Curated Chaos and Clinical Precision

Stepping into the atrium of the old Millington Works, I am immediately struck by the smell of expensive oat milk and the visual noise of 233 individual light bulbs hanging from the ceiling on frayed cords. It is a curated chaos. I am Olaf M.-C., and I spend my days in a world where a single micron of dust is a catastrophe. As a clean room technician, my job is to ensure that the environment is sterile, predictable, and devoid of any history that could contaminate the future. But here, in this 19th-century carcass, the history is the product, and yet, it feels more sterile than my lab at 43 percent humidity.

The original machinery is long gone. Not just moved, but erased with a clinical precision that would make my colleagues jealous. Where the massive hydraulic press once sat-a beast of iron that probably weighed 13 tons-there is now a ‘swing set’ made of polished brass. It serves no purpose other than as a platform for 23-year-olds to pose for their followers, their faces illuminated by the ring lights they carry in their bags. This is the new preservation. It’s a taxidermy of architecture. We keep the skin, but we replace the organs with sawdust and fiberglass.

Plastic Nature and Industrial Ghosts

I find myself staring at a wall of fake ivy. It’s tucked behind a neon sign that screams ‘GOOD VIBES ONLY’ in a font that looks like it was born in a marketing meeting on the 83rd floor of a glass tower in Dubai. The ivy is plastic, yet it’s meant to signal ‘nature’ and ‘growth’ within these brick walls that once saw the sweat of 233 workers on a single shift. Those workers didn’t have vibes; they had lung disease and a paycheck that barely covered the rent for a three-room flat. Now, we drink $13 lattes and talk about the ‘soul’ of the building while standing on a floor that has been sanded down so many times it has lost its grain.

As a man who understands the technical specifications of surfaces, I can tell you that these conversions are often failures of engineering masked as triumphs of style. The acoustics are the first thing that fails. You take a space designed to house heavy, vibrating machinery-a space with high ceilings and hard surfaces intended to bounce sound away from sensitive ears-and you turn it into a place for hushed conversations and phone pings. It’s a sonic disaster. I’ve seen better attempts at dampening the noise using modern interventions from Slat Solution, which at least attempt to bridge the gap between the industrial coldness and the need for a space where you can actually hear yourself think. But often, the architects of the ‘Instagram age’ just leave the brick raw because it looks ‘authentic’ on a smartphone screen, even if the resulting echo makes it impossible to have a human conversation without shouting over the sound of 13 different steam wands.

The Contamination of Performance

I am guilty of it too, I suppose. I took a photo of my coffee before I sat down. I wanted to prove I was here, in this ‘vibrant’ community space. But the longer I sit here, the more I feel the contamination of the performative. In my clean room, we use HEPA filters to remove 99.97% of particles. In these buildings, we use filters on our phones to remove 100% of the reality. We smooth out the cracks in the mortar. We saturate the red of the brick. We make the history look like a brand-new stage set. The result is a world that is visually stunning but tactually and emotionally empty. We are hollowing out our heritage to make room for a better feed.

“We are hollowing out our heritage to make room for a better feed.”

There is a specific kind of grief in watching a place lose its function. A factory is meant to make things. A home is meant to hold things. A church is meant to pray for things. When a factory becomes a ‘multi-use lifestyle destination,’ it ceases to be a place of production and becomes a place of consumption. But it’s a strange kind of consumption where we aren’t even consuming the food or the atmosphere-we are consuming the image of ourselves in the atmosphere. I watched a woman spend 33 minutes arranging her pastries for a flat-lay photo. By the time she was done, the croissant was cold, the coffee was stagnant, and she hadn’t looked out the window once. The window, by the way, still has the original 1903 glass panes, which ripple the light in a way that is truly beautiful. She didn’t notice.

The Architectural Deepfake

I wonder if we are losing the ability to be present in any space that hasn’t been pre-approved by an algorithm. If a building doesn’t have a ‘selfie wall,’ does it even exist? I think about my work again. In the clean room, if I forget to attach the sensors to the manifold, the entire batch is ruined. It’s a binary state: success or failure. But in the world of aesthetics, we have entered a gray zone where we can fail at preservation while succeeding at popularity. We can destroy the spirit of a landmark while getting 1,003 likes on a photo of its facade.

This trend toward facadism-the practice of keeping the exterior shell of a building while completely gutting and rebuilding the interior-is the architectural equivalent of a deepfake. It looks like history, but it’s a lie. When you walk through the door, the floorplan has no relationship to the original structure. The stairs don’t lead where they used to. The light doesn’t fall the way it was intended to. We have disconnected the body from the soul. And for what? So that we can have more open-concept floor plans and more room for retail stalls that sell $43 candles that smell like ‘Industrial Smoke.’

The Museum of Surfaces

I am sitting at table number 43. It’s made of ‘reclaimed wood,’ which is a fancy way of saying they took the old floorboards and glued them onto a piece of particle board. It’s a metaphor for the whole experience. It’s a thin veneer of the past glued onto a cheap, modern core. I think about my email again. The one without the attachment. I should probably go back to the lab and fix it. There, at least, the lack of an attachment is recognized as an error. Here, the lack of an attachment-to history, to function, to reality-is celebrated as ‘reimagining the space.’

What happens when we have reimagined every space? When every old warehouse is a food hall and every old bank is a luxury gym? We will live in a world that is perfectly photogenic and completely unrecognizable. We will be surrounded by the ghosts of our ancestors’ labor, but we won’t be able to hear them over the sound of the ‘vibe.’ We are building a museum of surfaces, and we are all just curators of our own emptiness.