Architecture is dust

Architecture is dust.

Dust that becomes form,

Dust transfigured by the mind.

Dust is memory so dust is also death.

Ancestral memory of death,

Dust refers to the beginnings.

That modernity that disowns sediment,

That shaves walls, that sanitises space;

That modernity that disowns dust,

Disowns even death.

Deprived of memory,

And so slave to a credible youth,

Ignoring its end, it repeats itself;

Without end.

In this house classical orders

And golden proportions celebrate dust:

Angels and choirs have abandoned Heaven,

And Heaven has adorned itself with earth.