Arets on architectural realization

Architecture is a desire for purity, a striving for perfection. Its principal colour is white. White marks a process in which the undecidable is respected and in which, for a short time, it is neither a question of meaningful or meaningless.
… Architecture is virginal. Its entire logic is a logic of the maidenhead: it risks something that is only of short duration. It appears only to disappear. … It presents us with its freshness and untaintedness, but only briefly, for it will lose those properties precisely by offering them to us.
Architecture is therefore a between, a membrane, an alabaster skin, a thing that is at once opaque and transparent, meaningful and meaningless, real and unreal. To become itself, architecture must lose its innocence; it must accept a violent transgression of its existence. It can only become part of the world by entering into marriage with its surroundings.Therefore architecture is not only virginal but violent too, and its violence once again has two sides. On one side it is violent because it resists having to be the victim of its surroundings and on the other it can influence those surroundings and bend them to its will. Marriage has lent it cunning.

“An alabaster skin,” Wiel Arets.