An unspoken revolution is occurring in architecture; a change that is slowly, sub-structurally altering the profession, from what we do, to how we do it and what we are being asked to deliver.

Neither Desperate Nor Decadent is a reaction to Ole Bouman's article Desperate Decadence in Volume #6. Bouman met Al Sager, Al Rubaian and Khanafer -three students from Kuwait- while travelling, and invited them to respond to his article.

Cities arise because of people’s basic need to live and work near one another. The city offers freedom, anonymity, trade, economy of scale, an immediately accessible consumers’ market, work potential – a swarming brew of ideas and innovation that fulfill man’s social, psychological, and economic needs. The city is the motor of progress.

After showing how power manifests itself in details ( Volume 5), Volume 6 discusses power at the scale of the building. Francesco Bonami, Ole Bouman, Zvi Efrat, Jeffrey Inaba, Jeannie Kim, Rem Koolhaas, Brendan McGetrick, Markus Miessen, Lina Stergiou, Robert Stern and many more on superchurches in the USA, the palaces of Saddam Hussein, penthouses taking over whole skyscrapers, entrance lobbies, detention centres, security fences, the perseverance of modernist utopias, and much more. Including a dossier on ‘desperately decadent’ megalo projects in the Gulf region.

Not having enough to do, architects often do too much. Devoted with masochistic fervor to a profession whose expertise is routinely ignored, they treat each project as if it might be their last, turning it into an ark loaded with their best ideas compacted into an intense display of effects.

At the most abstract level, the task for the artist and for the architect is essentially the same: to specify a frame. The artist’s frame may be entirely concrete or entirely abstract – from an ornately gilded rectangle to a spoken instruction – but always acts to define its contents as being artworks, whether they are newly created or nothing but found objects.

Few things are as driven by maximalism as architecture. The craft stands out for its almost boundless urge to prove itself. If you want to become a thinking, creative architect, not only must you be capable of doing anything, you also have to do it. Work, work, work: that’s the motto

Can we do something by doing (almost) nothing? Can we achieve anything by doing too much? Can we do what we need to do, by doing just what is needed? How do we define doing too much, too little? How to think through doing anyway?