The modern architectural world has become so absurd, so self-referential, that we are now finding whimsy in a grotesque pastiche of a mansion hoisted onto a soulless skyscraper—rather than restoring the very real, crumbling mansions that lie abandoned in the European countryside. This is art eating itself, an ouroboros of design where irony and spectacle matter more than substance or authenticity.
Philippe Starck’s latest creation, a fictionalized 19th-century mansion perched atop a nine-story tower, exemplifies this decay of meaning. The hotel in Metz, France clad entirely in metal, is presented as a fantastical tale:
“Manfred Heler has inherited his parents’ beautiful house,” explained Starck. “As an orphan, he finds himself all alone, in this mansion surrounded by a large park. Everything’s going well for him, until he starts to get bored.”
And so, like modern architecture itself, Heler’s boredom spurs him into excess. He does not restore, he does not root himself in the land—he invents. The mansion, a relic of aristocratic Europe, is yanked from the earth and mounted atop a monolithic tower, as if a cruel god had taken a cookie-cutter to the landscape and willed it skyward.
“He climbs and climbs and climbs, until the shaking stops,” Starck describes. “Then there’s silence. Manfred is high above the city. His house has been extruded.”
This surrealist vision is the perfect metaphor for contemporary sustainable architecture, which prides itself on innovation but often leaves genuine preservation behind. Instead of rehabilitating historic estates, we spend millions constructing imitations in unnatural settings, stripping them of their purpose and transforming them into profitable, sterilized attractions. This is not conservation. This is spectacle.
And what lies below, beneath this folly-in-the-sky? A cold, utilitarian tower with 104 spartan suites. “Stripped of any superficiality,” says Starck, as if modern minimalism is the necessary antidote to the whimsy of the mansion above. Concrete, stark white walls, and industrial elements form a dull contrast to the theatrical excess above. If the mansion is a dream of the past, the tower is the nightmare of the present: soulless, efficient, lacking any sense of history or romance.
Meanwhile, real mansions in the European countryside crumble. Their grand halls sit empty, their gardens overgrown, their histories fading into oblivion. Instead of revitalizing these structures—preserving their materials, their craftsmanship, their connection to the land—we fabricate their ghosts and pin them onto the skyline like trophies. This is what modern architecture calls progress.
The perception of numerous abandoned châteaux in France is partly influenced by the visibility of certain iconic ruins. Notable examples include Château de la Mothe-Chandeniers: Located in Les Trois-Moutiers, this 13th-century castle fell into ruin after a fire in 1932. In 2017, a crowdfunding campaign successfully raised funds to purchase and begin preserving the structure.
Château Burrus: Situated in Sainte-Croix-aux-Mines, this neo-baroque château was built in 1900 as the family home of tobacco magnate Maurice Burrus. After changing ownership and periods of abandonment, it was purchased in 2022 by a family committed to its renovation.
There are an estimated 3 million abandoned homes in France according to Insee, the French national statistics office.
Perhaps the most fitting element of this entire spectacle is Heler himself, this imagined Renaissance man who, in his boredom, creates without meaning. “An extraordinarily rigorous and inventive man, he doesn’t necessarily succeed in everything he undertakes, but it’s always done with intelligence and poetry, guided by a naive desire to create meticulously at all costs.”
In that, he is the perfect patron saint of modern architecture—meticulous, inventive, and tragically misguided. He builds because he can, not because he should. And in doing so, he becomes the very thing he sought to escape: a prisoner of his own creation, high above the real world, detached from the land and the history beneath him.
This is the art of our time: consuming itself, applauding its own cleverness, while the true beauty of the past lies forgotten.
