In a book of essays concerning the question of the possibility of preserving individuality and complexity within mass culture, writer Jonathan Franzen defines the central problem of modern literature and culture as a whole as being dominated by the “rhetoric of optimism”. The rhetoric of optimism is a result of the lie necessary for upholding every successful regime, including the present ruling techno-corporatism – the lie of how the system has brought us a better world. What is true of contemporary literature, whose value Franzen questions, is similarly true of a great part of modern architecture, very frequently presented in today’s publications and as a consequence recognised as a concept of Projective practices.