Oh, the joy of surprise! (I know. This is exactly the same opening as last Monday's message but Surprise! We have more to talk about in regards to making the expected, not and of murdering the mundane.
 
"Never judge a book by its cover. “Yet, look at the covers on most books; slick, trick, seductive, stylized overtures, designed to entice the purchase, like so many made-up mannequins, remaining frozen in the moment of strutting what few would comfortably wear.
 
Always, architecture, is judged by its cover. So architecture lies to be slick, trick and seductive. Front covers of boring space, designed to entice the buy in, like so many faked-up facades, frozen in the moment of strutting where few would feel comfortable remaining.
 
This is the act of "Facadomy," full-frontal throttled "Look at me Now and Buy," "Mannequintecture."
 
Test me on this. 
 
Drive down any major street in any City in any America. Football fields of flower-colored cars swell against the big, bigger and biggest boxes as they stack flatly four stories high with four foot high letters, reading,  Buy Me Now. 
 
Facadomy is pandemic. It is infectious. It is malevolent. It is expected.
 
But surprise? Oh, the joy of surprise!
 
Too seldom employed, surprise can be the architect's greatest tool, greatest prize, worthy pride.
 
We were blessed to design a Synagogue in Tempe, Arizona. The fellowship gardens, the migfa, all but the rising slope of the sanctuary facing true East, are almost but not quite, invisible from the street. These are holy places, hidden from parking, sequestered from the sticky noise and dead black tarmac heat, the profane. One separates from the world and penetrates with cool purpose through shadow, a twelve foot high, two foot thick, stone masonry wall. 
 
Surprise! The architecture doesn't scream to be seen. Temple Emmanuel, letters only four inches but powerfully tall. It hides and so is found. 
 
We're designing a kindergarten through twelfth grade school for French children and young adults in Tehran, Iran. Three and four story vine covered forms, swoop, compress and soar to scoop wind, sway judgement, sculpt hearts, open minds. 
 
Surprise! An "axis of evil", redefined.
 
Saturday I visited Roberto Angulo. It is a good habit, but people from Venezuela always feed the visitor. Roberto's smiling wife prepared Argentine empanadas with garlic, chives, red dried pepper and olive oil salsa. Wow.
 
We discussed plans for Publito Antiguo, an eighteen acre Super Surprise on Highway 71 just past Bastrop, on your way, llendose, a Houston.
 
Prone to flooding (Roberto bought the soggy property for a song), the waters will be managed and augmented by a one thousand foot long canal. Its banks will connect two, one acre ponds, one to retain an island amphitheater, walled in-the-round with twelve caneles (yes, for the Apostles), waterfalls on the corner, the sign, Publito Antiguo, half hidden behind falling water. The other pond, inland, laps up to the Bridal Palace. A covered flotilla will carry her and her mother and her entourage of always pretty women at a wedding, under a waterfall-bridge where she will join her Papito as he escorts her to the Wedding Chapel and her Novio. The wedding is welded and the party mixes in main Plaza Arcade, a Mariache'fied reception, next to the Restaurante, La Cantina, the Panaria y Tortilliaria while five tall brightly colored fabric covered Kioskos front the canal watching familias in picnic and barbecoa. 
 
No Facadomy here. No way! This is culture. This is familia. This is real and guess what? It's all hidden, almost, away from the traffic and a hectic, manic, movement of Buy Me Now. You have to want to get in hard enough to find your way in.
 
Surprise! There's a ten foot high stone and stucco wall and an ancient, wrought-iron gate through which tu tienes que pasar, you pass into a special place of Living in Surprise. Living in Architecture. 
 
A Living Architecture.