, a politics of minimal presence, especially potent for a woman writing under and after fascism. Just as resistance movements often take form in silence, secrecy, or coded speech, her writing holds space for the unsaid. This form of communication — what Susan Sontag called “writing against interpretation” — has direct relevance to critical design, speculative design, and any practice that challenges dominant narratives by withholding easy answers.

Susan Sontag

Take Lessico famigliare, for instance, which is rightfully considered Ginzburg’s most significant and accessible work. Beneath its fragmented anecdotes and remembered phrases is a political story — of anti-fascist struggle, persecution, exile, the assassination of Leone Ginzburg — told almost entirely without explicit commentary. The political is embedded in the domestic, smuggled through speech, suggestion, silence. This approach mirrors how critical design practitioners like Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby craft speculative artefacts: not to explain, but to provoke reflection. Just as Ginzburg’s silence is a provocation.

Fiona Raby

Silence in design is often misunderstood as lack. But in fact, designing with absence can be one of the most powerful communicative strategies. Consider the white space in a Yoko Ono instruction piece, or the subtractive minimalism of a Tadao Ando chapel. These are not neutral or serene gestures but forms of refusal. They force the viewer or user to do more, to participate, to project. Ginzburg, too, demands an interpretive labour of the domestic. She writes, but does not explain. She describes, but does not justify. Her silences ask the reader to fill in the emotional and political gaps, thereby creating an ethical bond of participation.

In design, this mirrors constraint-based practices, where limits become generative. Working with limited materials, restrictive budgets, inaccessible sites, or institutional obstacles, designers often produce their most creative work under pressure. Ginzburg’s work is forged in constraint: political censorship, grief, the banal logistics of motherhood, the expectation of silence from women. But like the architect Anne Lacaton, who famously declared “Never demolish,” Ginzburg makes something from what remains. She builds form out of loss.

“After a death, the days go on as before, but nothing is the same anymore.”
— Caro Michele

Anne Lacation

This paradox — of permanence within loss — is a key concept for designers working in memorialization, disaster recovery, or transitional urbanism. How do we design for grief? For rupture? For that which can no longer be directly named? Ginzburg offers no answers, only blueprints for how to persist in the wake of silence. Her refusal of closure, her resistance to arc or redemption, has deep implications for counter-hegemonic design. Where mainstream design often seeks to solve, conclude, streamline, Ginzburg remains with the unresolved. This makes her an ally to those working on the margins — migrant communities, disenfranchised populations, Indigenous designers — who resist being packaged into digestible narratives for policy or publicity.

Even in her essays, Ginzburg deploys rhetorical silence: long, flat paragraphs with no formal transitions; stories that begin mid-thought and end without catharsis. These are structural refusals. They mirror the work of feminist architects and spatial practitioners like Jane Rendell or Doina Petrescu, who speak of “critical spatial practice” as a method of occupying liminal, incomplete, or contested spaces. Ginzburg’s texts are these kinds of spaces: unfinished, resistant to enclosure, structured around omission.

This ethic — of restraint, refusal, and radical silence — should be central to any politics of design. It teaches us that form is not neutral; it always expresses values. And sometimes, the most political choice a designer can make is to leave something out: to not speak for the user, to not polish the story, to not fill the space. In doing so, we make room for others not just as subjects, but as co-authors.

5. Biography, Memory, and the Built Environment

Natalia Ginzburg never wrote explicitly about architecture, but few writers have mapped the emotional topography of domestic space as intimately as she did. Her narratives unfold not just in time, but in places inhabited, abandoned, returned to, or remembered. Rooms are not neutral containers but protagonists, as kitchens carry the weight of unsaid resentments, hallways are conduits of surveillance and avoidance, shared apartments reflect political alliances and personal betrayals. In Ginzburg’s work, the home becomes the architecture of biography, the stage on which memory, identity, and transformation are continually rehearsed.

“That house remembers everything, holds all our voices, even those who are no longer here.”
— Lessico famigliare

Her approach captures what spatial designers, urbanists, and architects have long recognised: that built environments store affect. They are archives of experience, holding onto gestures, silences, even grief. Ginzburg’s homes are not abstract or symbolic; they are stubbornly real, marked by the messiness of life, and yet they carry emotional geometries that spatial design must reckon with: how a room’s proportions can generate tension, how furniture can enforce roles, how space can reinforce or resist memory.

Her autobiographical strategy — what we might call a narrative mapping of lived space — bears striking resemblance to practices in architectural phenomenology and heritage conservation. Think of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, which explores how attics, cellars, and drawers shape the contours of interior consciousness. Ginzburg’s attics and kitchens do the same, but they are never abstractions. They are layered with people, crumbs, muttered phrases. They are lived spaces, thick with repetition, rupture, and unresolved history.

Gaston Bachelard

In The City and the House, a novel told entirely through letters, Ginzburg charts how place mediates relationships. Cities and houses are not neutral settings but living forces: Paris, Rome, the countryside, each produces different intimacies, different forms of alienation. The house becomes a main character, not only in its architecture but in its role as a vessel for longing, exile, and attachment. This resonates with how urban storytelling is approached in disciplines like placemaking and civic design, where memory is embedded in both physical structures and the narratives that surround them.

Projects such as Massimo Scolari’s The Theatre of Architecture, Joan Ockman’s Out of Ground Zero, or Forensic Architecture’s investigations similarly frame buildings as witnesses, not static objects but actors within history. Ginzburg, through quieter means, does the same: her writing turns the house into an interlocutor, and her biographies don’t just to tell about a life, but to render the built environment as a companion to loss, joy, or betrayal.

This is not nostalgia; it’s spatial indexing. Memory in Ginzburg is not linear but properly architectural. It returns in loops, tethered to objects and thresholds: a cracked wall, a broken lamp, the smell of a stairwell. These are the same anchors that interior designers, curators, and urban ethnographers work with when trying to preserve or reimagine a space’s identity: in post-conflict architecture, for instance, designing around memory often involves more than plaques or reconstructions, but listening to the everyday remnants people associate with presence and absence. Ginzburg’s stories offer that attentiveness, in narrative form.

Her approach to autobiography also challenges the division between personal and public memory. While writing her family’s story in Lessico famigliare, she documents a collective experience: of fascism, resistance, displacement. The apartment in via Pallamaglio becomes not only a private home but a microcosm of historical forces. This echoes how heritage studies now think about domestic spaces, not just as sites of personal memory but as arenas where political histories are enacted and contested. In contemporary urban regeneration projects, especially in historic neighborhoods, this lesson is crucial. Too often, design intervenes without understanding the narrative infrastructure already embedded in place. Ginzburg teaches us that the stories people tell about their homes — the things they say, repeat, forget — are design materials. Memory isn’t soft data; it is structural. It shapes how people move, what they protect, how they orient themselves to the future.

This is where Ginzburg intersects with the work of Lina Bo Bardi, the Italian-Brazilian architect who believed that design must respect the social fabric already in place. Bo Bardi’s buildings — like the SESC Pompéia in São Paulo — preserve traces of their past use, allow for adaptation, and refuse monumentalism. Ginzburg does the same with text. She preserves the cracks. She allows the ordinary to speak.

Lina Bo Bardi

In the end, Ginzburg’s autobiographical spaces offer a method for reading and designing space as lived, remembered, and relational. They teach us that architecture is not only what we build, but what we carry. That the city is not only a structure, but a memory system. And that biography, when told through space, becomes not self-expression but shared infrastructure.

6. Teaching Ginzburg to Designers: a Practical Compendium

If Natalia Ginzburg should be required reading for designers, what does it look like to teach her, not as an add-on to the syllabus, but as a structural element of design education? Integrating Ginzburg into a design curriculum is not about turning literature into a case study or poeticizing the design process, but about cultivating a disposition: attentive, honest, and grounded in the complex dynamics of human life. Her writing becomes not content but method, not subject matter but lens.

Contemporary design teaching strategies, especially within human-centered or speculative design, is increasingly aware of its limitations. The prevailing design thinking model — typically structured around problem definition, ideation, prototyping, and iteration — risks instrumentalizing empathy, aestheticizing complexity, and prioritizing innovation over care. Ginzburg’s narrative techniques stands as a counterweight: she teaches slowness, precision, ethical ambivalence, refuses to solve or optimize. She pays attention instead. That is the beginning of good design.

“We are adult because we have behind us the silent presence of the dead, whom we ask to judge our current actions and from whom we ask forgiveness for past offences: we should like to uproot from our past so many cruel words, so many cruel acts that we committed when, though we feared death, we did not know — we had not yet understood — how irreparable, how irremediable, death is: we are adult because of the silent answers, because of all the silent forgiveness of the dead which we carry within us.”
— My Craft

Werewolves Wednesday: The Wolf-Leader (21)

A werewolf story by Alexandre Dumas père.

Chapter XXI: The Genius of Evil

The next evening, about nine o’clock, a man might be seen walking along the Puits-Sarrasin road and making for for the Osieres forest-path.

It was Thibault, on his way to pay a last visit to the hut, and to see if any remains of it had been left by the fire. A heap of smoking cinders alone marked the place where it had stood; and as Thibault came in sight of it, he saw the wolves, as if he had appointed them to meet him there, forming an immense circle round the ruins, and looking upon them with an expression of mournful anger. They seemed to understand that by destroying this poor hut, made of earth and branches, the one who, by the compact with the black wolf, had been given them for master, had been made a victim. As Thibault entered the circle, all the wolves gave simultaneously a long and sinister sounding howl, as if to make him understand that they were ready to help in avenging him.

Thibault went and sat down on the spot where the hearth had stood; it was recognisable from a few blackened stones still remaining, which were otherwise uninjured, and by a higher heap of cinders just at that spot. He stayed there some minutes, absorbed in his unhappy thoughts. But he was not reflecting that the ruin which he saw around him was the consequence and the punishment of his jealous and covetous desires, which had gone on gathering strength. He felt neither repentance nor regret. That which dominated all other feeling in him was his satisfaction at the thought of being henceforth able to render to his fellow-creatures evil for evil, his pride in having, thanks to his terrible auxiliaries, the power to fight against those who persecuted him.

And as the wolves continued their melancholy howling: “Yes, my friends,” said Thibault, “yes, your howls answer to the cry of my heart… My fellow-creatures have destroyed my hut, they have cast to the winds the ashes of the tools wherewith I earned my daily bread; their hatred pursues me as it pursues you, I expect from them neither mercy nor pity. We are their enemies as they are ours; and I will have neither mercy nor compassion on them. Come then, let us go from this hut to the Castle, and carry thither the desolation which they have brought home to me.”

And then the master of the wolves, like a chief of banditti followed by his desperadoes, set off with his pack in quest of pillage and carnage.

This time it was neither red-deer, nor fallow-deer, nor any timid game of which they were in pursuit. Sheltered by the darkness of the night Thibault first directed his course to the Chateau of Vez, for there was lodged his chief enemy. The Baron had three farms belonging to the estate, stables filled with horses, and others filled with cows, and the park was full of sheep. All these places were attacked the first night, and on the morrow two horses, four cows, and ten sheep were found killed.

The Baron was doubtful at first if this could be the work of the beasts against which he waged so fierce a warfare; there seemed something partaking rather of intelligence and revenge in it than of the mere unreasoning attacks of a pack of wild animals. Still it seemed manifest that the wolves must have been the aggressors, judging by the marks of teeth on the carcases and the footprints left on the ground. Next night the Baron set watchers to lie in wait, but Thibault and his wolves were at work on the farther side of the forest. This time it was the stables and parks of Soucy and of Vivieres which were decimated, and the following night those of Boursonnes and Yvors. The work of annihilation, once begun, must be carried out with desperate determination, and the master never left his wolves now; he slept with them in their dens, and lived in the midst of them, stimulating their thirst for blood.

Many a woodman, many a heath-gatherer, came face to face in the thickets with the menacing white teeth of a wolf, and was either carried off and eaten, or just saved his life by the aid of his courage and his bill-hook. Guided by a human intelligence, the wolves had become organised and disciplined, and were far more formidable than a band of discontented soldiery let loose in a conquered country.

The terror of them became general; no one dared go beyond the towns and villages unarmed; horses and cattle were all fed inside the stables, and the men themselves, their work done, waited for one another, so as not to go about singly. The Bishop of Soissons ordered public prayer to be made, asking God to send a thaw, for the unusual ferocity of the wolves was attributed to the great quantity of snow that had fallen. But the report also went about that the wolves were incited to their work, and led about by a man; that this man was more indefatigable, more cruel and insatiable than the wolves themselves; that in imitation of his companions he ate raw flesh and quenched his thirst in blood. And the people went further and said that this man was Thibault.

The Bishop pronounced sentence of excommunication against the former shoe-maker. The Lord of Vez, however, had little faith in the thunders of the Church being of much effect, unless supported by some well-conducted hunting. He was somewhat cast down at so much blood being spilt, and his pride was sorely hurt that his, the Grand Master’s, own cattle should have suffered so heavily from the very wolves he was especially appointed to destroy.

At the same time, he could not but feel a secret delight, at the thought of the triumphant view-halloos in store for him, and of the fame which he could not fail to win among all sportsmen of repute. His passion for the chase, excited by the way in which his adversaries the wolves had so openly entered upon the struggle, became absolutely overpowering; he allowed neither respite nor repose; he took no sleep himself and ate his meals in the saddle. All night long he scoured the country in company with l’Eveille and Engoulevent, who, in consideration of his marriage had been raised to the rank of pricker; and the dawn had no sooner appeared before he was again in the saddle, ready to start and chase the wolf until it was too dark to distinguish the hounds. But alas! all his knowledge of the art of Venery, all his courage, all his perseverance, were lost labour. He occasionally brought down some wretched cub, some miserable beast eaten with mange, some imprudent glutton which had so gorged itself with carnage that its breath would not hold out after an hour or two’s run; but the larger, well-grown wolves, with their thick dark coats, their muscles like steel springs and their long slender feet not one of these lost a hair in the war that was being made upon them. Thanks to Thibault they met their enemies in arms on nearly equal ground.

As the Baron of Vez remained forever with his dogs, so did Thibault with his wolves; after a night of sack and pillage, he kept the pack awake on the watch to help the one that the Baron had started. This wolf again, following Thibault’s instructions, had recourse at first to stratagem. It doubled, crossed its tracks, waded in the streams, leaped up into the bending trees so as to make it more difficult still for huntsmen and hounds to follow the scent, and finally when it felt its powers failing, it adopted bolder measures and went straight ahead. Then the other wolves and their master intervened; at the least sign of hesitation on the part of the hounds, they managed so cleverly to put them on the wrong scent, that it required an experienced eye to detect that the dogs were not all following up the same track, and nothing less than the Barons’ profound knowledge could decide which was the right one. Even he some times was mistaken.

Again, the wolves in their turn followed the huntsmen; it was a pack hunting a pack; only the one hunted in silence, which made it far the more formidable of the two. Did a tired hound fall behind, or another get separated from the main body, it was seized and killed in an instant, and Engoulevent, whom we have had occasion to mention several times before and who had taken poor Marcotte’s place, having hastened one day to the help of one of his hounds that was uttering cries of distress, was himself attacked and only owed his life to the swiftness of his horse.

It was not long before the Baron’s pack was decimated; his best hounds were nearly dead with fatigue, and his more second-rate ones had perished by the wolves’ teeth. The stable was in no better condition than the kennel; Bayard was foundered, Tancred had sprained a tendon leaping over a ditch, and a strained fetlock had placed Valourous on the list of invalids. Sultan, luckier than his three companions had fallen honourably on the field of battle, having succumbed to a sixteen hours’ run under the weight of his gigantic master, who never for a moment lost courage notwithstanding the fact that the dead bodies of his finest and most faithful servitors lay heaped around him.

The Baron, following the example of the noble-hearted Romans who exhausted the resources of military art against the Carthaginians who were forever re-appearing as enemies, the Baron, I repeat, changed his tactics and tried what battues could accomplish. He called on all available men among the peasants, and beat up the game throughout the forest with such a formidable number of men, that not so much as a hare was left in its form near any spot which they had passed.

But Thibault made it his business to find out beforehand where these battues were going to take place, and if he ascertained that the beaters were on the side of the forest towards Viviers or Soucy, he and his wolves made an excursion to Boursonnes or Yvors; and if the Baron and his men were busy near Haramont or Longpre, the people of Corey and Vertefeuille were made painfully aware of Thibault and his wolves.

In vain the Lord of Vez drew his cordon at night round the suspected enclosures, so as to begin the attack with daylight; never once did his men succeed in starting a wolf, for not once did Thibault make a mistake in his calculations. If by chance he had not been well informed, and was uncertain in what direction the Baron and his men were going, he called all his wolves together, sending express couriers after them as the night set in; he then led them unobserved down the wooded lane leading to Lisart l’Abbesse, which at that time ran between the forest of Compiegne and the forest of Villers-Cotterets, and so was able to pass from one to the other. This state of things went on for several months. Both the Baron and Thibault carried out the task each
had set before himself, with equally passionate energy; the latter, like his adversary, seemed to have required some supernatural power, whereby he was able to resist fatigue and excitement; and this was the more remarkable seeing that during the short intervals of respite accorded by the Lord of Vez, the Wolf-leader was by no means at peace in himself.

It was not that the terrible deeds in which he was an active agent, and at which he presided, filled him exactly with horror, for he thought them justifiable; he threw the responsibility of them, he said, on to those who had forced him to commit them; but there were moments of failing spirit, for which he could not account, when he went about in the midst of his ferocious companions, feeling gloomy, morose and heavy hearted. Again the image of Agnelette would rise before him, seeming to him like the personification of his own past life, honest and laborious, peaceful and innocent. And more than that, he felt he loved her more than he had ever thought it possible for him to love anybody. At times he would weep at the thought of all his lost happiness, at others he was seized with a wild fit of jealousy against the one to whom she now belonged, she, who at one time, might if he had liked, have been his.

One day, the Baron in order to prepare some fresh means of destruction, had been forced for the while to leave the wolves in peace. Thibault, who was in one of the moods we have just described, wandered forth from the den where he lived in company with the wolves. It was a splendid summer’s night, and he began to rove about the woodlands, where the
moon was lighting up the trunks of the trees, dreaming of the time when he trod the mossy carpet underfoot free from trouble and anxiety, until at last the only happiness which was now left him, forgetfulness of the present, stole over his senses. Lost in this sweet dream of his earlier life, he was all of a sudden aroused by a cry of distress from somewhere near at hand. He was now so accustomed to such sounds, that, ordinarily, he would have paid no attention to it, but his heart was for the moment softened by the recollection of Agnelette, and he felt more disposed than usual to pity; as it happened also he was near the place where he had first seen the gentle child, and this helped to awaken his kinder nature.

He ran to the spot whence the cry had come, and as he leaped from the under wood into the deep forest-lane near Ham, he saw a woman struggling with an immense wolf which had thrown her on the ground. Thibault could not have said why he was so agitated at this sight, nor why his heart beat more violently than usual; he rushed forward and seizing the animal by the throat hurled it away from its victim, and then lifting the woman in his arms, he carried her to the side of the lane and laid her on the slope. Here a ray of moonlight, breaking through the clouds, fell on the face of the woman he had saved, and Thibault saw that it was Agnelette. Near to the spot was the spring in which Thibault had once gazed at himself, and had seen the first red hair; he ran to it, took up water in his hands, and threw it into the woman’s face. Agnelette opened her eyes, gave a cry of terror, and tried to rise and flee.

“What!” cried the Wolf-leader, as if he were still Thibault the shoemaker, “you do not know me again, Agnelette?”

“Ah! yes indeed, I know you, Thibault; and it is because I know who you are,” cried the young woman, “that I am afraid!”

Then throwing herself on her knees, and clasping her hands: “Oh do not kill me, Thibault!” she cried, “do not kill me! it would be such dreadful trouble for the poor old grandmother! Thibault, do not kill me!”

The Wolf-leader stood overcome with consternation; up to this hour he had not fully realised the hideous renown which he had gained; but the terror which the sight of him inspired in the woman who had loved him and whom he still loved, filled him with a horror of himself.

“I, kill you, Agnelette!” he said, “just when I have snatched you from death! Oh! how you must hate and despise me for such a thought to enter your head.”

“I do not hate you, Thibault,” said the young woman, “but I hear such things about you, that I feel afraid of you.”

“And do they say nothing of the infidelity which has led Thibault to commit such crimes?”

“I do not understand you,” said Agnelette looking at Thibault with her large eyes, blue as the heavens.

“What!” exclaimed Thibault, “you do not understand that I loved you that I adored you Agnelette, and that the loss of you sent me out of my mind?”

“If you loved me, if you adored me, Thibault, what prevented you from marrying me?”

“The spirit of evil,” muttered Thibault.

“I too loved you,” continued the young woman, “and I suffered cruelly waiting for you.”

Thibault heaved a sigh.

“You loved me, Agnelette?” he asked.

“Yes,” replied the young woman with her soft voice and gentle eyes.

“But now, all is over,” said Thibault, “and you love me no
more.”

“Thibault,” answered Agnelette, “I no longer love you, because it is no longer right to love you; but one cannot always forget one’s first love as one would wish.”

“Agnelette!” cried Thibault, trembling all over, “be careful what you say!”

“Why should I be careful what I say, since it is the truth,” said the girl with an innocent shake of the head. “The day you told me that you wished to make me your wife, I believed you, Thibault; for why should I think that you would lie to me when I had just done you a service? Then, later I met you, but I did not go in search of you; you came to me, you spoke words of love to me, you were the first to refer to the promise that you had made me. And it was not my fault either, Thibault, that I was afraid of that ring which you wore, which was large enough for you and yet, oh, it was horrible! not big enough for one of my fingers.”

“Would you like me not to wear this ring any more?” said Thibault. “Would you like me to throw it away?” And he began trying to pull it off his finger, but as it had been too small to go on Agnelette’s finger, so now it was too small to be taken off Thibault’s. In vain he struggled with it, and tried to move it with his teeth; the ring seemed rivetted to his finger for all eternity.

Thibault saw that it was no use trying to get rid of it; it was a token of compact between himself and the black wolf, and with a sigh he let his arms fall hopelessly to his sides.

“That day,” went on Agnelette, “I ran away; I know that I was wrong to do so, but I was no longer mistress of myself after seeing that ring and more still…” She lifted her eyes as she spoke, looking timidly up at Thibault’s hair. Thibault was bare-headed, and, by the light of the moon Agnelette could see that it was no longer a single hair that shone red as the flames of hell, but that half the hair on Thibault’s head was now of this devil’s colour.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, drawing back, “Thibault! Thibault! What has happened to you since I last saw you?”

“Agnelette!” cried Thibault throwing himself down with his face to the ground, and holding his head between his hands, “I could not tell any human creature, not even a priest what has happened to me since then; but to Agnelette, all I can say is: Agnelette! Agnelette! have pity on me, for I have been most unhappy!”

Agnelette went up to him and took his hands in hers.

“You did love me then? You did love me?” he cried.

“What can I do, Thibault!” said the girl with the same sweetness and innocence as before. “I took you at your word, and every time I heard someone knocking at our hut door, I thought it was you come to say to the old grandmother, “Mother, I love Agnelette, Agnelette loves me; will you give her to me for my wife?”

“Then when I went and opened the door, and found that it was not you, I used to go into a corner and cry.”

“And now, Agnelette, now?”

“Now,” she answered. “Now, Thibault, it may seem strange, but in spite of all the terrible tales that are told about you, I have not been really frightened; I was sure that you could not wish any harm to me, and I was walking boldly through the forest, when that dreadful beast from which you saved me, suddenly sprang upon me.”

“But how is it that you are near your old home? do you not live with your husband?”

“We lived together for a while at Vez, but there was no room there for the grandmother; and so I said to my husband, ‘the grandmother must be thought of first; I must go back to her; when you wish to see me you will come.'”

“And he consented to that arrangement?”

“Not at first, but I pointed out to him that the grandmother is seventy years of age; that if she were only to live another two or three years, God grant it may be more! it would only be two or three years of some extra trouble for us, whereas, in all probability we had long years of life before us. Then he understood that it was right to give to those that had least.”

But all the while that Agnelette was giving this explanation, Thibault could think of nothing but that the love she once had for him was not
yet dead.”

“So,” said Thibault, “you loved me? and so, Agnelette you could love me again?”

“That is impossible now because I belong to another.”

“Agnelette, Agnelette! only say that you love me!”

“No, Thibault, if I loved you, I should do everything in the world to hide it from you.”

“And why?” cried Thibault. “Why? you do not know my power. I know that I have only a wish or two left, but with your help, by combining these wishes together, I could make you as rich as a queen… We could leave the country, leave France, Europe; there are large countries, of which you do not even know the names, Agnelette, called America and India. They are paradises, with blue skies, tall trees and birds of every kind. Agnelette, say that you will come with me; nobody will know that we have gone off together, nobody will know where we are, nobody will know that we love one another, nobody will know even that we are alive.”

“Fly with you, Thibault!” said Agnelette, looking at the wolf-leader as if she had but half understood what he said, “do you forget that I no longer belong to myself? do you not know that I am married?”

“What does that matter,” said Thibault, “if it is I whom you love, and if we can live happily together!”

“Oh! Thibault! Thibault! what are you saying!”

“Listen,” went on Thibault, “I am going to speak to you in the name of this world and the next. Do you wish to save me, Agnelette, body and soul? If so, do not resist my pleading, have pity on me, come with me; let us go somewhere together, where we shall no longer hear these bowlings, or breathe this atmosphere of reeking flesh; and, if it scares you to think of being a rich, grand lady, somewhere then where I can again be Thibault the workman, Thibault, poor but beloved, and, therefore, Thibault happy in his hard work, some place where Agnelette will have no other husband but me.”

“Ah! Thibault! I was ready to become your wife, and you scorned me!”

“Do not remember my sins, Agnelette, which have been so cruelly punished.”

“Thibault, another has done what you were not willing to do. He took the poor young girl; he burdened himself with the poor old blind woman; he gave a name to the one and bread to the other; he had no ambition beyond that of gaining my love; he desired no dowry beyond my marriage vow; can you think of asking me to return evil for good? Do you dare to suggest that I should leave the one who has given me such proof of his love for the one who has given me proof only of his indifference?”

“But what matter still, Agnelette, since you do not love him and since you do love me?”

“Thibault, do not turn and twist my words to make them appear to say what they do not. I said that I still preserved my friendship for you, I never said that I did not love my husband. I should like to see you happy, my friend; above all I should like to see you abjure your evil ways and repent of your sins; and last of all, I wish that God may have mercy upon you, and that you may be delivered from that spirit of evil, of which you spoke just now. For this I pray night and morning on my knees; but even that I may be able to pray for you, I must keep myself pure; if the voice that supplicates for mercy is to rise to God’s throne, it must be an innocent one; above all, I must scrupulously keep the oath which I swore at His altar.”

On hearing these decisive words from Agnelette, Thibault again became fierce and morose.

“Do you not know, Agnelette, that it is very imprudent of you to speak to me here like that?”

“And why, Thibault?” asked the young woman.

“We are alone here together; it is dark, and not a man of the open would dare to come into the forest at this hour; and know, the King is not more master in his kingdom than I am here?”

“I do not understand you, Thibault?”

“I mean that having prayed, implored, and conjured, I can now threaten.”

“You, threaten?”

“What I mean is,” continued Thibault, paying no heed to Agnelette’s words, “that every word you speak does not excite my love for you more than it rouses my hatred towards him; in short, I mean that it is imprudent of the lamb to irritate the wolf when the lamb is in the power of the wolf.”

“I told you, Thibault, before, that I started to walk through the forest without any feeling of fear at meeting you. As I was coming to, I felt a momentary terror, remembering involuntarily what I had heard said about you; but at this moment, Thibault, you will try in vain to make me turn pale.”

Thibault flung both hands up to his head.

“Do not talk like that,” he said, “you cannot think what the devil is whispering to me, and what an effort I have to make to resist his voice.”

“You may kill me if you like,” replied Agnelette, “but I will not be guilty of the cowardice which you ask of me; you may kill me, but I shall remain faithful to my husband; you may kill me, but I shall pray to God to help him as I die.”

“Do not speak his name, Agnelette; do not make me think about that man.”

“You can threaten me as much as you like, Thibault, for I am in your hands; but, happily, he is far from you, and you have no power over him.”

“And who told you that, Agnelette? do you not know that, thanks to the diabolical power I possess and which I can hardly fight against, I am able to strike as well far as near?”

“And if I should become a widow, Thibault, do you imagine that I should be vile enough to accept your hand when it was stained with the blood of the one whose name I bear?”

“Agnelette,” said Thibault falling on his knees, “Agnelette, save me from committing a further crime.”

“It is you, not I, who will be responsible for the crime. I can give you my life, Thibault, but not my honour.”

“Oh,” roared Thibault, “love flies from the heart when hatred enters; take care, Agnelette! take heed to your husband! The devil is in me, and he will soon speak through my mouth. Instead of the consolation which I had hoped from your love, and which your love refuses, I will have vengeance. Stay my hand, Agnelette, there is yet time, stay it from cursing, from destroying; if not, understand that it is not I, but you, who strike him dead! Agnelette, you know now Agnelette, you do not stop me from speaking? Let it be so then, and let the curse fall on all three of us, you and him and me! Agnelette, I wish your husband to die, and he will die!”

Agnelette uttered a terrible cry; then, as if her reason reasserted itself, protesting against this murder at a distance which seemed impossible to her, she exclaimed:

“No, no; you only say that to terrify me, but my prayers will prevail against your maledictions.”

“Go then, and learn how heaven answers your prayers. Only, if you wish to see your husband again alive, Agnelette, you had better make haste, or you will but stumble against his dead body.”

Overcome by the tone of conviction with which these last words were pronounced, and yielding to an irresistible feeling of terror, Agnelette, without responding to Thibault, who stood on the further side of the lane with his hand held out and pointing towards Preciamont, set off running in the direction which it seemed to indicate, and soon disappeared into the night as she turned out of sight at the corner of the road. As she passed from his view, Thibault uttered a howl, which might have been taken for the howling of a whole pack of wolves, and plunging into the thicket, “Ah! now,” he cried aloud to himself, “I am indeed a lost and accursed soul!”

…to be continued.

Do Tools Think? Automation, Intuition, and the Designer’s Role

Who (or What) Is Designing?

Somewhere between the mouse click and the model update, a question sometimes lingers, one that makes architects react with violence. Who is really designing here? “Me,” will answer the architect. “The computer is Just A Tool and I’m in Control.” Of course I agree. Except that many architects aren’t in control of jack shit, but that’s a different story. Still, the underlying question is interesting enough to deserve a reflection. Who’s responding to a set of predefined rules, constraints, and scripts? The system or the human behind the screen?

Design has always been a negotiation between intention and material, purpose and medium, and many many other things. But now that negotiation might include another party: automation. In Revit, in Rhino, in Grasshopper, in the silent judgment of a machine-learning model suggesting the next move, automation is no longer a passive extension of the designer’s will. It curates options. It filters noise. Sometimes, it even surprises. As Cedric Price prophetically mused in the 1960s, “Technology is the answer, but what was the question?”

Yes, I’m in love with the work done by this guy.

We’re past the point of asking whether machines can draw. Apparently, they do. The real anxiety — and the real opportunity — lies in how they think alongside us. Or ahead of us. Or instead of us. When does a parametric script become more than a tool? When does it become a co-author? And if authorship is now distributed across layers of logic and learning, where do we locate intuition?

Marshall McLuhan, in his 1964 provocation, told us that media (and by extension, tools) are “extensions of man.” But what happens when those extensions begin to offer suggestions of their own? When your Revit family auto-populates parameters based on predictive rules you wrote two weeks ago and now barely remember? When your AI-powered concept sketcher proposes a form you would never have drawn, but now you can’t unsee?

In science fiction, this is where the tool becomes sentient. In architectural practice, it’s more subtle and perhaps more insidious. The automation of design decision-making isn’t some far-off dystopia; it’s a default setting. The danger isn’t that we’ll be replaced. It’s that we’ll stop noticing when we’ve ceded control. Revit seems to be making decisions on how a wall should behave, so people stop thinking about how a wall works.

Of course this isn’t a Luddite call to arms. It’s a design brief. Automation doesn’t erase authorship: it reshapes it. The creative act is still there, but it’s refracted through scripts, interfaces, presets, and algorithms. The challenge is to trace that act, to own it even when it appears in distributed, delegated form.

With genAI being super-hyped, the imperative may not be to draw a line between humans and machines. That binary has expired. It’s about recognising that we are designing with systems that contain fragments of our past thinking, our encoded preferences, and yes — occasionally — alien logics. If anything, the frontier of design today is less about form, and more about responsibility.

So let’s ask again, not out of fear but out of curiosity, ambition, and a refusal to let default settings define creative practice: Do tools think? And when they do, do we still think with them?

1. Thinking with Tools: from the Drafting Table to the Script

Before there were machines that could design, there were architects who designed machines. Cedric Price was one of them, of course, and my students have heard his name repeated over and over. His unrealised projects — the Fun Palace and the Potteries Thinkbelt Project — weren’t just designs: they were systems. Circuits of possibility, not monuments. Architecture, for Price, was not a noun but a verb, a process, a mechanism for adaptation. Technology could quickly become a solution in search of a problem, as his famous quote encapsulates, and that line still slices uncomfortably through today’s AI hype.

Price didn’t want to design buildings: he wanted to shape behaviours. He sketched not spaces but feedback loops. His work anticipated a world where the designer no longer “composes” space in the classical sense, but configures the conditions for it to emerge, transform, respond. In that sense, he didn’t just predict automation: he demanded it.

Enter Marshall McLuhan, another provocateur of his era. While Price reimagined buildings as intelligent environments, McLuhan reframed the entire idea of tools. His premise was deceptively simple: tools are extensions of man. The wheel extends the foot. The book extends the eye. The computer extends — and transforms — the nervous system. Every tool, McLuhan argued, externalises a part of the self. And when we externalise a function, we also alter it. We don’t just offload effort: we mutate perception, behaviour, and judgment.

For architects and designers, this should hit particularly close to home. Even if some people fight against the very concept, I’ve been pushing for years the idea that the transition from the drafting table to the digital model wasn’t just about speed or precision: it was a shift in worldview. The graphite line required a steady hand and a practised eye. The CAD line requires similar skills, plus the ability to snap to grid and an understanding of Boolean logic. Now, with parametric design and AI assistance, we’re shifting again: from drawing things to designing systems that generate things. The tool is no longer a passive medium. It’s a collaborator, a filter, a suggestion engine.

This often isn’t a linear progression. It’s a messed-up lineage of designer-tool entanglements. The compass didn’t eliminate geometry: it invited more of it; the early use of perspective in Renaissance drawing didn’t reduce architecture to optics, it opened a spatial revolution. Similarly, the algorithm doesn’t end design; it reconfigures it. But each leap has consequences.

Sometimes leaps have beautiful consequences. Other times… well, we’ll see.

Today’s design tools don’t just follow orders: they anticipate needs, enforce standards, and sometimes obscure intentions. A Revit family loaded with pre-programmed behaviours might help you model faster, but it also nudges you toward certain assumptions about how walls, doors, and systems should behave. As European users know very well, sometimes these assumptions are rooted in the way things work in the developer’s Country of origin, and when this doesn’t align with how things work in the rest of the world… things get messy. In the same way, a Grasshopper script gives you flexibility but also offloads your memory, intuition, and sometimes even your authorship onto a nested logic you may not fully control or remember when you’re way into the project. We’re no longer just drawing with tools. We’re delegating decisions to them. The question is no longer what we can do with them, ’cause in the lineage of designer-tool interactions, this is the moment where agency gets messy. Tools have always shaped thought. But now, they also feed back into it. Faster, deeper, and with increasing autonomy. Cedric Price sketched the provocation, McLuhan mapped the feedback loop, but we’re the ones living in the recursive moment, caught between intention and automation, authorship and abstraction.

And if our tools now whisper back — with predictions, completions, scripts, and scores — we have to learn to listen carefully. Not just to what they say, but to what they assume, because behind every “automated” suggestion is a history of human thought: encoded, structured, sometimes forgotten, and tremendously biased.

2. Scripts, Routines, and Ghosts in the Shell

Automation doesn’t go south with a boom. It slides in quietly, line by line, wrapped in good intentions: efficiency, consistency, error reduction. But make no mistake — every script you write, every node you connect in Dynamo, might be the last thing you do on your model. But that’s not what concerns us here. What concerns us is that you’re not just modelling walls or automating schedules: you’re encoding decisions, preferences, hierarchies. You’re capturing pieces of your design logic and handing them over to a machine that will execute them without hesitation, hesitation being a deeply human feature.

And it won’t even ask you to evaluate its performance. The nerve.

This is what we call procedural thinking: the shift from product to process, from result to recipe. Parametric design invited us into this logic, but BIM formalised it, rendered it a necessity because of the extra effort you need to put into… well, everything. It also made it easier, since the model isn’t a visual artefact but a database of rules and, once rules are in play, all you need for automation are standards. Routines proliferate in this framework: batch-renaming sheets, auditing worksets, reconciling type parameters across linked models. These aren’t design activities in the traditional sense, yet they structure the design process at scale. And here’s the twist: the more we automate, the more we rely on the machine’s memory rather than our own. Which is fine. That Dynamo script we wrote three months ago to sort room tags by department is doing the work now. The trick is… do we remember exactly how it works? Do our teammates? Who’s the author of that decision today?

There’s a ghost in the shell, and it might be you. A past version of yourself, frozen in code, still shaping outcomes long after you’ve mentally moved on.

Consider this: you build a Dynamo graph to auto-place fire extinguishers based on local code logic, spatial thresholds, and occupancy loads. On the surface, it’s a time-saver. But under the hood, it’s a snapshot of your interpretation of regulation, spatial standards, and project priorities. That script becomes part of the firm’s operational DNA. Others run it, unaware of the assumptions baked into it. If the regulation changes, the script doesn’t. Unless someone thinks to check.

This is where decision-making gets displaced. Not eliminated: just moved, hidden in scripts, buried in custom nodes, abstracted behind UI buttons labelled “Update Data.” The human still decides what to automate, but not always how the automation plays out over time.

There’s a risk here, and it’s not dystopian: it’s banal. It’s the slow erosion of agency under the weight of convenience. It’s when design becomes reactive — responding to what the system can do — rather than what the designer envisions. And this happens subtly, not through command but through suggestion. A pop-up. A default setting. A template that doesn’t push the project but gently nudges it in a particular direction, before anyone sketches a line.

But there’s also potential — and power — in recognising this. Scripts aren’t inherently reductive. They can encode nuance, adaptability, even elegance. I’ve built Dynamo graphs that don’t just crunch data but generate responses based on thresholds of daylight availability (it’s a regulation in places like Russia). These scripts didn’t replace my thinking: they extended it, they acted as a reminder (and my ADHD sorely needs it), but they also challenged it. They made visible certain patterns I hadn’t fully grasped, and offered to my designers alternate paths I hadn’t drawn.

Automation becomes most interesting when it becomes an enlarging mirror, when the output surprises you not because it’s alien, but because it reveals a blind spot in your own logic. That’s the moment when the tool isn’t just executing: it’s provoking.

So yes, there are ghosts in the shell. But they’re not rogue AIs: they’re fragments of you, your team, your office culture, your assumptions. Scripts carry memory, and automation carries intent. The question is: do you still recognise yours?

Let’s see how to deal with this.

3. Remembering the Author: Strategies for Designing Automation with Memory and Intent

Automation should not be amnesia. If design is a cultural act, automation must be annotated, not just executed. From the top of my head, I’ll give you five ideas on how to embed authorship, decision rationale, and institutional memory within automated processes, ensuring the designer’s hand remains legible even when the process is procedural.

1. Comment Like a Human: Writing Code That Thinks Out Loud

Most automation scripts are haunted houses: full of poltergeists, things that move by themselves, old blood trickling down the wall for no reason, and decisions made while running for your life. Variables named “x” or “temp.” Conditional logic written for a specific exception, long forgotten. What’s left is a script that maybe works but certainly doesn’t speak, not to others, not even to your future self.

To comment like a human means to narrate your thinking. Not just what the code does, but why you made the choice. Think of comments as pebble trails through your design logic, meant to carry you back home when you’re lost in the woods. A well-commented Dynamo graph or Python snippet should read like a manifesto in miniature: this is what I knew, this is what I assumed, this is what I chose.

Best practices:

use plain language before code: “This step reorders rooms by program adjacency, not alphabetically”;declare exceptions explicitly: “This override is only for the 3rd-floor fire core: DO NOT APPLY ELSEWHERE”;document external logic sources: “Thresholds based on EN ISO 7730:2006 comfort criteria” (spoiler: it’ll soon be outdated);annotate decisions, not just syntax: “Chose list flattening here to prevent nested geometries: watch for broken grouping.”

Well-commented automation is generous. It invites participation, critique, and future revision. Uncommented code is authoritarian: it demands obedience but reveals nothing of its reasoning. And, of course, I’m bound to dislike it.

2. Design Diaries and Automation Logs

Scripts don’t evolve in a vacuum: they respond to shifting needs, updated standards, new project types, and the occasional “why did we do this?” fire drill. Capturing these evolutions is not just project hygiene: it’s part of design authorship.

A design diary is an informal changelog with memory. It can be embedded in script headers, external text files, or even version-controlled documentation platforms. The goal: record not only what changed, but why.

Automation logs can track:

version number and author/editor;date of update;description of the change;reason for the change (e.g., “New local code standard for corridor width”);known limitations or warnings.

Tool tip: markdown-based README files can live alongside scripts, hosted in cloud directories or Git-based systems. Version comments should be written in a conversational style, such as: “v3.1: Simplified the occupancy filter: previous method was overfitting small rooms.”

This is less about compliance and more about creating a time machine for your thought process. Scripts are living artefacts, and they deserve a living memory.

3. Embedded Documentation in the Model

In digital workflows, documentation often gets exiled to external files — PDFs, checklists, emails — while the actual product — the model in our case — is treated as neutral data. That’s a mistake. We can leverage the model and bring it back to its original purpose of design medium even in this context, turning it into an interface.

Using Revit as an example, strategies for embedded documentation include:

Parameter notes: use Revit’s shared/project parameters to hold rationale for specific values. Example: a “Design_Rationale” parameter explaining why certain types were used.Annotated views: create dedicated views (e.g., “Script Logic Overview” or “Design Intent Map”) where documentation is visualised alongside geometry.Legends as narratives: use schedules and colour-coded legends (yes, filters do work in legends) not just for data but for storytelling (e.g., phases of automation, levels of manual override).“Ghost views”: as scary as it might sound, create views or sheets not for the delivery of the design intent, but for internal communication: logic flows, decision forks, exceptions.

Documentation inside the model travels with the model itself. It makes your thinking legible at the point of action, not buried in a folder. And it’s Agile as hell.

4. Health Checks and Intent Validators

Automation is not “fire and forget.” It’s “fire, monitor, correct.” Scripts and routines can drift, either from changing requirements or from silent misuse. Embedding validation logic into your tools helps maintain alignment between what the tool does and what you intended it to do.

Examples of Health Checks include:

Sanity checks: do all generated elements conform to standards such as naming? Are parameter values within expected ranges?Ghost errors: are there model elements created but not placed? Filled parameters that don’t drive anything?Scope alerts: if the number of elements affected by a script doubles suddenly, should it pause and ask for confirmation?

These are validator strategies. They require a little more of code but they perform internal checks within the automation tools, so that the original intent is preserved and a failsafe switch is implemented.

Write scripts that report before they act, through a preview mode with warnings or flags. Implement visual diagnostics (e.g., temporary filters or colour overlays). Use dashboards (e.g., Power BI hooked to Revit exports) to audit performance over time. In short: give your scripts some humility. They should check themselves before they wreck themselves (and your project).

5. Product Ownership for Scripts and Models

Borrowing from Agile methodologies, consider treating key scripts and models not just as assets, but as products with maintainers, roadmaps, user feedback loops, and lifecycles.

Appointing Product Owners means:

assigning responsibility for a script/model’s integrity and evolution;gathering input from its “users” (e.g., project teams, BIM coordinators);managing versioning, retirement, and onboarding;tracking change requests like features or bugs.

Treating scripts as products isn’t about adding more bureaucracy — God knows that’s the last thing we need in BIM — it’s about cultivating a design culture that values clarity, continuity, and care. When automation routines are owned, documented, and maintained like real tools rather than throwaway hacks, they stop becoming orphaned fragments of past projects and start functioning as trusted components of your practice. Versioning becomes meaningful: “We use v4.2 of the Lighting Zone Allocator: here’s what it does, here’s who to ask.” That clarity reduces the risk of misapplication and helps teams build confidence in using shared tools. It also encourages thoughtful refactoring over hasty patches, allowing systems to evolve deliberately instead of being duct-taped into irrelevance. In short, scripts deserve the same critical attention we give to buildings, because in the digital layer of design, they are the architecture.

4. Reclaiming Intuition: the Designer’s Evolving Role

If scripts are to carry memory, then designers must remember themselves not just as coders or modellers, — or technically inept artists, which is worst — but as authors in the broader sense. The practical strategies we’ve just explored — from annotated scripts to product ownership — aren’t side notes: they’re management skills needed to survive and thrive in an era where authorship risks dissolving into automation. They remind us that design intent doesn’t vanish in digital workflows; it simply mutates. And if we want to remain designers — not just operators — we need to reframe intuition not as an endangered species, but as a new form of literacy.

Too often, intuition is pitched as the opposite of automation, as if there were a clean divide between gut feeling and digital logic. But in practice, they interlace. When a seasoned designer glances at a Dynamo graph and knows it won’t work before running it… that’s intuition. When someone selects a default value not because the software suggested it, but because they recall a hard-earned lesson from a failed submission… that’s intuition too.

When you pause for a snack and your sandwich bites back, that’s a mimic (but that’s also another story)

As we learn from the theories of fast and slow thinking, intuition is compressed experience. And in automated environments, it becomes the skill of reading the system, the ability to recognise when a script is silently misaligned with project goals. It’s knowing when to trust the output and when to question the assumptions embedded in the algorithm. Like code fluency, intuition becomes a kind of pattern recognition, not in opposition to technical reasoning, but inseparable from it.

This is where reflexive authorship enters the frame. In post-automation design, authorship isn’t about total control: it’s about strategic intervention. You don’t handcraft every detail: you shape the conditions that generate detail. You build tools that can surprise you, then you respond to those surprises with judgment, not rigidity. You don’t just edit models; you edit systems that produce models. In that loop, authorship isn’t erased but multiplied. This means that to be a designer is to navigate layered systems of agency. You are no longer the sole originator of form. You are a reader of constraints, a tuner of parameters, a negotiator between human intention and machine interpretation. And if that sounds abstract, consider the very real act of stepping back from an AI-generated product and asking: is this what we meant to build? That’s not just QA. That’s authorship doing its job.

The new creative stance is not about reclaiming the drafting table. It’s about learning to operate in a space where decisions are distributed across scripts, teams, platforms, and time. The designer becomes a curator of systems and a guardian of quality in environments that increasingly “design themselves.” This in itself is a form of leadership, not managerial but conceptual. Less about knowing all the answers, more about knowing which questions must remain yours. If this is the landscape, intuition is not a romantic escape from machines: it’s the only thing that lets us keep thinking with them, without being consumed by them.

So, reclaim your intuition. Write it into the code. Annotate it in the model. Speak it in reviews. Build it into the scripts that others will run long after you’ve moved on. Because that’s what authors do. They don’t just design outcomes: they leave behind systems that can still think.

Conclusion: Thinking Tools and Thinking Designers

Let’s come back to the question that started all of this:

Do tools think?

Not in the sentient, sci-fi sense. Not yet. But they do encode decisions. They propose options. They operationalise patterns. And more importantly, they remember even when we don’t. In that sense, yes: tools think. But only in the way that we have taught them to, which is precisely why the real issue isn’t whether tools can think: it’s whether we still think with them.

Hello? Is the brain still connected?

In the age of automation, authorship has not vanished but shifted, and now hides in naming conventions, in nested conditions, in scripts that propagate judgment across dozens of models. It lives in parameter schemas and in Dynamo routines built to reduce labour but capable of reducing meaning if left unexamined. And the more we separate design intent from technical excellence — the more we think we can flood studios with dozens of underpaid BIM specialists as long as we have supposedly brilliant project leaders — the more things will get messy. Automation reshapes ownership and displaces it. It spreads it across interfaces, fragments it across files, and embeds it in silent decisions that eventually will shape how buildings get drawn, calculated, modelled, built. This isn’t a lament, for me. It’s a liberation. But only if we acknowledge the new terrain.

We must stop imagining automation as an enemy of design. The real danger is something quieter: becoming passive in the presence of systems that offer too much, too fast. When suggestions become assumptions. When defaults become doctrine. When speed becomes strategy because we’re too greedy to pause and check.

So what now?

We write code as narrative. We annotate logic like we once sketched over butter paper — as a way of thinking, not just outputting. We train ourselves and our teams not just to use tools, but to interpret them, to interrogate them, to shape them back. In short: we become thinking designers for an era of thinking tools. Because design has always been about choices. And if the tools now help us choose, then our responsibility is even greater: to choose how we use them, to know when to listen and when to override, and to leave behind not just buildings, but ways of working that still think when we’re no longer there.

How to Connect Autodesk Construction Cloud and Microsoft Power BI

I’ve been told it’s difficult and — honest to God — it’s not. It’s just incredibly convoluted and, as it often happens with both Microsoft and Autodesk, stuff isn’t where you expect it to be. So here’s a quick guide on how to pull data from your project into Microsoft Power BI. You can stop reading right away if:

You don’t know what Power BI is. It might be a little too soon for you: try and get your basics straight and then come back.You have no familiarity with the Docs module of Autodesk Construction Cloud. Again, find your footing and then return here.You aren’t Project Admin of at least one project on Autodesk Construction Cloud: you won’t be able to publish data. We’ll need Docs and Insight, so make sure you have them enabled on the project you want to use.You are not the Admin of your own computer. While I have a workaround for this, I strongly suggest you go and have a chat with whoever won’t trust you to do your job on the tools your employer assigned you — if you’re a BIM/CDE manager or a BIM coordinator, I mean — and, depending on the outcome, ponder on your life choices.

If you’re still reading, congratulations: you’re a real boy.

Very much not like the BIM manager who can’t try tools and still is expected to optimise the design and construction process.Stage 1: the Connector

In order to pull stuff from your Autodesk Construction Cloud projects into Power BI, you’ll have to download a couple of things. The first one is the official Autodesk® Data Connector for Power BI, which can be found at this address.

Click “download” and you’ll be redirected to a page where you’ll be asked to log-in into your Autodesk Account;Do that and follow through all the steps: they have a 2-steps verification now, so you might need to have access to your e-mail but we’ve already established you have agency upon your own life, so that shouldn’t be a problem;Apparently, you’re redirected to the same page and nothing happened, but you’re now logged in (and you can see it from the ribbon above). If it didn’t ask you to log in, it’s probably because you told the system to try and remember you for 5 minutes straight. The important thing is that you can see your username on the ribbon above. Now you can actually download it.

Download the Exe and run it. This will actually download two things:

the Data Connector, which will enable Power BI to load data from your ACC projects;the Model Viewer Visualisation, which we’ll use to visualise your models directly within the Power BI interface (or at least we’ll try).

If you’re having trouble with this step, take a look at the Autodesk Installation Guide (until they change all the permalinks all over again and all these community-drafted tutorials become useless).

If you aren’t the Admin of your computer, the guide provides a workaround for that too, but you’ll have to catch your IT and bind it with a spell first.Stage 2: the Void

You might think: “this is it, that was easy”. According to the feedback I got, this is where people stop, so let’s try not to stop here but first let’s wee what’s stopping them.

1. You open Power BI Desktop just like any other day and start a new report by getting data from another source.

2. In the Get Data panel, you can type Autodesk or browse until you find these two: a thing called Autodesk Data Connector for Power BI (Custom) and a thing called Autodesk Construction Cloud. This first time, you might want to select the second option: Autodesk Construction Cloud.

3. Select the region your projects are located. Autodesk provides the possibility to host data on servers based on their geographical area, and some people have been whining on LinkedIn about it, because the data cannot be transferred from one server to the other. I’d like to remind these people that there is such a thing as war, and I wouldn’t want to host data about my hospitals on the land of someone who might decide to bomb them. I wish we’d live in a better world. We don’t. I pick Europe, you pick yours.

4. You’ll see a list of the hubs you’ve been invited as an administrator and — by clicking on the + symbol at the left of the name — a choice between Account Extracts and Project Extracts. Let’s start with Project Extras: we’ll get to the first one later.

Pardon my redacting: people seem to think their stuff is super-secret…

5. At this point you can browse through your projects and you should be able to see your stuff. However, no matter how data-rich your projects are, this is what you’ll get:

Any attempt to select below the project name will result in this error.

DataSource.Error: No data requests for this project in the last 30 days. Users with project admin access can request data from Autodesk Data Connector.

You’ve established your connection, but The Void is staring back at you.

This is where some of my students stopped. Who should require what and where?
Don’t worry.
I’ve got you.

I’ve got you…Stage 3: This is the Way

Well, at least one of the ways.

To publish data from a view of your Revit model (and I stress, this’ll only work from a native Revit file on Autodesk Construction Cloud Docs: no dwgs, no ifcs, no nwds, no nothing), you’ll have to:

Create a 3d view in your model, appropriately cropped and filtered, and make sure it’s selected for publishing when you upload the file on Docs (if you don’t know how to do that, take a look at the official guide);
Note: the default 3d view is usually selected for publishing, unless your BIM Coordinator hates your guts and has removed the option for reasons unbeknown to you commoners.Have the file uploaded on Autodesk Construction Cloud and find it in the browser;Click on the filename and open the preview;Click on the upper left button to browse all published views in the uploaded model and click on the 3d tab: you’ll find the 3d view you’ve published (if you don’t, it’s either you haven’t selected it for publishing, you haven’t published it or a mixture of both). If you’re one of my clients, this might or might not be your mixing tank.

Now for the last part. D’you see those three dots on the side of the view name? Click them.

Yes, I’m not shitting you: it’s those three things. It’s Autodesk’s first rule of user interface: the smaller a thing is, the more crucial it is to make sure the big ones actually work.

You’ll have one only option and it’s the one you need: Create Data Exchange.

3.1. Errors you might get

There’s a couple of things that might go wrong here: one is quite common, the other’s a weird one.

Problem 1: you’re old. Or at least, your model is. The Data Connection can only be created from Revit 2023 onwards: if your model is older, you’ll get the suggestion to update it. For sanity’s sake, don’t. Never upload a Revit model unless you get a hologram form a priness dressed in white who states it’s your only hope.

Problem 2: the view isn’t actually published. This is the weird one, as you shouldn’t be able to see the view on Docs at all, and it took me a while to recreate it, but apparently it happens if the view has been selected for publishing, the model has been uploaded and published, but then the view was unselected in another upload of the model. What you’re seeing is the ghost of the view.

Promise me / When you’ll see / A 3d view you’ll think of me…Stage 3: This is the (other way)

With the first option, you’ve effectively pushed a 3d view (and all data it contains) towards Microsoft Power BI. But what if the data you’re looking for isn’t in the view of a model? What if you want to analyse data on document uploads, ongoing issues, clashes and so on? That’s where the second way comes in.

This is the (other) way.

For the second way, you’ll need the Insight module of Autodesk Construction Cloud and it’s free but you might not have it enabled because your CDE manager hates you or because you hate yourself (for some reason, I lock myself out of Insight every single time).

You can reach it through the pull-down menu by clicking on Docs on the upper-left corner. It’s down there alongside all the rest of the modules that are enabled on the project.

If you don’t know how to enable modules on a project (or if your CDE manager tries to bullshit you), here’s a guide on how to do it.

Insight does its thing and we might get onto that later, but for now all that needs your attention is the Data Connector at the bottom of the sidebar. It looks like it’ll try to download stuff but it won’t.

The Data Connector page will offer a couple of options, including the one to use a Power BI Template, but as a first start I recommend a manual extraction, just to see what our options are, so you’ll want to click on “Execute Extraction” (or whatever’s the name in English, since Autodesk won’t let me change the language of my interface regardless of EVERYTHING ABOUT BE being in English, from my OS to my deeper thoughts).

Hit the Blue Button

A sidebar will sweep in from the right, like a hero coming from the city in a Greek drama, asking you what kind of data will you want to extract, and it’ll offer you different options: you’ll have data on Issues and Documents, Clashes (provided a coordination space has been set up), Approval workflows and Markups.

I strongly advise you against picking “Select All”, as this might take a while: if you’re running a test, select something that’s actually significant in the way you’ve used ACC on the project. If you only used it a document repository, pick Documents (ACC) and leave the rest. Please.

In the second scroll-down menu, you’ll be able to set up a timeframe (or not). If this is your first time, you might want to leave it empty but consider that the longer people have been using ACC on the project the more data you’ll have to process. When this will become a regular habit of yours, you’ll have a specific timeframe in mind. Hopefully.

When you’re done setting up things, hit the Run button at the bottom of the page.

The system warns you it might take a while by default, even if you’re running a fake test on a fake project called Banana Project just for the sake of having a clean screenshot.

Just saying…

They will send you an e-mail when they’re done, whether you like it or not, so you can go and have a drink while you’re waiting. I won’t judge you.

Yes, darling, I know. I was still looking at the page.

When it’s done, the report will be listed in the page alongside every other report you’ll run. At this point, you might be tempted to download the fat zip file Autodesk created for you, unzip it and manually import it into Power BI. Please don’t. You’re done. Leave this accursed place and go back to Power BI Desktop because we have the connection.

Leave this place. We’re done here.Stage 4: Back to Where We Started

Remember where we dropped off? We stared at the void of the Autodesk connector, and the void stared back at us. Well, no more of that. If you go back to your Navigator, you’ll see a bunch of tables under the project.

Once you’ve selected the table, you can either load it and then transform it with a Power Query or you can transform it before loading it. But that’s not why we’re here.

Before selecting one table, use the preview and make sure it actually contains something…

4.1. What about my 3d View?

Fair question. In order to get data from the 3d view we previously published, you need to get data not from Autodesk Construction Cloud but using the Autodesk Data Connector for Power BI.

In the next panel, you’ll have to select:

the Source Type (you’ll probably have no other option than Data Exchange);optionally the unit of length (a set of choices between metric and Imperial) if you want data in a different format than the project settings;the possibility to include filters and, if you want, the URL of the view.

Just select Source Type and hit Ok.

The rest carries on pretty much in the same way: you’ll find yourself staring at the Navigator, you’ll have to browse through your hubs and then through your projects, and the view you published will eventually be visible.

Note: the preview will be in tabular form, and truncated.

Select the view and hit Load. It might take a while.

4.2. But I want to see it!

By now, you’ll have imported a tabular view of your model, which isn’t pretty.

Remember: this is how Revit sees things. No wonder it’s cranky.

In order to visualise your model, you’ll have to create a visual just as you would for a pie chart, so hit the Report View on the left bar of your interface, and you’ll find yourself here.

Now, the visual you need should be in the side panels, together with all other chart types, but you won’t find it unless your IT really loves you and has installed a certain file somewhere. The file is AutodeskDataConnectorforPowerBI.pbiviz, and it’s a custom visualisation file: it should be in a Power BI folder under WindowsApps in Program Files, which is a folder buried so deep and protected by so many layers that even I can’t access it on my own computer because being an Administrator is actually not enough.

If I wanted to be locked out of my own computer for my own good, I’d use Apple

No worries. This just means you won’t have the visualisation by default, but you can still load custom visualisations in any Power BI file through the Get More Visuals -> Import a Visual from a File option, which you’ll find by clicking on the three dots under the available charts.

Browse until you find the AutodeskDataConnectorforPowerBI.pbiviz file (it should be under Documents\Power BI Desktop\Custom Visuals). If everything goes according to plan, you’ll get a very happy message, and a tiny button with the Autodesk logo will be added under the others.

Once you hit the button, you’ll need to follow the steps it gives you, and you can read them below since you lose them the moment you execute the first one.

Step 1: search for [ViewName].Viewer in the Data pane and drag it into the corresponding field.

This one goes here

Step 2: drag and drop ExternalElementId for mapping, as many times as it asks (it might be 2, it might be 3, because of… reasons).

In the colour field, you can drag any parameter you want to use to colour the view (Category is a classic, for instance, or leave it empty to colour by material and object styles.

You are done. You can start messing around with your data and your 3d view. You’re welcome.

Werewolves Wednesday: The Wolf-Leader (20)

A werewolf story by Alexandre Dumas père.

Chapter XX: True to Tryst

On quitting the Countess’s room, Thibault had left the castle by the way which he had described to her, and soon found himself safe beyond its walls and outside the park. And now, for the first time in his life, Thibault had really nowhere to go. His hut was burnt, he was without a friend, and like Cain, he was a wanderer on the face of the earth. He turned to the unfailing shelter of the forest, and there made his way to the lower end of Chavigny; as the day was breaking he came across a solitary house, and asked if he could buy some bread. The woman belonging to it, her husband being away, gave him some, but refused to receive payment for it; his appearance frightened her. Having now food sufficient for the day, Thibault returned to the forest, with the intention of spending his time till evening in a part which he knew between Fleury and Longpont, where the trees were especially thick and tall. As he was looking for a resting place behind a rock, his eye was attracted by a shining object lying at the bottom of a slope, and his curiosity led him to climb down and see what it was. The shining object was the silver badge belonging to a huntsman’s shoulder-belt; the shoulder-belt was slung round the neck of a dead body, or rather of a skeleton, for the flesh had been entirely eaten off the bones, which were as clean as if prepared for an anatomist’s study or a painter’s studio. The skeleton looked as if it had only lain there since the preceding night.

“Ah! ah!” said Thibault, “this is probably the work of my friends, the wolves; they evidently profited by the permission which I gave them.”

Curious to know if possible who the victim was, he examined it more closely; his curiosity was soon satisfied, for the badge, which the wolves had no doubt rejected as less easily digestible than the rest, was lying on the chest of the skeleton, like a ticket on a bale of goods.

J.B. LESTOCQ,

Head Keeper to the Comte de Mont-Gobert.

“Well done!” laughed Thibault, “here is one at least who did not live long to enjoy the result of his murderous act.” Then, contracting his brow, he muttered to himself, in a low voice, and this time without laughing:

“Is there perhaps, after all, what people call a Providence?”

Lestocq’s death was not difficult to account for. He had probably been executing some order for his master that night, and on the road between Mont-Gobert and Longpont, had been attacked by wolves. He had defended himself with the same knife with which he had wounded the Baron, for Thibault found the knife a few paces off, at a spot where the ground showed traces of a severe struggle; at last, being disarmed, the ferocious beasts had dragged him into the hollow, and there devoured him.

Thibault was becoming so indifferent to everything that he felt neither pleasure nor regret, neither satisfaction nor remorse, at Lestocq’s death; all he thought was, that it simplified matters for the Countess, as she would now only have her husband upon whom she need revenge herself. Then he went and found a place where the rocks afforded him the best shelter from the wind, and prepared to spend his day there in peace. Towards mid-day, he heard the horn of the Lord of Vez, and the cry of his hounds; the mighty huntsman was after game, but the chase did not pass near enough to Thibault to disturb him.

At last the night came. At nine o’clock Thibault rose and set out for the Castle of Mont-Gobert. He found the breach, followed the path he knew, and came to the little hut where Lisette had been awaiting him on the night when he had come in the guise of Raoul. The poor girl was there this evening, but alarmed and trembling. Thibault wished to carry out the old traditions and tried to kiss her but she sprang back with visible signs of fear.

“Do not touch me,” she said, “or I shall call out.”

“Oh, indeed! my pretty one,” said Thibault, “you were not so sour-tempered the other day with the Baron Raoul.”

“May be not,” said the girl, “but great many things have happened since the other day.”

“And many more to happen still,” said Thibault in a lively tone.

“I think,” said the waiting-maid in a mournful voice, “that the climax is already reached.”

Then, as she went on in front, “If you wish to come,” she added, “follow me.”

Thibault followed her; Lisette, without the slightest effort at concealment, walked straight across the open space that lay between the trees and the castle.

“You are courageous to-day,” said Thibault, “and supposing some one were to see us…”

“There is no fear now,” she answered, “the eyes that could have seen us are all closed.”

Although he did not understand what the young girl meant by these words, the tone in which they were spoken made Thibault shiver.

He continued to follow her in silence as they went up the winding-stairs to the first floor. As Lisette laid her hand on the key of the door, Thibault suddenly stopped her. Something in the silence and solitude of the castle filled him with fear; it seemed as if a curse might have fallen on the place.

“Where are we going?” said Thibault, scarcely knowing himself what he said.

“You know well enough, surely.”

“Into the Countess’s room?”

“Into the Countess’s room.”

“She is waiting for me?”

“She is waiting for you.”

And Lisette opened the door. “Go in,” she said.

Thibault went in, and Lisette shut the door behind him and waited outside.

It was the same exquisite room, lighted in the same manner, filled with the same sweet scent. Thibault looked round for the Countess, he expected to see her appear at the dressing-room door, but the door remained closed. Not a sound was to be heard in the room, except the ticking of the Sevres clock, and the beating of Thibault’s heart. He began to look about him with a feeling of shuddering fear for which he could not account; then his eyes fell on the bed; the Countess was lying asleep upon it. In her hair were the same diamond pins, round her neck the same pearls; she was dressed in the same pink silk dressing-gown, and had on the same little slippers of cloth of silver which she had worn to receive the Baron Raoul. Thibault went up to her; the Countess did not stir.

“You are sleeping, fair Countess?” he said, leaning over to look at her.

But all at once, he started upright, staring before him, his hair standing on end, the sweat breaking out on his fore head. The terrible truth was beginning to dawn upon him; was the Countess sleeping the sleep of this world or of eternity?

He fetched a light from the mantel piece, and with trembling hand, held it to the face of the mysterious sleeper. It was pale as ivory, with the delicate veins traced over the temples, and the lips still red. A drop of pink burning wax fell on this still face of sleep; it did not awake the Countess.

“Ah!” cried Thibault, “what is this?” and he put down the candle, which his shaking hand could no longer hold, on the night-table.

The Countess lay with her arms stretched out close to her sides; she appeared to be clasping something in either hand. With some effort, Thibault was able to open the left one; within it he found the little bottle, which she had taken from her dressing case the night before. He opened the other hand; within it lay a piece of paper on which were written these few words: “True to tryst,” yes, true and faithful unto death, for the Countess was dead!

All Thibault’s illusions were fading one after the other, like the dreams of the night which gradually fade away, as the sleeper becomes more and more thoroughly awake. There was a difference, however, for other men find their dead alive again in their dreams; but with Thibault, his dead did not arise and walk, but remained lying forever in their last sleep.

He wiped his forehead, went to the door leading into the corridor, and opened it, to find Lisette on her knees, praying.

“Is the Countess dead then?” asked Thibault.

“The Countess is dead, and the Count is dead.”

“From the effect of the wounds given him by the Baron Raoul?”

“No, from the blow with the dagger given him by the Countess.”

“Ah!” said Thibault, grimacing hideously, in his effort to force a laugh in the midst of this grim drama, “all this tale you hint at is new to me.”

Then Lisette told him the tale in full. It was a plain tale, but a terrible one.

The Countess had remained in bed part of the day, listening to the village bells of Puiseux, which were tolling as the Baron’s body was being borne from thence to Vauparfond, where he was to be laid in the family grave. Towards four o’clock the bells ceased; then the Countess rose, took the dagger from under her pillow, bid it in her breast, and went towards her husband’s room. She found the valet in attendance in good spirits; the doctor had just left, having examined the wound, and declared the Count’s life out of danger.

“Madame will agree that it is a thing to rejoice at!” said the valet.

“Yes, to rejoice at indeed.”

And the Countess went on into her husband’s room. Five minutes later she left it again.

“The Count is sleeping,” she said, “do not go in until he calls.”

The valet bowed and sat down in the ante-room to be in readiness at the first call from his master. The Countess went back to her room.

“Undress me, Lisette, “she said to her waiting maid, “and give me the clothes that I had on the last time he came.”

The maid obeyed; we have already seen how every detail of toilet was arranged exactly as it had been on that fatal night. Then the Countess wrote a few words on a piece of paper, which she folded and kept in her right hand. After that, she lay down on her bed.

“Will Madame not take anything,” asked the maid.

The Countess opened her left hand, and showed her a little bottle she was holding inside it.

“Yes, Lisette,” she said, “I am going to take what is in this bottle.”

“What, nothing but that!” said Lisette.

“It will be enough, Lisette; for after I have taken it, I shall have need of nothing more.”

And as she spoke, she put the bottle to her mouth and drank the contents at a draught. Then she said:

“You saw that man, Lisette, who waited for us in the road; I have a meeting with him this evening, here in my room, at half past nine. You know where to go and wait for him, and you will bring him here. I do not wish that any one should be able to say that I was not true to my word, ever after I am dead.”

Thibault had nothing to say; the agreement made between them had been kept. Only the Countess had accomplished her revenge herself, single-handed, as every-one understood, when the valet feeling uneasy about his master, and going softly into his room to look at him, found him lying on his back with a dagger in his heart; and then hurrying to tell Madame what had happened, found the Countess dead also.

The news of this double death soon spread through the Castle, and all the servants had fled, saying that the exterminating Angel was in the Castle; the waiting-maid alone remained to carry out her dead mistress’s wishes.

Thibault had nothing more to do at the castle, so he left the Countess on her bed, with Lisette near her, and went down stairs. As Lisette had said, there was no fear now of meeting either master or servants; the servants had run away, the master and mistress were dead. Thibault once more made for the breach in the wall. The sky was dark, and if it had not been January, you might have imagined a thunder storm was brewing; there was barely light enough to see the footpath, as he went along. Once or twice Thibault paused; he fancied he had detected the sound of the dry branches cracking under someone’s footsteps keeping pace with his, both to right and left.

Having come to the breach, Thibault distinctly heard a voice say: “that’s the man!” and at the same moment, two gendarmes, concealed on the farther side of the wall, seized Thibault by the collar, while two others came up behind.

It appeared that Cramoisi, jealous with regard to Lisette, had been prowling about at nights on the watch, and had, only the evening before, noticed a strange man come in and go out of the park along the more secluded paths, and he had reported the fact to the head of the police. When the recent serious events that had taken place at the Castle became generally known, orders were given to send four men and take up any suspicious looking person seen prowling about. Two of the men, with Cramoisi for guide, had ambushed on the farther side of the breach, and the two others had dogged Thibault through the park. Then as we have seen, at the signal given by Cramoisi, they had all four fallen upon him as he issued from the breach.

There was a long and obstinate struggle; Thibault was not a man that even four others could overcome without difficulty; but he had no weapon by him, and his resistance was therefore useless. The gendarmes had been more bent on securing him, on account of having recognised that it was Thibault, and Thibault was beginning to earn a very bad name, so many misfortunes having become associated with it; so Thibault was knocked down, and finally bound and led off between two mounted men. The other two gendarmes walked one in front, and one behind.
Thibault had merely struggled out of a natural feeling of self-defence and pride, for his power to inflict evil was, as we know, unlimited, and he had but to wish his assailants dead, and they would have fallen lifeless at his feet. But he thought there was time enough for that; as long as there still remained a wish to him, he could escape from man’s justice, even though he were at the foot of the scaffold.

So, Thibault, securely bound, his hands tied, and fetters upon his feet, walked along between his four gendarmes, apparently in a state of resignation. One of the gendarmes held the end of the rope with which he was bound, and the four men made jokes and laughed at him, asking the wizard Thibault, why, being possessed of such power, he had allowed himself to be taken. And Thibault replied to their scoffings with the well-known Proverb: “He laughs best who laughs last,” and the gendarmes expressed a wish that they might be the ones to do so.

On leaving Puiseux behind, they came to the forest. The weather was growing more and more threatening; the dark clouds hung so low that the trees looked as if they were holding up a huge black veil, and it was impossible to see four steps ahead. But he, Thibault saw; saw lights swiftly passing, and crossing one another, in the darkness on either side. Closer and closer drew the lights, and pattering footfalls were heard among the dry leaves. The horses became restive, shied and snorted, sniffing the air and trembling beneath their riders, while the coarse laughter of the men themselves died down. It was Thibault’s turn to laugh now.

“What are you laughing at?” asked one of the gendarmes. “I am laughing at your having left off laughing,” said Thibault.

The lights drew nearer, and the footfalls became more distinct, at the sound of Thibault’s voice. Then a more ominous sound was heard, a sound of teeth striking together, as jaws opened and shut.

“Yes, yes, my friends,” said Thibault, “you have tasted human flesh, and you found it good.”

He was answered by a low growl of approbation, half like a dog’s, and half like a hyena’s.

“Quite so,” said Thibault, “I understand; after having made a meal of a keeper, you would not mind tasting a gendarme.”

The gendarmes themselves were beginning to shudder with fear. “To whom are you talking?” they asked him.

“To those who can answer me,” said Thibault; and he gave a howl. Twenty or more howls responded, some from close at hand, some from farther off.

“H’m!” said one of the gendarmes, “what are these beasts that are following us? this good-for-nothing seems to understand their language?”

“What!” said the shoemaker, “you take Thibault the wolf-master prisoner, you carry him through the forest at night, and then you ask what are the lights and the howls that follow him! … Do you hear, friends?” cried Thibault, “these gentlemen are asking who you are. Answer them, all of you together, that they may have no further doubt on the matter.”

The wolves, obedient to their master’s voice, gave one prolonged, unanimous howl. The horses panted and shivered, and one or two of them reared. The gendarmes endeavoured to calm their animals, patting and gentling them.

“That is nothing,” said Thibault, “wait till you see each horse with two wolves hanging on to its hind-quarters and another at its throat.”

The wolves now came in between the horses’ legs, and began caressing Thibault; one of them stood up, and put its front paws on Thibault’s chest, as if asking for orders.

“Presently, presently,” said Thibault, “there is plenty of time; do not be selfish, give your comrades time to come up.”

The men could no longer control their horses, which were rearing and shying, and although going at a foot’s pace, were streaming with sweat.

“Do you not think,” said Thibault, “you would do best now to come to terms with me? That is, if you were to let me free on condition that you all sleep in your beds to-night.”

“Go at a walking pace,” said one of the gendarmes, “as long as we do that, we have nothing to fear.”

Another one drew his sword. A second or two later there was a howl of pain; one of the wolves had seized hold of this gendarme’s boot, and the latter had pierced him through with his weapon.

“I call that a very imprudent thing to do,” said Thibault; “the wolves eat each other, whatever the proverb may say, and once having tasted blood, I do not know that even I shall have the power to hold them back.”

The wolves threw themselves in a body on their wounded comrade, and in five minutes there was nothing left of its carcase but the bare bones. The gendarmes had profited by this respite to get on ahead, but without releasing Thibault, whom they obliged to run alongside of them; what he had foreseen, however, happened. There was a sudden sound as of an approaching hurricane the whole pack was in pursuit, following them up at full gallop. The horses, having once started trotting, refused to go at a walking pace again, and frightened by the stamping, the smell, and the howls, now set off galloping, in spite of their riders’ efforts to hold them in. The man who had hold of the rope, now requiring both hands to master his horse, let go of Thibault; and the wolves leaped on to the horses, clinging desperately to the cruppers and withers and throats of the terrified animals. No sooner had the latter felt the sharp teeth of their assailants, than they scattered, rushing in every direction.

“Hurrah, wolves! hurrah!” cried Thibault. But the fierce animals had no need of encouragement, and soon each horse had six or seven more wolves in pursuit of him.

Horses and wolves disappeared, some one way some the other, and the men’s cries of distress, the agonised neighings of the horses, and the furious howls of the wolves became gradually fainter and fainter as they travelled farther away.

Thibault was left free once more, and alone. His hands however were still bound, and his feet fettered. First he tried to undo the cord with his teeth, but this he found impossible. Then he tried to wrench his bonds apart by the power of his muscles, but that too was unavailing; the only result of his efforts was to make the cord cut into his flesh. It was his turn to bellow with pain and anger. At last, tired of trying to wrest his hands free, he lifted them, bound as they were, to heaven, and cried: “Oh! black wolf! friend, let these cords that bind me be loosened; thou knowest well that it is only to do evil that I wish for my hands to be free.”

And at the same moment his fetters were broken and fell to the ground, and Thibault beat his hands together with another roar, this time of joy.

…to be continued.

Let’s visit Casa degli Atellani (without getting arrested for trespassing)

In a city that often hides its wonders behind unassuming façades, Casa degli Atellani is a palimpsest of Milan’s most profound historical, artistic, and architectural evolutions. And yet, this house — steeped in stories from the Sforza court to the 20th-century architectural revival — is now closed to the public, bought by Bernard “Louis Vuitton” Arnault and rumoured to be transformed into a luxury hotel. It would be hypocritical on my side to be against luxury hotels, but this quiet closure risks erasing not only a cultural treasure but also the complex and layered narrative it embodies, so let’s see why the house is important and hope this will guide the designers while they try to add one more layer.

And yet I’m so angry the house isn’t open anymore. Casa degli Atellani is not just a beautiful Renaissance residence; it is a living document of Milan’s shifting identity — from ducal ambitions and Leonardo da Vinci’s vineyard, to the recovery of Lombard frescoes and Piero Portaluppi’s architectural interventions. To lose its accessibility is to flatten a multidimensional history into a marketable surface. This blog piece invites you to dress in black, darken your face, and come with me to explore Casa degli Atellani’s layered history. We’ll see why every one of those layers — political, artistic, architectural — deserves to be both preserved and reinterpreted, not to fossilise the past but to honour its cumulative value, understanding that the addition of a new layer should be an act of cultural dialogue, not cultural overwrite.

Casa degli Atellani is situated in corso Magenta 65, in the historical Porta Vercellina sestriere.

This is it. You won’t notice if unless you know it (the banners aren’t there anymore).1. Early Origins: the Atellani Family and the Renaissance Context

To understand the significance of Casa degli Atellani, one must first immerse oneself in the social and political atmosphere of late 15th-century Milan. This was a city on the brink of transformation, poised between medieval urbanism and the Renaissance’s humanist aspirations. At the heart of this transition stood the Sforza dynasty, particularly Ludovico Maria Sforza — better known as Ludovico il Moro because of his dark complexion — whose vision was to establish Milan as a centre of art, science, and refined court culture.

Ludovico il Moro. He wasn’t a particularly handsome fellow, but he rocked.A Gift of Power and Allegiance

Casa degli Atellani owes its name to the Atellani family, a noble lineage of southern origin, possibly from Atella in Campania. The family had risen to prominence in Milan as loyalists to the Sforza and, in 1490, Ludovico il Moro donated the surrounding land and the existing residence to Giacometto of the Atellani family, as a political reward and a way of securing allegiance. The house stood on what was then a key thoroughfare in the emerging urban network near Porta Vercellina, just across from Santa Maria delle Grazie, the church and Dominican convent that Ludovico was ambitiously renovating.

The proximity was no accident. Ludovico sought to create an ideal courtly neighbourhood, a symbolic and physical extension of his power. By placing trusted allies in strategic residences, he was building both a literal and ideological fortification around his most cherished projects — Santa Maria delle Grazie — where he would later be a patron for Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper.

Santa Maria delle GrazieArchitectural Roots: a Milanese Typology

The original structure of the house reflected a late Gothic-Renaissance hybrid, a style not uncommon in Milan during the 15th century. It likely featured a corte nobile (noble courtyard), arcades, and decorative frescoes, that served not only residential but also representative functions. Unlike the Florentine palazzo typology, the Milanese residence of this period integrated urban domesticity with strategic display, often oriented toward internal gardens or vineyards, and made for social diplomacy as much as for family life.

Although much of the early structure has since been altered or restored (more on that later), traces of the original configuration remain: the garden layout, which would later host Leonardo’s vineyard, reflects these Renaissance spatial principles: nature, order, and social prestige interwoven into the very fabric of the residence.

The structure of the houseThe Role of the Court and Urban Identity

At the end of the 15th century, Milan was not just a city of merchants and artisans: it was a court city. With Ludovico il Moro assuming de facto power in 1480 and then officially becoming Duke in 1494, the need for an elite, educated, and loyal class to embody his cultural project became central. The Atellani family was part of this effort.

In this sense, Casa degli Atellani was never a neutral space; it was a political artefact. Its location, ownership, and architectural language contributed to a network that sought to root the Sforza vision into the geography of Milan in ways we’ll see better in a while. Through this lens, the house represents not only private memory but also a foundational layer in the city’s public identity, which we still witness today.

Is it antique? Is it modern? It is both.2. Ludovico il Moro and the Dream of a Cultural Capital

In the final decades of the 15th century, Milan emerged as a powerful and cosmopolitan city-state, seeking to rival Florence, Venice, and Rome not only in military and economic power but also in cultural ambition. Central to this transformation was Ludovico Maria Sforza, known as il Moro, who wielded extraordinary influence even before officially ascending to the ducal throne in 1494. A patron of the arts and a shrewd political operator, Ludovico sought to recast Milan as the heart of the Italian Renaissance, a project in which Casa degli Atellani played a surprisingly deliberate role.

Santa Maria delle Grazie: Monument of Power and Legacy

The cornerstone of Ludovico’s cultural strategy was Santa Maria delle Grazie, a Dominican convent and church that he transformed from a modest Gothic structure into one of the most celebrated Renaissance landmarks in Europe. Construction of the new tribune began in the 1490s, entrusted to Donato Bramante, and the refectory was destined to host Leonardo da Vinci’s monumental Ultima Cena, a symbolic masterpiece representing divine order, dynastic legitimacy, and intellectual virtuosity.

Ludovico’s motivations for such patronage were not purely aesthetic. His wife, Beatrice d’Este, was buried in the church, and it was widely believed that Ludovico intended it as a dynastic mausoleum for the Sforza family. Thus, Santa Maria delle Grazie became a locus of spiritual, political, and artistic energy, carefully calibrated to legitimize his rule in the eyes of both the Milanese and the broader Italian elite.

An incomplete marble cover meant for the conjoined tombs of Ludovico il Moro and his wife Beatrice Sforza, currently on display in Pavia.A Courtly Microcosm: The Urban Choreography of Power

Casa degli Atellani, located directly across the street from Santa Maria delle Grazie, was not an incidental neighbour, as we were seeing. It was part of a curated urban landscape, a deliberate weaving of noble residences into the orbit of the ducal complex. Ludovico granting the house to Giacometto degli Atellani, a courtier loyal to the Sforza ruling, signalled a strategy of consolidating allegiance through spatial proximity and architectural patronage, and also secured indirect control over the area, which wouldn’t be allowed to develop in directions not approved by the central aesthetic rule of the Sforzas.

This gesture had a twofold significance. Alongside embedding the Atellani family within the visual and social perimeter of the Duke’s most important architectural investment, it aligned private domesticity with public spectacle, a characteristic Milan would never, ever lose. The Atellani residence functioned not just as a home but as a courtly satellite, participating in Ludovico’s project to re-script Milan’s civic identity through art and urbanism.

From Residence to Representation

By placing a trusted family within Casa degli Atellani — in such close dialogue with Santa Maria delle Grazie — Ludovico blurred the boundaries between statecraft and stagecraft. The street itself became a corridor of influence where every structure, façade, and fresco reinforced a shared narrative of cultural ascendancy and political stability. In a way, this early form of urban branding mirrored the visual coherence of other Renaissance cities — such as the Medici’s Florence — but with a distinctly Milanese flavor, grounded in innovation, courtly diplomacy, and architectural fusion. Don’t forget that the castle is just a stone’s throw from there.

This interweaving of art, architecture, and ideology found its apex in Leonardo da Vinci’s presence in Milan. His work at the convent and his simultaneous ownership of a vineyard directly behind Casa degli Atellani (we’ll get to that in a moment) reveal the full extent to which Ludovico il Moro had constructed a cultural ecosystem: one in which the sacred, the domestic, and the artistic existed in choreographed interdependence.

Yeah, I mean this castle.3. Leonardo’s Vineyard: a Living Fragment of how the Economy Worked

Few places can claim a tangible connection to Leonardo da Vinci that extends beyond canvas and invention. Yet behind the walls of Casa degli Atellani, nestled in a quiet urban garden, lay a small parcel of land that tells an extraordinary story: the vineyard gifted to Leonardo by Ludovico il Moro in 1498. Although not the original vineyard, this modest stretch of soil has been reconstructed to signify centuries of transformation, rediscovery, and even destruction, emerging as one of the most intimate relics of Renaissance history. How did that happen, and why would an intellectual want a vineyard? First things first.

Yes, this is the Last Supper I’m talking about, in case you’re wondering.A Ducal Gift Amid Crisis

The vineyard was granted to Leonardo at a critical moment. In 1498, as he was completing The Last Supper in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, tensions were rising across the Italian peninsula. Ludovico il Moro, then at the peak of his power, sought to retain Leonardo in Milan despite political turbulence, and he wouldn’t have it. The gift of a 16-perch vineyard (roughly 8,000 square meters) was both a reward and a strategic gesture, land being among the most prestigious and enduring currencies of gratitude and status. Think about it. Nowadays, they give you money and you can invest it safely and effortlessly through a bank, but back in those days, banks were being invented. Literally. A piece of land was a strategic asset that would grant the kind of annuity, a regular and steady income, you would never have without being of noble birth.

Located directly behind what is now Casa degli Atellani, the vineyard symbolically anchored Leonardo to Milan. It is a revealing detail: Leonardo, an itinerant genius, was offered not gold, not titles, but something agricultural and eternal. The vineyard subtly reinforced Ludovico’s own self-image as a refined and generous patron, cultivating minds and vines alike, and the metaphor wouldn’t have been lost on Leonardo himself.

As we know, it didn’t work. Leonardo packed up his most precious belongings and left Milan in 1499, shortly after the French forces invaded and Ludovico was deposed.

The original vineyard was restored and reopened to the public in 2015, coinciding with the Expo 2015 event in Milan. It was replanted with the Malvasia di Candia Aromatica grape variety, historically documented as the type Leonardo would have cultivated, to recreate the authentic Renaissance vineyard experience.A Disappearance and a Rediscovery

For centuries, the vineyard vanished from public consciousness. Changing ownerships, urban developments, and war all conspired to obscure its physical trace. As we’ll see, its rediscovery is due to Piero Portaluppi in 1920, who did a restoration of Casa degli Atellani and became aware of archival references to the land grant and its topographical clues. Though the vineyard was no longer visible, its story lingered beneath the surface, literally.

It was not until 2015, during preparations for Expo Milano, that the vineyard was scientifically reconstructed. Researchers from the University of Milan, led by Professor Attilio Scienza, conducted soil and DNA analysis to identify the original Malvasia di Candia Aromatica vines that had once grown there. Using historical documents and biological matching, they were able to replant Leonardo’s vineyard exactly as it had been, reintroducing a living element of his world into the 21st century. The vineyard became not only a tribute to Leonardo’s polymathy, which included deep botanical and agricultural knowledge, but also a symbol of continuity: a living organism reclaimed from archival silence.

I’m told the grapes look like this.4. From Renaissance Splendour to Modern Revival: between the 16th and 20th Centuries

While Casa degli Atellani is renowned for its Renaissance origins and its association with figures like Ludovico il Moro and Leonardo da Vinci, its journey through the subsequent centuries is equally compelling. This period saw the residence transition through various phases, reflecting the broader socio-political and architectural evolutions of Milan.

The gardenPost-Sforza Transitions and Changing Ownership

Following the death of Francesco II Sforza in 1535, the last Duke of Milan from the Sforza lineage, the duchy fell under Spanish control, as it was incorporated into the Habsburg Empire ruled by Charles V and subsequently Philip II of Spain. The fall of the Sforza dynasty marked a turning point not only for Milan as a duchy but also for the constellation of urban palaces and noble houses that had thrived under their patronage, including Casa degli Atellani, whose owning family began its long descent into relative obscurity.

Milan ushered in centuries of foreign rule, court structures were reshaped under Spanish absolutism, and the symbolic value of properties like the Atellani residence shifted from being active nodes of power to passive remnants of a previous ruling. The house changed ownership several times between the 17th and 19th centuries. After the Atellani family faded from prominence, the property was transferred to the Taverna family, one of the noble lineages that had gained favour under Spanish and later Austrian Habsburg administration. The Taverna maintained the house as a private dwelling, though little is recorded about any significant architectural or artistic modifications during this period.

By the 18th century, the building passed into the hands of the Pianca family, and later the Martini di Cigala, indicating its continued function as an elite residence, albeit increasingly detached from the cultural vanguard it once represented. During these centuries, the house followed the typical arc of many Milanese noble residences: maintaining its basic structure and aristocratic identity, while gradually being adapted to more domestic, and sometimes even fragmented, uses. Some rooms were rented, subdivided, or repurposed for utilitarian functions, as Milan itself grew denser.

What is striking is how the house managed to retain its architectural skeleton despite these transformations. Unlike other residences of its kind, Casa degli Atellani was not destroyed, absorbed into larger complexes, or completely remodelled in the neoclassical or eclectic styles of the 18th and 19th centuries. This relative architectural continuity may be attributed to a combination of luck, location, and discreet custodianship by private owners with an appreciation — if not always an active interest — in its historic value.

A 1832 map of Milan highlights the Spanish walls. They were corrupt bastards, and we weren’t fond of their occupation. What followed was worse.19th-Century Modifications and Neoclassical Influences

As Milan emerged from Napoleonic rule and entered the complex fabric of Austrian-controlled Lombardy-Venetia, the 19th century brought a wave of architectural transformations that reflected not just stylistic shifts but also a redefinition of civic identity. Neoclassicism — characterised by its orderly proportions, Greco-Roman motifs, and urban decorum — had become the architectural language of the empire, seeking to signify enlightenment and bourgeois modernity. Within this shifting aesthetic and political landscape, Casa degli Atellani underwent subtle but telling modifications that mirrored Milan’s own transformation from courtly capital to modern city.

The house, now owned by the Martini di Cigala family, was subject to internal reorganisations and exterior alterations aimed at aligning the ageing Renaissance structure with contemporary tastes. Though not radically overhauled, the building saw the injection of neoclassical vocabulary: smoother wall finishes, restrained stucco ornamentation, and possibly even modifications to fenestration and cornices to reflect more “rational” 19th-century ideals of balance and composure.

While exact documentation of every intervention is scarce, records suggest that a Milanese architect named Carlo Aspari, active in the early 1800s, was responsible for overseeing minor restorations and façade adjustments around 1823. His approach — typical of the time and unfortunately not just that time — was not to preserve Renaissance irregularities but to standardise and idealise. Decorative frescoes were often painted over or removed entirely, considered out of step with the sober elegance prized by 19th-century elites. This was a period when historical awareness had not yet developed into systematic conservation; the past was frequently aestheticised or erased in order to suit the values of the present.

In the broader urban context, the house began to suffer from its increasingly peripheral location within a changing cityscape. With the emergence of new civic centres around La Scala and Piazza del Duomo, the Corso Magenta district lost its centrality. The once-symbolic proximity to Santa Maria delle Grazie no longer held the same political or cultural charge. At the same time, maybe for this specific reason, the house avoided the drastic fate of many Milanese residences that were demolished or rebuilt to accommodate bourgeois apartment blocks, new commercial functions.

The 19th century marks a paradoxical chapter in the life of the house. On one hand, it underwent erasures, refinements, and functional reorientations that distanced it from its Renaissance essence; on the other, it persisted, architecturally recognisable and structurally intact, as Milan reshaped itself into a modern metropolis. Enter 20th-century historians and architect Piero Portaluppi.

Another shot of the courtyard where the vineyard was recreated.5. Portaluppi’s 20th-Century Revival: Modern Memory

By the early 20th century, Casa degli Atellani had become a faded aristocratic residence, standing awkwardly between historical significance and urban anonymity. Yet it was precisely this fragile equilibrium — its partial erasure and surviving fragments — that made the house a fertile ground for architectural rebirth. That opportunity was seized by Piero Portaluppi, the visionary Milanese architect whose 1920s intervention transformed Casa degli Atellani into a dialogic space where Renaissance heritage and modern sensibility could coexist.

Arch. Piero Portaluppi is one of the most celebrated figures of Milanese architecture. I don’t like everything he did, but I’m very fond of some of his work.A Commission Rooted in Legacy

The revival of the house began when Senator Ettore Conti, a prominent industrialist and patron of the arts, purchased the residence in 1919. Conti, who married Portaluppi’s daughter, wanted to reclaim the home not as a museum but as a residence for an enlightened bourgeoisie, one that embraced both tradition and innovation. Portaluppi, already an acclaimed architect known for blending historical reference with modern geometry, was the perfect agent for this transformation, aside from being family, which is always very prized by the Milanese middle class when it comes to business.

His renovation, completed through the 1920s and early 1930s, was not a faithful restoration in the narrow sense, nor a full-on modernisation. Instead, it was an exercise in architectural interpretation, a curated reconstruction of the Renaissance filtered through a 20th-century eye, and deeply aware of the theatrical potential of history.

This is how the neoclassical façade looked like in the 1920s.A Layered Architectural Language

Portaluppi’s interventions were sophisticated and varied. He reorganised the plan of the house, unifying previously fragmented rooms and courtyards to recreate a coherent flow between public and private spaces. Rather than simply rebuilding what had been lost, he constructed a new narrative of continuity, one that was respectful of the Renaissance origins but infused with modern elegance.

The decorative language he employed was rich in irony and symbolism: ceilings were coffered in geometric patterns inspired by Renaissance motifs but executed with crisp, modern lines; frescoes were uncovered, conserved, or carefully simulated where necessary. Portaluppi also designed custom furnishings and metalwork for the house, often incorporating stylised astronomical symbols — his signature theme — as a subtle reminder that time and memory were the building blocks of this new domestic mythology. His architectural idiom balanced historicist quotation with rationalist formality, making Casa degli Atellani an early case of what would later be recognised as critical regionalism: an approach to design that neither rejected modernism nor blindly mimicked the past, but instead used the local architectural language as a site of creative tension.

A shot of the gorgeous interiorsThe Architecture of Memory and the Urban Ethos

Portaluppi’s renovation also reflected broader currents in interwar Italy, where architects and intellectuals debated the role of national identity, tradition, and modernity. While some contemporaries pursued a purist classical revival or radical futurism, Portaluppi carved a middle path, one that placed memory at the heart of modern architecture. He saw in Casa degli Atellani a vessel for cultural continuity, and in his own work, a responsibility to re-stitch time. That’s probably why he preserved key elements — stone portals, terracotta cornices, fresco fragments — but recomposed them in a way that invited the viewer to engage with history not as a static backdrop but as a living structure, open to reinterpretation. One of the most significant outcomes of this process was the rediscovery of Renaissance frescoes, including works attributed to Bernardino Luini, a disciple of Leonardo da Vinci. Their delicate figuration, re-emerging after centuries under whitewash and soot, became emblematic of the house’s transformation.

The frescoes in the so-called Zodiac Room

In this sense, Portaluppi’s work on Casa degli Atellani stands as a testament to Milan’s unique ability to adapt, layer, and synthesise without erasing (a lesson that is never fully learned, as the carnage done with the destruction of the historical fair testimonies). In many ways, the house became a manifesto of Milanese modernism: eclectic yet composed, historic yet forward-facing, elegant without spectacle.

His intervention thus wasn’t merely about preserving a building, but about reinstating its narrative agency in a voice calibrated to the tensions and aspirations of a city between wars, between monarchies and republics, between tradition and industrial modernity.

The Noble Courtyard, with its (fake) installation of antiquities.6. Did you say Bernardino Luini?

Yes, I did. Amid the architectural rediscovery and reinvention that marked Piero Portaluppi’s renovation of Casa degli Atellani, one revelation stood out for its art-historical weight: the emergence of frescoes attributed to Bernardino Luini, a key figure in the Lombard school and one of the most refined followers of Leonardo da Vinci. Their reappearance beneath centuries of stucco and soot was more than a stroke of archaeological luck: it was a moment of artistic reawakening, reconnecting the house not only to its Renaissance roots but to the visual and spiritual language of 16th-century Milan.

The transition between the noble courtyard and the space where the vineyard was recreated.Leonardo’s Lombard Heir

Bernardino Luini (ca. 1480–1532) is often described as the most lyrical interpreter of Leonardo’s pictorial innovations in Lombardy. Trained in the Saronno region and active across northern Italy, Luini absorbed Leonardo’s sfumato, grace of expression, and compositional balance, translating them into a distinctly Lombard idiom marked by devotional intimacy, serene faces, and luminous colours.

Unlike other Leonardeschi, Luini never sought to imitate Leonardo’s grandeur but rather to domesticate his genius, applying it to altarpieces, private chapels, and villa frescoes. His work is characterised by a humanising softness and spiritual delicacy that appealed deeply to the religious and domestic patrons of early 16th-century Milan. He was celebrated in a 2014 exhibition at Palazzo Reale, one in which I was lucky enough to lend a hand.

The frescoes in the so-called Portraits Room

During Portaluppi’s meticulous interventions in the 1920s, parts of the house’s walls were stripped of later plaster and revealed scenes that bore unmistakable signs of Luini’s hand, or that of his workshop. The frescoes, though damaged and partially lost, displayed telltale elements of his style: oval-faced Madonnas, elegantly draped figures, and muted chromatic harmonies. Art historians quickly identified these paintings as important additions to the known corpus of Lombard mural painting, even if attribution remained debated in some quarters.

The location of the frescoes — inside a private domestic space — suggests a continuity with the tradition of Renaissance “studioli” and camera picta, where humanistic and religious imagery was integrated into the rhythm of everyday life. In this light, the house functioned as more than an aristocratic residence; it became a canvas of devotional and cultural identity, a space where spirituality, family prestige, and aesthetic refinement converged.

Ettore Conti’s room of his own within the houseFrom Private Devotion to Public Memory

The frescoes are also significant for what they reveal about continuities in Milanese visual culture. Despite the turbulence of the early 16th century — marked by foreign invasions, regime changes, and let’s not forget the plague — the Lombard school persisted in its embrace of elegance, emotional restraint, and narrative intimacy. In this sense, Luini’s presence in Casa degli Atellani aligns with the very heart of the house: a space that was both anchored in political power and suffused with personal, almost meditative meaning.

Moreover, the rediscovery of these works in the 20th century points to an enduring dialogue between artistic memory and historical architecture. Portaluppi’s decision not to restore them to perfection, but rather to stabilise and exhibit them as fragments, was an early example of conservation ethics that favoured authenticity over illusion.

Another shot of the Portrait Room: it overlooks the splendid garden, and therefore it possibly was a space of passage, one of the blurred rooms between public and private.7. Milan’s Identity as a City of Layers: Preserving Casa degli Atellani

To walk through Casa degli Atellani — if one still could — is to cross a threshold not just into a residence, but into Milan’s cultural genome. Here, the Renaissance ideal of harmony, the echoes of Leonardo’s genius, the quiet religiosity of Luini’s frescoes, and the modern elegance of Portaluppi’s hand coexist in a fragile equilibrium. It is a house made of layers: political, artistic, architectural, symbolic. And it is precisely the threat to these layers that worries me more.

Casa degli Atellani’s acquisition and possible conversion into a luxury hotel represent more than a real estate shift: they signal a crisis of urban identity. The transformation of a historical site into a commercial operation risks flattening its narrative, reducing complexity to aesthetic branding, memory to backdrop, and heritage to profit. Such projects do not merely alter buildings; they risk amputating the continuity of meaning that binds past to present. It’s a risk we’re also witnessing with the conversion of the old Odeon theatre and cinema into a branch of La Rinascente shopping centre.

This is the “vision” for the conversion of the historic theatre and cinema into a shopping centre, and I think I’m going to be sick.

In Milan, a city where much has been lost to war, crazy-ass futurism and fascism revisionism, speculation and indifference, Casa degli Atellani is rare: not because it is untouched, but because it has been layered with care. Every generation — whether the Atellani family under Ludovico il Moro, the Martini di Cigala under the Habsburgs, or Portaluppi in the 20th century — has left its trace in dialogue. And therein lies the model it offers: preservation as addition, not as museumification or stagnation, but as a living, breathing urban memory.

To preserve Casa degli Atellani is not to fossilize it. It is to curate continuity, to recognise that cultural value lies not only in what is old but in how each era speaks with and through what came before. The potential transformation into a hotel would sever this dialogue, would replace civic meaning with private exclusivity, would turn a public story into a gated commodity. unless executed with extraordinary ethical and architectural responsibility. I honestly can’t think of many contemporary architects who could achieve this feat, but I can think of some.

Werewolves Wednesday: The Wolf-Leader (19)

A werewolf story by Alexandre Dumas père.

Chapter XIX: The Dead and the Living

At the same moment that the trembling soul of the young Baron passed away, Thibault, awaking as if from an agitated sleep full of terrible dreams, sat up in his bed. He was surrounded by fire, every corner of his hut was in flames; at first he thought it was a continuation of his nightmare, but then he heard cries of, “Death to the wizard! death to the sorcerer! death to the were-wolf!” and he understood that some terrible attack was being made upon him.

The flames came nearer, they reached the bed, he felt their heat upon him; a few seconds more and he would be burned alive in the midst of the flaming pile. Thibault leaped from his bed, seized his boar-spear, and dashed out of the back door of his hut. No sooner did his enemies see him rush through the fire and emerge from the smoke than their cries of “death to him!” “death!” were redoubled. One or two shots were fired at him; Thibault heard the bullets whizz past; those who shot at him wore the livery of the Grand Master, and Thibault recalled the menace of the lord of Vez, uttered against him a few days before.

He was then beyond the pale of the law; he could be smoked out of his hole like a fox; he could be shot down like a buck. Luckily for Thibault, not one of the bullets struck him, and as the circle of fire made by the burning hut was not a large one, he was soon safely beyond it, and once again in shelter of the vast and gloomy forest, where, had it not been for the cries of the menials who were burning down his house, the silence would have been as complete as the darkness. He sat down at the foot of a tree and buried his head in his hands. The events of the last forty-eight hours had succeeded each other with such rapidity, that there was no lack of matter to serve as subjects of reflection to the shoemaker.

The twenty-four hours, during which he had lived another existence than his own, seemed to him like a dream, so much so, that he would not have dared to take his oath that all this recent affair between the Baron, and the Countess Jane, and the Comte de Mont-Gobert had really taken place. The church clock of Oigny struck ten, and he lifted his head. Ten o’clock! and only half-an-hour before he had been still in the body of the Baron Raoul, as he lay dying in the house of the Curb of Puiseux.

“Ah!” he exclaimed “I must find out for certain what has happened! It is not quite three miles to Puiseux and I shall be there in half-an-hour; I should like to ascertain if the Baron is really dead.”
A melancholy howl made answer to his words; he looked round; his faithful body-guards were back again; he had his pack about him once more.

“Come, wolves! come, my only friends!” he cried, “let us be off!” And he started with them across the forest in the direction of Puiseux. The huntsmen of the Lord of Vez, who were poking up the remaining embers of the ruined hut, saw a man pass, as in a vision, running at the head of a dozen or more wolves. They crossed themselves, and became more convinced than ever that Thibault was a wizard. And anybody else who had seen Thibault, flying along as swiftly as his swiftest wolf, and covering the ground between Oigny and Puiseux in less than a quarter of an hour, would certainly have thought so too.

He stopped at the entrance to the village, and turning to his wolves, he said:

“Friend wolves, I have no further need of you to-night, and indeed, I wish to be alone. Amuse yourselves with the stables in the neighbourhood, I give you leave to do just what you like; and if you
chance to come across one of those two-footed animals, called men, forget, friend wolves, that they claim to be made in the image of their Creator, and never fear to satisfy your appetite.” Whereupon the wolves rushed off in different directions, uttering howls of joy, while Thibault went on into the village. The Cure’s house adjoined the church, and Thibault made a circuit so as to avoid passing in front of the Cross. When he reached the presbytery, he looked in through one of the windows, and there he saw a bed with a lighted wax candle beside it; and over the bed itself was spread a sheet, and beneath the sheet could be seen the out lines of a figure lying rigid in death. There appeared to be no one in the house; the priest had no doubt gone to give notice of the death to the village authorities. Thibault went inside, and called the priest, but no one answered. He walked up to the bed, there could be no mistake about the body under the sheet being
that of a dead man; he lifted the sheet, there could be no mistaking that the dead body was that of Raoul de Vauparfond. On his face lay the still, unearthly beauty which is born of eternity. His features, which in life had been somewhat too feminine for those of a man, had now assumed the sombre grandeur of death. At the first glance you might have thought he only slept; but on gazing longer you recognised in that immovable calm something more profound than sleep. The presence of one who carries a sickle for sceptre, and wears a shroud for mantle was unmistakeable, and you knew King Death was there.

Thibault had left the door open, and he heard the sound of light footsteps approaching; at the back of the alcove hung a serge curtain, which masked a door by which he could retreat, if necessary, and he now went and placed himself behind it. A woman dressed in black, and covered with a black veil, paused in some hesitation at the door. The head of another woman passed in front of her’s and looked carefully round the room.

“I think it is safe for Madame to go in; I see no one about, and besides, I will keep watch.”

The woman in black went in, walked slowly towards the bed, stopped a moment to wipe the perspiration from her forehead, then, without further hesitation, lifted the sheet which Thibault had thrown back over the face of the dead man; Thibault then saw that it was the Countess.

“Alas!” she said, “what they told me was true!”

Then she fell on her knees, praying and sobbing. Her prayer being ended, she rose again, kissed the pale forehead of the dead, and the blue marks of the wound through which the soul had fled.

“O my well-beloved, my Raoul;” she murmured, “who will tell me the name of your murderer? who will help me to avenge your death?” As the Countess finished speaking, she gave a cry and started back; she seemed to hear a voice that answered, “I will!” and something had shaken the green serge curtain.

The Countess however was no chicken-hearted woman; she took the candle that was burning at the head of the bed and went and looked behind the curtain; but no creature was to be seen, a closed door was all that met her eye. She put back the candle, took a pair of gold scissors from a little pocket case, cut off a curl of the dead man’s hair, placed the curl in a black velvet sachet which hung over her heart, gave one last kiss to her dead lover, laid the sheet over his face, and left the house. Just as she was crossing the threshold, she met the priest, and drawing back, drew her veil more closely over her face.

“Who are you?” asked the priest.

“I am Grief,” she answered, and the priest made way for her to pass.

The Countess and her attendant had come on foot, and were returning in the same manner, for the distance between Puiseux and Mont-Gobert was not much more than half-a-mile. When about half way along their road, a man, who had been hiding behind a willow tree, stepped forward and barred their further passage. Lisette screamed, but the Countess, without the least sign of fear, went up to the man, and asked: “Who are you?”

“The man who answered ‘I will’ just now, when you were asking who would denounce the murderer to you.”

“And you can help me to revenge myself on him?”

“Whenever you like.”

“At once?”

“We cannot talk here very well.”

“Where can we find a better place?”

“In your own room for one.”

“We must not enter the castle together.”

“No; but I can go through the breach in the park wall: Mademoiselle Lisette can wait for me in the hut where Monsieur Raoul used to leave his horse, she can take me up the winding-stair and into your room. If you should be in your dressing-room, I will wait for you, as Monsieur Raoul waited the night before last.”

The two women shuddered from head to foot.

“Who are you to know all these details?” asked the Countess.

“I will tell you when the time comes for me to tell you.”

The Countess hesitated a moment, then, recovering her resolution, she said:

“Very well then; come through the breach; Lisette will wait for you in the stable.”

“Oh! Madame,” cried the maid, “I shall never dare to go and bring that man to you!”

“I will go myself then,” said the Countess.

“Well said!” put in Thibault, “there spoke a woman worth calling one!” And so saying he slid down into a kind of ravine beside the road, and disappeared. Lisette very nearly fainted.

“Lean on me, Mademoiselle,” said the Countess, “and let us walk on; I am anxious to hear what this man has to say to me.”

The two women entered the castle by way of the farm; no one had seen them go out, and no one saw them return. On reaching her room, the Countess waited for Lisette to bring up the stranger. Ten minutes had elapsed when the maid hurried in with a pale face.

“Ah! Madame,” she said, “there was no need for me to go to fetch him.”

“What do you mean?” asked the Countess.

“Because he knew his way up as well as I did! And oh! Madame! if you knew what he said to me! That man is the devil, Madame, I feel sure!”

“Show him in,” said the Countess.

“I am here!” said Thibault.

“You can leave us now, my girl,” said the Countess to Lisette. The latter quitted the room and the Countess remained alone with Thibault. Thibault’s appearance was not one to inspire confidence. He gave the impression of a man who had once and for all made up his mind, but it was also easy to see that it was for no good purpose; a Satanic smile played about his mouth, and there was a demoniacal light in his eyes. He had made no attempt to hide his red hairs, but had left them defiantly uncovered, and they hung over his forehead like a plume of flame. But still the Countess looked him full in the face without changing colour.

“My maid says that you know the way to my room; have you ever been here before?”

“Yes, Madame, once.”

“And when was that?”

“The day before yesterday.”

“At what time?”

“From half-past ten till half-past twelve at night.”

The Countess looked steadily at him and said:

“That is not true.”

“Would you like me to tell you what took place?”

“During the time you mention?”

“During the time I mention.”

“Say on,” replied the Countess, laconically.

Thibault was equally laconic.

“Monsieur Raoul came in by that door,” he said, pointing to the one leading into the corridor, “and Lisette left him here alone. You entered the room by that one,” he continued, indicating the
dressing-room door, “and you found him on his knees. Your hair was unbound, only fastened back by three diamond pins, you wore a pink silk dressing-gown, trimmed with lace, pink silk stockings, cloth-of-silver slippers and a chain of pearls round your neck.”

“You describe my dress exactly,” said the Countess, “continue.”

“You tried to pick a quarrel with Monsieur Raoul, first because he loitered in the corridors to kiss your waiting-maid; secondly, because someone had met him late at night on the road between Erneville and Villers-Cotterets; thirdly, because, at the ball given at the Castle, at which you yourself were not present, he danced four times with Madame de Bonneuil.”

“Continue.”

“In answer to your accusations, your lover made excuses for himself, some good, some bad; you, however, were satisfied with them for you were just forgiving him when Lisette rushed in full of alarm calling to Monsieur Raoul to escape, as your husband had just returned.”

“Lisette was right, you can be nothing less than the devil,” said the Countess with a sinister laugh, “and I think we shall be able to do business together … Finish your account.”

“Then you and your maid together pushed Monsieur Raoul, who resisted, into the dressing-room; Lisette forced him along the corridors and through two or three rooms; they then went down a winding staircase, in the wing of the Castle opposite to the one by which they had gone up. On arriving at the foot of the staircase, the fugitives found the door locked; then they ran into a kind of office where Lisette opened the window, which was about seven or eight feet above the ground. Monsieur Raoul leaped down out of this window, ran to the stable, found his horse still there, but hamstrung; then he swore that if he met the Count at any time he would hamstring him as the Count had hamstrung his horse, for he thought it a cowardly act to injure a poor beast so
unnecessarily. Then he went on foot to the breach, climbed it, and found the Count awaiting him outside the park, with his sword drawn. The Baron had his hunting-knife with him; he drew it, and the duel began.”

“Was the Count alone?”

“Wait … the Count appeared to be alone; after the fourth or fifth pass the Count was wounded in the shoulder, and sank on one knee, crying: ‘help, Lestocq!’ Then the Baron remembered his oath, and hamstrung the Count as he had hamstrung the horse; but as the Baron rose, Lestocq drove his knife into his back; it passed under the shoulder blade and out through the chest. I need not tell you where … you kissed the wound yourself.”

“And after that?”

“The Count and his huntsman returned to the Castle, leaving the Baron lying helpless; when the latter came to, he made signs to some passing peasants, who put him on a litter, and bore him away, with the intention of taking him to Villers-Cotterets; but he was in such pain, that they could not carry him farther than Puiseux; there they laid him on the bed where you found him, and on which he breathed his last a second after the half hour after nine in the evening.”

The Countess rose, and without speaking, went to her jewel-case and took out the pearls she had worn two nights before. She handed them to Thibault.

“What are they for?” he asked.

“Take them,” said the Countess, “they are worth fifty thousand livres.”

“Are you still anxious for revenge?”

“Yes,” replied the Countess.

“Revenge will cost more than that.”

“How much will it cost?”

“Wait for me to-morrow night,” said Thibault, “and I will tell you.”

“Where shall I await you?” asked the Countess.”

“Here,” said Thibault, with the leer of a wild animal.

“I will await you here,” said the Countess.

“Till to-morrow then.”

“Till to-morrow.”

Thibault went out. The Countess went and replaced the pearls in her dressing case; lifted up a false bottom, and drew from underneath it a small bottle containing an opal-coloured liquid, and a little dagger with a jewelled handle and case, and a blade inlaid with gold. She hid both beneath her pillow, knelt at her prie-dieu, and, her prayer finished, threw herself dressed on to her bed.

…to be continued.

From Labyrinths to Trees: How Narrative Shapes Our Idea of Data

Introduction: Stories We Tell About Data

Before we ever store, query, or analyze it, we tell stories about data. Not with words, necessarily, but with structures. With paths, branches, and webs. With ontologies and classification systems. With expeditions and search parties.

Data — raw, abstract, and infinitely recursive — resists intuitive grasp. Its operations are hidden, its shape formless until imposed upon. To make sense of this invisible substance, when we try to structure it, we reach instinctively for analogies. More often than not, the analogies we choose are narrative in nature: we imagine data as something we must navigate, something that branches or something interconnected. Labyrinths, trees and webs: these words are more than visual aids. They are cognitive models, story-shaped vessels that guide our understanding and behaviour.

Every user-facing interface, from a folder hierarchy to a knowledge graph, carries with it an implicit narrative logic. Even technical operations — tagging, sorting, filtering — are quietly guided by storytelling assumptions: there is a starting point, a path, a logic to follow. Sometimes, this logic echoes ancient myths of wandering through mazes; sometimes, it borrows the calm authority of Illuministic classification systems; sometimes, it mimics the erratic pulse of conversation and relation.

The first Italian on-line search engine was named after her, Ariadne, as someone who would help you through the labyrinth of the World Wide Web.

In this post, let’s explore how three literary and cognitive structures have come to shape our ways of visualizing and managing data, not as historical curiosities or literary tropes, but as active frameworks through which we design systems, interface with machines, and understand the abstract landscapes of information. Each carries a worldview, a promise, a politics.

the labyrinth privileges the experience of the journey: complex, uncertain, often nonlinear;the tree promises hierarchy, clarity, a clean mapping of meaning;the network embraces multiplicity, emergence, and connection over control.

By exploring these metaphors through literature — from Borges to Powers, from Calvino to Le Guin — we’ll try to expose the narrative DNA of our digital systems, and we might find ourselves wondering not just how we organize data, but how data organizes us, what kinds of stories we allow it to tell, and which ones we unconsciously live by.

1. The Labyrinth: Obscurity and Discovery

To enter a labyrinth is to abandon certainty. There is no clear overview, no promise of return, every path might be the wrong one, and every turn might be your last. You might have been here before but there’s no way of telling, as it all looks the same. And yet our heroes go in. On top of the famous prison hosting the Minotaur, Pliny the Elder lists a number of different labyrinths, starting from the Egyptians and suggesting they had been inspirational for Daedalus to build the one in Crete. The labyrinth forges the hero with its structure of suspense, of epistemic tension. It withholds its logic, daring us to decode it. In the context of data, this metaphor proves both ancient and startlingly contemporary: much of our experience of interacting with large information systems is not linear or hierarchical, but labyrinthine and driven by intuition, misdirection, and chance.

A shot of the magnificent Labyrinth exhibition held at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (read more here)The Infinite Folds of Borges and Danielewski’s Interface

Jorge Luis Borges stands as the canonical cartographer of the literary labyrinth, as we have seen in my piece on Digital Archives. His 1941 short story The Garden of Forking Paths posits a universe where every decision branches into alternate timelines: a narrative not of singular plot, but of multiplicity, coexisting outcomes, and endless recursion. Borges’ vision prefigures not only the multiverse and quantuum theories but the structure of hypertext, the user experience of digital archives and databases, where each query reveals not a conclusion, but further nodes, ambiguities, and forks. As you know, The Library of Babel offers an even more vertiginous vision where the challenge is not storing information but finding meaning within infinite variation.

In both cases, the user is cast as an epistemological wanderer, confronted with the ineluctability of choice on one side and an abundance that borders on absurdity on the other. Combine both: to navigate Big Data, we rely on algorithms, heuristics, and the occasional stroke of serendipity, and more often we make a choice of interpretation because you have to, even if the options are seemingly infinite.

Borges did it better.

When we talk about data, we often depict order. But before the charts, trees, and graphs, there is the experience of getting lost, of facing a structure so vast, so recursive, that it resists any single point of entry. This is where the metaphor of the labyrinth becomes most revealing: not just as an architectural curiosity, but as a condition. In the age of hypertext and databases, we still move like Theseus, thread in hand, navigating the unknown. We need tools of orientation, and survival tools to survive the flood.

That survival, however, is always provisional.

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Italo Calvino’s fragmented novel, simulates the experience of trying to read a system that refuses completion. Each chapter opens a new story, only to break off, redirect, reframe. The reader becomes a seeker, assembling coherence from discontinuity. Tell me it doesn’t sound familiar. The novel mirrors how we interact with broken datasets or labyrinthine archives, making meaning in spite of interruption, not in the comfort of flow. What Calvino offers is a model of navigation, not destination, and shows us how partial access can still yield insight. Narrative is often constructed not from continuity but from collage.

Umberto Eco understood this well, of course. In Foucault’s Pendulum, he dramatizes the danger of pattern-seeking behaviour, of imposing structure on data until the structure bites back. If all you’ve read is The Name of the Rose, here’s a quick summary: a group of editors builds a fictional conspiracy theory by connecting esoteric facts and occult knowledge, only to become trapped in their own creation; what begins as a game becomes deadly serious, a warning about narrative overfitting — the tendency to extract coherence where there is none. In the context of data, this is the peril of overinterpreting correlations, of seeing meaning in coincidence out of the desperate need to find order, of mistaking algorithmic output for truth. The labyrinth, Eco suggests, is not always a place to be solved: sometimes it’s a place where our need for resolution becomes the real danger.

You’ve seen this before: this is called “spurious correlation,” and it shows how Nicolas Cage’s career is clearly connected to pool drownings.

So, how do we avoid overfitting and still find meaning? The labyrinth metaphor provides two solutions: guidance from somebody external to the system (the Ariadne to your Theseus), and internal, spontaneous rise of statistical correlations between elements, which is what we’re trying to do today with Artificial Intelligence.

The House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski turns the labyrinth into an interface for the book itself. Its typography twists, collapses, mirrors, gives you footnotes on footnotes, corridors of pages. The physical act of reading becomes spatial, almost architectural: a direct parallel to navigating nested file systems, digital archives, or sprawling UX environments. The house in the story is larger on the inside than on the outside, its layout changes, defies measurement, resists mapping. It is, in many ways, the shape of data when uncatalogued: a void that expands the more you try to contain it. Reading becomes a kind of crawling — not unlike scraping, not unlike indexing — until you let the book take its own shape. And roll with it.

The House of Leaves is a publisher’s nightmare.

In all these works, the labyrinth is not simply a trap: it’s a method of knowledge that favours intuition, experience, and uncertainty. It acknowledges that access to information is rarely linear and that sometimes discovery comes through detour. This is evident in digital design too, where serendipity is engineered into platforms, from algorithmic suggestions to associative hyperlinks. The path you take is never the only one possible. Sometimes, the insight you need is not at the end of the road but along its edge, hiding in the loops, the tangents, the recursion.

So much of our interaction with data today remains labyrinthine, not because we lack structure but because our structures no longer assume a single point of view. We may crave dashboards and diagrams, but beneath them lies a Borgesian complexity that continues to shape how we search, interpret, and trust. The data labyrinth, then, is not a failure of clarity: it is a recognition that clarity is sometimes a fiction we impose, a story we tell to make the complexity legible.

If this approach gives you the creeps, don’t you worry and bear with me. Maybe you’ll like the data tree better. Where the labyrinth confuses, the tree classifies. Where the labyrinth meanders, the tree declares order. But we will see that this metaphor, too, carries its own assumptions about growth, knowledge, and control.

2. The Tree: Structure and Control

If the labyrinth is the metaphor of mystery, the tree is the metaphor of structure and clarity. It offers reassurance: a trunk that grounds us, branches that unfold with logic, a canopy of meaning supported by roots we can trace. In the realm of data, the tree promises what the labyrinth withholds: a place for everything, and everything in its place. It is the diagram we reach for when we want to classify, control, and contain. A structure that not only grows, but grows in a knowable direction.

It is no coincidence that the language of databases and digital systems borrows heavily from arboreal imagery: file trees, decision trees, tree maps, root folders. These structures reflect a cognitive comfort with hierarchy, with the idea that meaning descends from a singular origin and radiates outward in discernible, sortable parts. Trees imply a world of vertical relationships, where data can be nested, categorized, inherited.

This desire for structure is deeply human, and perhaps nowhere more poetically explored than in Richard Powers’ The Overstory. Here, trees are not just background but protagonists: carriers of time, memory, and interconnection. Powers invites us to see trees not as passive entities in a human drama, but as narrative structures in their own right. Their slow intelligence, their branching logic, their mycorrhizal communications… all suggest an alternative form of knowledge, one rooted in deep time and distributed agency. At the same time, the novel echoes our instinct to make sense of complexity by tracing it back to roots, to see every story as part of a larger canopy.

Yet this metaphor is not without its tensions. While Powers offers a tree as something dynamic and interconnected, our use of trees in data often reflects a more static impulse. To build a taxonomy is to prune: to cut away ambiguity in favour of clarity, to define what belongs where. Ontologies, those formalized systems of categories and relationships, are tree-like in their architecture: they represent knowledge not as a tangled web, but as a diagram of “is-a” and “part-of” relationships, each node legible in its placement. Neat, isn’t it? Then why it doesn’t work? Why are we shifting away from trees and back into labyrinths more and more, these days? Is it just because we have more powerful Ariadnes, with longer threads?

The utopia of classification isn’t as neat as it seems, and yet literature might come to our aid and suggest us a solution. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home is structured like an anthropological archive of a future people, including stories, songs, rituals, maps, and imagined cultural fragments in a way that resists linearity and embraces layered organization, but retains a sense of rootedness: a tree not of dominance, but of growth from shared soil. The book’s very structure mimics a knowledge system shaped by human use, not abstract logic. Categories emerge not from authority but from lived context, from the rhythms of a culture that sees narrative and data as co-extensive. The result is less a top-down taxonomy and more a habitat of meaning. Which sounds better from the start.

There is something similar in the meditative writings of Annie Dillard, particularly in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Here, attention itself becomes a kind of branching act: a slow, recursive witnessing of nature that accrues significance through layered observation. Dillard doesn’t explain: her prose grows outward from small details, inviting the reader to see connections as something that emerges through accumulation, not categorization. It is the logic of the tree again, but one that unfolds organically, not hierarchically. A model, perhaps, for thinking about narrative-driven data design: systems that evolve in relationship to what they record, rather than impose structure from above. Taxonomies might be outdated, and we spoke about it multiple times, particularly starting off from Mario Carpo‘s considerations.

Still, the most haunting challenge to the “data tree idea” may come from Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, a novel that fragments rather than branches. Though closer in structure to a network, Flights still orbits arboreal motifs: the body as map, the soul as traveler, the story as something that grows by layering, not sequencing. The book resists hierarchy, but it does not abandon rootedness. Instead, it offers a model of distributed order, where each part informs the whole without subordinating it. In data terms, this resembles the shift from rigid schema to schema-on-read, where structure emerges at the moment of interpretation, not before.

And yet, we continue to lean on trees, their elegance is seductive: a clean parent-child structure, a promise that meaning can be sorted, compressed, and retrieved. File hierarchies, drop-down menus, classification systems, are all echo the belief that information can be made legible through controlled growth. Trees allow us to curate complexity, to domesticate chaos.

But what is lost when we prune too much? What nuances disappear when we demand everything fit neatly within a defined branch? Trees are not wrong, but they are limiting. They reflect a worldview in which knowledge is static, curated, placed. In contrast to the labyrinth’s mystery, the tree offers mastery. It is no accident that early attempts at artificial intelligence were built on decision trees: the logic of either/or, of progress through elimination.

Still, we must ask whether the story we want to tell with our data is truly so linear, so singular. Perhaps what we need is not to discard the tree, but to let it grow wilder; to embrace branching without domination, rootedness without rigidity; to design systems that remember the difference between structure and control.

From here, we move toward a different metaphor, one that abandons singular origin and embraces multiplicity: the network. If the labyrinth is the experience of being lost, and the tree is the imposition of order, then the network is the space of relation. Not how things are arranged, but how they connect.

3. The Network: Relation and Multiplicity

Where the tree arranges and the labyrinth conceals, the network connects. It does not begin, it does not end, but it spreads, unfolds, recombines. As a mental scheme for data, the network marks a decisive shift: away from fixed hierarchies and singular truths, toward a dynamic field of relationships, constantly rewritten by the movement of the user. It is a metaphor not of place, but of possibility, an architecture in which meaning is not given, but emerges from interaction.

If the labyrinth is a structure we explore and the tree a structure we build, the network is a structure we participate in. We are not merely readers or users within a system; we are nodes in the system itself, generating meaning as we move, click, associate, remix. This idea is perhaps best captured in the radical botanical metaphor offered by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: the rhizome. Unlike the tree, which imposes vertical order, the rhizome grows laterally, unpredictably. It has no centre, no beginning, no totalizing structure. It is a model of non-hierarchical, decentralized proliferation, perfect for describing the logic of hyperlinking, relational databases, and peer-to-peer networks.

In A Thousand Plateaus, the rhizome is not simply a metaphor for how things connect, but for how meaning itself operates: contextually, associatively, without final authority. When applied to data, this vision challenges the ontological assumptions of trees and folders. It allows for multiple truths, overlapping categories, intersecting narratives, a world where classification is not a cage but a collective dance. This is the philosophy underlying the semantic web, where links do not merely point but mean: data tagged with relationships, not just attributes.

In David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, stories leap across centuries and voices, connected not by chronology or genealogy, but by resonance. Characters echo each other, motifs recur, the different pasts bleed into the future. In a structure that’s polyphonic and recursive, each tale is embedded in another, forming a network of influence rather than a ladder of progress. The novel’s architecture resembles a hyperlink map more than a novel in the classical sense. You don’t read Cloud Atlas to reach a conclusion; you read it to understand how each part reverberates within the whole.

This is the shift that networks make possible: from narrative as linear progression to narrative as systemic relation. Meaning becomes ambient, contingent, shaped by how we move through it. In the context of digital data, this means that truth is not always in the source, but in the linking. The power of the network lies not in any single node, but in the edges between them.

Do you want another one? In Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, this ethos is taken further. The novel unfolds in nonlinear fragments, jumping between characters, decades, and media, with one chapter taking the form of a PowerPoint presentation. Characters appear and reappear at unexpected intervals, connected by moments of intimacy, failure, and transformation. The result is not a story told, but a story constructed through traversal, a process that mirrors how users navigate data-rich environments. Not by following a map, but by creating one in the act of movement.

This fluidity is increasingly foundational to how we design data systems. In data lakes, information is stored without predefined schema, waiting for relationships to be defined by the query rather than the structure. In linked data environments, knowledge is not stored in silos but interwoven through URI-based relationships. The architecture becomes interpretive, open-ended, and shaped by context. We move from “what is this?” to “what is this connected to?”, from ontology to ontology-in-motion. Which is really, really, really cool.

Yet this proliferation of connections also raises new challenges. In networks, meaning is mutable, authority is decentralized. While this allows for pluralism and discovery, it can also produce fragmentation and overload. Just as the rhizome resists pruning, networks resist closure. We are always in the middle of things, never at the root or the crown. In such a system, the user is not a passive recipient but an active co-weaver, generating meaning through attention, relation, and movement. If the user loses attention and participation, the whole thing collapses.

This is perhaps the most radical lesson the network teaches us: that truth is not stored, but formed; that meaning is not fixed, but emergent; and everyone of us has a responsibility towards it that trascends that of the mere end-user. We do not merely access data: we compose it, through pathways that are neither identical nor repeatable. And if trees impose control, and labyrinths invite surrender, then networks offer a third possibility: co-creation. A way of reading — and living — in which knowledge grows sideways, relationally, infinitely.

From here, we turn to one final reflection: if literature provides us with mental models, how can we apply these considerations to actual data design?

4. Beyond the Metaphor: What Narrative Models Can Teach Data Design

If metaphors are how we first grasp complexity, perhaps it is time to stop treating them as mere illustrations and begin using them as tools for design. The labyrinth, the tree, the network aren’t just literary or cognitive patterns: they are functional models that can guide how we build, navigate, and trust digital systems. And in no field is this more urgent than in the increasingly layered and collaborative world of construction data management, particularly within Common Data Environments and BIM ecosystems.

So, let’s see where we stand.

The default structure of most technological solutions for document and data management within a Common Data Environment remains arboreal. Projects are broken down into folders, categories, subcategories, reflecting not just a taxonomic mindset, but a regulatory logic. ISO 19650 workflows echo this order: everything in its place, versioned, sequenced, named according to rules. The tree prevails because it offers control, traceability, and hierarchy, all reassuring qualities in a field where liability, compliance, and accountability are non-negotiable.

But the question arises: what happens when this tree becomes too rigid? When the structure no longer reflects the messiness of collaboration, the plurality of inputs, or the lifecycle of evolving models and knowledge? In these moments, alternative narrative metaphors — the labyrinth and the network — offer more than literary flair. They offer design principles.

A labyrinthine approach to data interaction — as we have seen a couple of months ago — foregrounds the user’s experience of discovery. It accepts that a designer, coordinator, or contractor entering a document management system does not always know what they’re looking for, or even the vocabulary to describe it. This is especially true in federated models, where naming conventions aren’t always transparent, and the logic of one discipline may be opaque to another. Here, interface design could learn from Borges and Calvino: structure the CDE to allow serendipity, encourage exploratory navigation, support partial visibility and recursive returns. Faceted search, semantic tagging, and cross-referenced metadata can transform a rigid repository into a narrative engine, where data tells its own story depending on how it’s approached. Some vendors are already shifting towards this logic: usBIM from ACCA comes to mind, and Datagrids’ effort to inject an LLM into Autodesk Construction Cloud.

Meanwhile, the network model offers perhaps the most radical — and needed — shift. If trees are about control and labyrinths about experience, networks are about relation. Imagine a CDE technological solution that thinks more like a graph than a folder: where models, documents, and stakeholders are interlinked through contextual metadata, where relationships between files are as important as the files themselves.

Think of a data environment that knows: “this model update affects that clash report, which is linked to that issue, which is tracked by that team.”

This is not speculative: it’s the logic behind linked data, IFC-based interoperability, and emerging graph-based BIM approaches. But it needs a narrative sensibility to make it humane.

Just as in literature, structure affects legibility. A tree flattens nuance; a network reveals it. A labyrinth demands attention; a network rewards association. For designers of digital workflows, these metaphors should not be siloed but interwoven. Different users, at different project stages, require different ways of knowing: the auditor needs the tree, the architect may prefer the network, the student might benefit from the labyrinth.

This plurality can also inform AI-generated storytelling in construction. Whether drafting scope notes, generating descriptions of issue histories, or summarizing model changes, AI systems trained on project data will inherit our narrative logic. If we structure our environments only as trees, we teach machines to write in absolutes. If we allow networks, they can write in relational nuance. If we simulate labyrinths, they may even capture the ambivalence and complexity that defines real-world design decisions.

Ultimately, these narrative forms also shape trust.

A tree says: “this is the truth, in its place.” A network says: “these are the connections — follow them.” A labyrinth says: “explore — but beware.”

The metaphor we adopt affects how users perceive validity, how they negotiate access, and how they construct understanding across disciplines.

In our construction projects, where data must move across people, time zones, software, and intentions, it is no longer enough to ask whether our systems are compliant or efficient. We must also ask: are they legible? Are they navigable? Are they telling the right stories to the right people? To answer these questions, we must think as readers and authors alike. We must recognize that every data model is a narrative, and that the metaphors we choose will shape not only our technologies, but the futures we build with them.

Conclusion: The Shape of Knowing

Let’s accept that our interaction with data doesn’t merely structure it but creates a story. Before the first column in a spreadsheet, before the first node in a graph, we reach for metaphors to make the abstract tangible, and that’s when we imagine it as a labyrinth, a tree, a network. Each metaphor becomes a shape for knowledge, an interface not only for information but for meaning. And once chosen, these shapes begin to shape us in return.

Throughout this reflection, we’ve seen how these metaphors operate across disciplines and scales, from federated models to the semantic web, but what emerges is not simply a taxonomy of literary structures; it is a deeper recognition that the metaphors we choose are never neutral.

The labyrinth carries the romance of discovery, but also the anxiety of uncertainty. It values experience but resists efficiency. It is poetic, recursive, disorienting, and often truer to the lived complexity of knowledge work than the sanitised structures we impose.

The tree offers order and authority, but its elegance comes at the cost of exclusion. It renders knowledge legible through hierarchy, but risks cutting off what cannot be neatly categorised. It reflects a desire for control, a confidence in roots and branches: sometimes helpful, sometimes oppressive.

The network celebrates emergence, multiplicity, and lateral connection. It mirrors the real fluidity of contemporary data environments, but it also disperses responsibility. In the network, there is no center, which means there is often no clear ground to stand on. It invites co-authorship, but it can also overwhelm.

These metaphors do not simply describe our systems; they express our attitudes toward knowledge itself. They encode our biases, our fears, our aspirations; they reveal how we think we ought to relate to information, whether we want to map it, tame it, wander through it, or become part of it. And in doing so, they shape how we design, how we navigate, and ultimately how we decide.

As professionals working with data in the built environment — as designers, modelers, coordinators, clients — we are not exempt from this narrative impulse. On the contrary, we are its authors. Every Common Data Environment, every folder structure, every naming convention is a story about what matters and how it should be found. Every model element carries not just coordinates and parameters, but a cultural decision about legibility, relevance, trust.

To rethink how we design with data, we must first rethink the metaphors we design by. So let us begin again — not with a blank screen, but with a question: what kind of story do we want our systems to tell?

Do we want data to be a forest of branching truths? A tangle of lived paths? A map of shimmering links? There is no single answer. There never was. But in choosing, consciously, how we structure information, we shape the spaces we live and build in… and the futures we make possible.

Pride Month 2025 – It’s a Wrap

We Were Always Here: on Memory, Erasure, and the Persistence of Queer History

All month long, we have journeyed through scroll and scripture, painting and poetry, ruin and reliquary, gathering voices, gestures, glances that once defied the world to say: we have always loved differently. These were not abstract symbols or distant metaphors. They were people: monks and mystics, lovers and poets, rulers and rebels, living lives shaped by desire, by ambiguity, by the refusal to be only what they were told they should be.

Too often, those lives have been softened into silence. Queer saints are called “devout companions.” Female lovers are dismissed as “close friends.” Trans figures are flattened into metaphors. Erotic mystics are scrubbed of their flesh and made palatable to tradition. We are told that queerness is a modern invention, that no one was like us then because no one said the words. But this is the paradox: you burn the evidence, then call us imaginary. You erase the love letters, then claim we never loved. You tear pages from the record, then point to the silence as proof we didn’t exist.

And still, here we are: in illuminated margins, in the fervour of a sonnet, in the brushstroke of a hand that lingers too long on another. Not every gaze is friendship. Not every kiss is innocent. Not every martyr is only holy. Sometimes, they are holy and queer.

To call these people “just friends” is not history. It is erasure dressed as restraint.

Queerness is not a historical anomaly. It is a rhythm in the human story: a set of lives, desires, identities, and rebellions that run alongside — and sometimes against — the canon. It is not a footnote. It is the footstep. And so, as Pride Month ends, this is not a closing: it is a charge. To remember that queer people are not seasonal, that our past does not only belong to June. That recovering queer history is not a performance, but a responsibility. Because if we don’t tell these stories, they will be told without us. And if we don’t remember them, they will be forgotten on purpose.

So we say it plainly: queer people existed. Queer people exist. Queer people will exist.
And we will keep digging through the ruins.
And we will keep naming what we find.

Pride Month 2025 – Words of the Day

Letters in Exile: Rumi’s Longing for Shams al-Din Tabrizi

“Since Shams appeared,
my heart has been a hundred thousand burning lamps.
The world is a candle, and I am the wick:
I am consumed in the flame of love.”
— Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, 13th century, Persia

Among the most exalted voices in Islamic mysticism, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, better known simply as Rumi, has been canonised as a sage of universal love. Yet within the swirling mysticism of his poetry lies a core of unmistakable longing: one intimately bound to the figure of Shams al-Din Tabrizi, the elusive dervish whose arrival in Rumi’s life set both his spirit and his verse ablaze.

When they met in 1244 in Konya, Rumi was already a respected jurist and teacher. Shams, a wandering mystic with no allegiance to orthodoxy, shattered his world. Their bond was immediate, intense, and transformative. Rumi abandoned his public teaching. The two withdrew into private communion: days of silence, laughter, gazes, poetry, and spiritual transmission. Their closeness scandalised Rumi’s followers, who saw their beloved master vanishing into obsession.

And then Shams disappeared, either murdered by jealous disciples or choosing exile once more. Rumi was devastated. What followed was one of the most remarkable outpourings of grief and ecstatic love in world literature: the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, a collection of over 3,000 poems in which Shams is muse, beloved, mirror.

Rumi’s language is rapturous, full of fire, yearning, surrender. He speaks of kisses, of annihilation, of being consumed. The gender of the beloved, when specified, is male. And though the poetry is often couched in metaphysical terms — the beloved as a vessel for divine love — it pulses with earthly longing, erotic metaphor, and emotional intimacy that defy strict spiritual abstraction.

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