Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

by Rory Sutherland

My contention is that our perception is calibrated more widely in this way. We notice and attach significance and meaning to those things that deviate from narrow, economic common sense, precisely because they deviate from it. The result of this is that the pursuit of narrow economic rationalism will produce a world rich in goods, but deficient in meaning. In architecture this has produced modernism, a style with a marked absence of decoration or ‘spurious’ detail, and a corresponding loss of ‘meaning’.fn2 My secret hope is that, with the 3D-printing of buildings becoming possible, a certain Gaudí-ness may reappear in twenty-first-century buildings.fn3