The architect at Christmas

At Christmas, the architect walks through the city like a man with the wrong map in his pocket. He drew that map himself, years earlier, convinced the world would adapt to it. The city, politely, did something else. He walks slowly, not out of contemplation but to avoid tripping: at Christmas the steps seem placed there on purpose, to remind him that the street section is a form of personal humiliation.

At Christmas, the architect enters the scene as he always enters life: convinced he has a clear idea in mind. But the city appears decorated, indulgent, almost benevolent, and precisely for this reason it unsettles him. Because it works. It works without a masterplan, without a concept, without a thirty‑page report. It works through temporary misuse, exception, badly hung decoration. And so he realizes the obvious paradox: what Loos would have condemned as “the crime of ornament”, when it is only temporary, suddenly becomes tolerable. A tragedy for someone who has spent a lifetime studying how to avoid all this.

He looks at the illuminated façades and thinks that, without lights, certain architectures would never have had a social life. Christmas is the only moment when even the mediocre building is invited to the party.

Every ten meters the architect thinks: “It would take very little here.” A bench, a tree… Then he remembers that even “very little” requires meetings, opinions, budget chapters, and he suddenly feels tired. Walking is easier than designing. But he trips again. An invisible step, an unmarked level change. No one helps him: everyone is used to that step. The city is inclusive only for those who have always known it. The architect gets back on his feet with a theatrical gesture, as if performing balance for an imaginary audience. And he mentally notes a critical issue that will never be resolved.

At Christmas, the architect sitting at the table becomes an object of anthropological curiosity in the eyes of relatives, who question him with candor and ruthless naivety. No one understands exactly what he does, but everyone is convinced he could fix the bathroom better. Unable to grasp the meaning of his profession, they show him cracks, doors that don’t close, windows that don’t open. He listens and nods with measured patience, while inside him an elegant fatigue accumulates, the fatigue born of having to translate his knowledge into elementary, practical words. At Christmas, theory bows before the misaligned cabinet door.

The Christmas house is a cruel device. It forces spaces to be used in ways they were never meant to be: extra chairs of various models, extended tables, improvised beds. The architect observes this functional disorder with a mix of annoyance and admiration. Because it works. It works better than the magazine‑ready open‑plan living rooms.

There is something heroically mediocre about the architect at Christmas. He saves no one, improves nothing, cannot even explain his work without using his hands. He is a technician of utopia forced to confront the fact that people simply want to be comfortable, together, preferably warm.

And then the houses unmask him. The real ones, not the published ones. Rooms too small to contain everyone, corridors that look like youthful mistakes, living rooms solemn as council chambers used to pile coats. The architect looks, measures mentally, and understands, with an almost comic sadness, that he has spent his life designing spaces that do not work at Christmas.

Immersed in this domestic theatre, the architect takes on the traits of a tragicomic figure. Sitting on the family sofa, he realizes something dramatically true: we have designed a lot, but understood little.

The walk resumes among decorated shop windows and squares. The architect notices that the city is kinder when it stops asking for performance. When it doesn’t need to be efficient, iconic, competitive. When it can simply be crossed without purpose. And this discovery, so obvious and so late, weighs on him more than his coat.

The walk ends in a square that works only because it is Christmas. Lights, voices, cordial people. The architect sits on an unauthorized low wall and understands, with almost offensive clarity, that his profession is full of good intentions and terrible timing. It always arrives after: after life, after uses, after needs.

After Christmas, the architect will become serious again, ambitious again, will speak in difficult terms again. But for a few days he will have known the truth, the one that makes you laugh and hurts at the same time: the city moves independently, animated by practices, habits, and elusive flows. And it is precisely he, still and always he, who despite everything is entrusted with the arduous and indispensable task of interpreting, orienting, and governing this complexity, finding sense and measure in what appears ungraspable.

December 2025

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