O teak!
You delight of shoppers’ wives,
refuge of architects,
and the dot over the “i” of honoraria.
You fiendishly indestructible and shitty brown.
You’re so Asiatic Firm-like and so noble
that you simply can not even stand being painted in a vibrant coloration,
so filled with virtues you can solely be proven nude
as God, in a second of genius, created you,
sexless, boring, as pricey as advantage itself.
Neither a knot nor a crack on you can also make little women and boys
assume that not all the pieces is identical at each ends.
Along with chrome steel and bolstered concrete
you stand because the trinity of the instances.
Banks, companies, and financial savings and loans worship you.
You’re the image of all method of consolidated semi-education,
the discrete commercial for the acceptable peak of our tax bracket
and the corresponding excellence of our neighborhood.
When you have been an honorable maritime materials,
supposed to resist storm and salt water.
Now you’ve gotten been raised to the pedestal of style.
Now even financial institution clients,
who themselves should pay the worth,
fall on their knees earlier than the totem pole of teak.
*
Humble and touching pine,
which might rot in first rate style,
which should not present its soiled hue at any value,
which modestly wears the painter’s coloration –
Allow us to be quaint collectively and out of contact with the instances.
Our likelihood will come once more, ultimately.
— Poul Henningsen (1894-1967), Danish creator, architect and critic, written Oct. 28, 1953
