"Less is more." — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. "Less is a bore." — Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966)
At the far edge of the Atelier Fringe, where the maintained terrazzo gives way to raw concrete and the brass floor lamps stop being canonical and start being simply old, the ground is cracked. The Cracked Slab is not large — seven metres along its longest fissure — but it is, by the standards of Formgard's otherwise immaculate surfaces, a catastrophe. The polished aggregate has split along a diagonal that no engineer has been able to attribute to subsidence, thermal expansion, or any structural cause. The crack simply appeared, one morning, as if the terrazzo had decided to stop pretending it was not, underneath, desert. Through the fissure, the sand is visible. Not the decorative decomposed granite of the Courtyard Quarter — raw desert sand, the colour of old bone, fine and dry and indifferent to the polished surface that was poured over it. Desert grasses have seeded themselves in the gap. They grow without permission, without Registry review, without a photometric study of their sh...
From the lore of The Panopticon of Good Taste.