"He was not frightened, only confused. He knew what had happened but could not quite believe it had happened." — J.G. Ballard, The Concentration City (1957)
Ren Cassidy does not dispute the beauty of Formgård. This is the first line of every paper Ren has attempted to publish, and the phrase has been declined as 'insufficiently neutral' by the Journal of Spatial Comportment and as 'excessively hedged' by the Atelier Fringe Quarterly. Ren disputes something smaller and more specific: the claim that beauty is innocent. Over nine years of fieldwork — conducted with a hand-held notation device that records micro-movements to a tenth of a degree — Ren has documented 4,847 instances of what the field notes call 'the accommodation.' This is the moment when a human body encounters a canonical object at monumental scale and makes an unconscious adjustment: a straightened spine, a careful repositioning of the hands, a slowed gait, a lowered voice. No one tells visitors to the Green Nave to behave differently beneath the Plinth Pavilion's sight-lines. They simply do. Ren's unpublished thesis — titled, with characteristic flatness, 'Postural Conseque...
From the lore of The Panopticon of Good Taste.