 A little while ago, I went to talk at a conference in Lisbon. While I was there, I also had a chance to visit the medieval castle of Sausage. So this is basically a military compound, pretty much designed to shoot cannonballs at intruding armies. Nevertheless, when you looked at the place, it was actually quite beautiful. The entryways, symmetrical, carefully designed, every doorknob in it covered in an intricate ornament. And even the cannons themselves actually were clearly carefully considered. The smack from Lisbon I travelled to speak at yet another conference. This one in Memphis, Tennessee. And upon arrival at the convention center, I looked around. Everything only designed with function. This overpass, the architecture itself, the speed furniture, nothing was made with beauty in mind. This was pure utilitarianism. I visited that brought us from the relative darkness of the middle ages into the complete utter blackout of the 21st century. I blame one single man, fellow Austrian architect Adolf Loos, born in 1870 in Vienna, at a time of architectural historicism. Basically everything was built in any which way, in any which historic style the emperor fancied. So the Rathaus was in neo-Gothic, the parliament in neo-Greek, the opera in neo-Renaissance. And Loos was basically the leading architect for the intelligentsia at the time. He published an essay called Ornament and Crime in which he argued that most tattoos are ornamental. Most people who get tattoos are criminals, hence ornament must be criminal. He also had one better argument where he said that as ornament is always fashionable, it is criminal to force craftspeople to put ornaments on the things that they create because it would speed up the obsolescence. Now Adolf Loos became quite an influence on the Bauhaus and the Bauhaus as we know was the leading influence on architectural and design thinking throughout the entire 20th century all the way up into the 21st century. If you look at one of his most famous buildings at Michaelaplatz, Kaiser Franz Joseph apparently had all the windows that looked out over Michaelaplatz from the neighboring Hofburg nail shut so he wouldn't have to look at this awful building without ornament that was known in Vienna and still is known in Vienna as the building without eyebrows. And some of this made sense at the time. Get rid of all the ornamentation, embrace the new age, embrace the machines, show them visually, some of the other stuff didn't make that much sense. Machines also really started to play a big role in architecture. Natural ventilation was replaced by air conditioners, gabled roofs that automatically removed the snow, were replaced by flat roofs that needed machine snow removals and so on. And the leading proponents of the Bauhaus, so you have Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier built collectively a good number of masterpieces, but their thinking of course was in basically blameable for a real mass aglification of the world. Corbusier himself quite famously wanted to rip down Paris. This is the Paris that's the favorite city in every city survey of most people around the world and he wanted to replace it with this. Also came to India, this is in Chandigarh, Corbusier himself, and here are the sons of that sort of thinking right here in Pune. In every sort of building, be it a school building, be it a private building, be it a government building, this really became the world. And it's unbelievably. We look at the handaxe, this is the oldest tool humans and humanoids made. This is over a million years old, it's beautiful, it's symmetrical and there is no reason for it from a practical point of view that it's symmetrical. You can skin that mammoth just as well with this thing not being symmetrical. There many of them have been found all over Europe and Africa that actually work to be of any practical use. So they were just made to basically show off the fitness of its maker in the creation of something beautiful. So it's very clear that from the extreme beginning, even before we were called proper humans, when we were still humanoids, homo erectus, we already considered beauty as a very big part of what it means to be us. And the more, the even stupidest thing of it all is that it's all been an unbelievable misunderstanding. Adolf Loos actually loved beauty. He created this set of glasses for the Austrian company Loebmeyer, has been in production for the last 80 years. And when he's admitted these glasses to the company, he wrote a letter of wisdom. The letter basically stated that at a later date, he can also see ornaments cut into these glasses. He suggested butterflies, small animals, the naked human form, this from the creator of the essay, Ornament and Crime. But he didn't really have time to design the ornaments himself anymore. So 80 years later, Leonid Roth, the owner of Loebmeyer, found this letter and he commissioned my studio to create the ornaments to be cut into Adolf Loos' glasses, which of course was a fun job to do. And we designed a set of 14 glasses called Heaven and Hell, based on the seven heavenly virtues and the seven deadly sins. So here you have them, I see if I can get them all together. So this is greed, gluttony, lust, pride, wrath, sloth and envy. And then you have humility, chastity, charity, diligence. Then there's patience. The real fight is not between plain and complex, or between something simple and something ornamental. The real fight really is between designed with a lot of love and designed without care. I think that functionalism gave the stupid the excuse to not look at beauty at all and it gave us the possibility to ignore this real fundamental rule that beauty is always part of the function. And I do think that in the last decade or so things have started to really become better. There's many, many, many examples out there. I'll give you one from my neighborhood. Probably the most utilitarian building, the most functional building that you could possibly think of is an elevated cargo train track. Now, we had one of them rotting away two blocks from my apartment in Chelsea in the lower part of Manhattan. A couple of community organizers came around, Robert Hammond and Joshua Davis, and they commissioned friends of mine, the architecture office of Diller and Scaffidio, to renovate this train track. What came out of it is the now almost universally loved highlight. It's a small park from South Street in Manhattan all the way up to 30th Street. It's truly gorgeous. Vesa and I go running there every single morning. It inspired billions of extra development surrounding it. It's probably going to emerge as the most influential building in Manhattan from this generation. There's architects studying it from around the world on a weekly basis. It also, as a very astonishing fact, even though it has since its opening had 10 million visitors, so far not a single handbag has been stolen on it. The crime rates are zero. And this, of course, has again something to do with something that's been carefully considered and designed with beauty very much in place. So I do think that things get better, that civilization actually works. I know that from my own work that I had started out very much as a designer that only took care of concepts and ignored pretty much anything else that never really thought about form. But I've learned that if you want to communicate anything that a home really has a big, big role in how things are perceived. We even looked at this sentence, now it's better and it's getting more beautiful. Thank you so much.