We’re living in a world that’s being sterilised by architecture. Inspiration, dreams and ambitions are being quelled by changing our surroundings. Art, Beauty, Inspiration and Positivity are all being gently and quietly removed from our consciousness.
Sounds a bit Wah-Wah-WHOO! – EH?? – Well listen to the audio below, follow along with the poem/lyrics and simply ‘reflect’.
Why is art hushed low in the roar of the street,
Where concrete and commerce so clinically meet?
Why are our buildings no longer raised high
As cathedrals of craft that once dazzled the sky?
Why do the doorways stand silent and plain,
Uncarved by devotion, untouched by the vein
Of artisans pouring their spirit in wood,
As once in the centuries proudly they stood?
Why do the windows stare empty and bare,
Without stained-glass stories suspended in air?
Why does the stonework lie lifeless and cold,
No flourished adornment, no filigreed fold?
Why is the pipework exposed without grace,
Like veins of a body stripped out of its place?
Why must efficiency banish delight,
And function extinguish the warmth of the light?
Why is a house just a box with a door,
A number, a lock, and a laminated floor?
Where once it was poetry shaped into space,
With cornices curling in elegant lace.
Why do the statues that rise in our squares
Seem twisted by anguish, consumed by their stares?
Like fragments of nightmares welded in steel,
More eager to wound than to soothe or to heal.
Why do the fountains no longer sing
With sculpted cherubs on crystalline wing?
Why do the stations where thousands convene
Resemble a sketch of a half-formed machine?
We rush through terminals sterile and wide,
Where beauty and wonder have quietly died.
We live in abstraction of angles and screens,
In grayscale reflections of digital dreams.
The curves have been straightened, the colors subdued,
The language of ornament deemed crude.
We trade sacred craft for the cheapest design,
And call it progression by modern outline.
Yet still in the hush of a twilight-lit street,
The hunger for splendor and harmony beats.
For deep in the marrow, the spirit still yearns
For arches and frescoes and hand-carved returns.
Perhaps in the cracks of this abstract age,
New artists will step to the unvarnished stage.
To marry the useful with luminous art,
And build us a world where both dwell in the heart.
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