Chapter I — The Grammar of Forms: What Formgård Is Made Of

"Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier." — Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979)

Formgård is a city made of canonical objects at monumental scale, and the distinction matters. The street lamps along the Promenade of Good Objects are not inspired by Isamu Noguchi's Akari lanterns — they are Akari lanterns, enlarged to the height of a three-storey building, their washi-paper skins replaced with tensioned oiled silk that diffuses sodium light into something warmer than warmth: a amber that has been considered. Verner Panton's Phantom lamp hangs at the intersection of The Plinth's two principal axes, twenty metres across, casting a violet wash that makes every upturned face look briefly like a detail in a painting. The chairs along the Green Nave — Frank Gehry's corrugated Wiggle chair, Terje Ekström's Ekstrem in oxblood red — stand two and a half metres tall, so that to sit in one is to be held rather than supported, nested in a curatorial decision someone else made about good form. This is the first thing the visitor must understand: in Formgård, every designed objec...

From the lore of The Panopticon of Good Taste.