“It’s beyond my control”, repeats John Malkovich with careless indifference in “Dangerous Liaisons” when he insensitively, at least on the surface, breaks up with the seduced Michelle Pfeiffer.

It seems that the present state of mind, general culture, ethics and morals are the result of a similar mentality: all too often we use the sentence quoted above as an excuse for our (non)actions. For fear of personal exposure or personal responsibility, most people prefer to swim in the safe waters of mediocrity. And so, things move in their own way, left more or less to chance.

The frequency of the “it’s-beyond-my-control” kind of persuasion (which is used not only on the level of architectural design but also on administrative and political levels) is manifested in architecture in the present design and town-planning chaos where the designer’s fundamental values are submitted to, and even substituted by, the laws of the economic/financial market.