Much like real life, once it’s finished—having become real, as imagined, or something like it was imagined—architecture becomes prosy. Prosy in the corners of the room; the trim, when there’s trim; the banister landing; the side door to the side place; prosy in the wayward door that marks a vestibule or entry lobby. All becomes inaugurated into the commonplace. The prosy commonplace in surfaces and volumetric asides, like where the sunlight bends in late afternoon when you’re trying to decide whether to take a nap. Prosy commonplace architecture with its exfoliation and crowfeet, rigid joints and sunspots.

Architecture is now a building; prosy form, prosy affect. Prosy places where your dad works, where people wait in line, and where you visit, somehow, without knowing what to do or where to go when you step through the door. You know, the sort of place you’d visit when following the advice of a barfly who advises, “if you’re ever stuck in Lansing…” It smells official, like bureaucracy and workaday integrity, sometimes cleaner. It smells like home, like laundry, and the sheets on your bed after a couple weeks of sleep. It lets in the cold, wafts of frozen chicken breasts baking in a discount oven, lingers comatose in the abrasive light, and muffles the sounds of the bus and airplanes and machinery. It is the idylls of everydayness. Architecture becomes a rote chorus, an incidental formation of ontic and faceless characters; it becomes hereness. Architecture becomes marvelous.