"The house is a machine for living in." — Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (1923)
Formgard is a city built from the California Case Study programme at monumental scale, and the distinction matters. The street pavilions along the Promenade of Good Objects are not inspired by post-and-beam residential architecture — they are post-and-beam houses, enlarged to the height of civic monuments, their steel frames painted white against the perpetual golden sky, their glass walls reflecting nothing but the terrazzo and the careful absence of anything undesigned. The terrazzo extends without interruption for nine city blocks. It is a single continuous pour — polished aggregate in warm ivory with chips of green serpentine and black basalt, maintained by a crew that works between three and five in the morning so that no resident need witness the labour of its upkeep. The reflecting pool that bisects the Promenade is heated to precisely twenty-six degrees, not for comfort but for the quality of light it throws onto the undersides of the butterfly roofs at dusk. The furniture is...
From the lore of The Panopticon of Good Taste.