I am seven years old, sitting in the backseat with my family on the way to a hiking holiday in the Swiss Alps. My parents want to listen to classical music; my brothers and I vote for fairy tales or the Bert and Ernie cassette. The compromise is Abba.

With I Have a Dream playing in the background, we speed along the German autobahn, and my eye catches the signs that say Ausfahrt, appearing every few kilometers. I ask my father what they mean. Wanting to listen to the music, he jokingly replies that it’s a very famous hotel.

As a dreamy child, I accept his answer without question and imagine that each exit leads, via a winding road, to the mysterious Hotel Ausfahrt. With every change of landscape we pass, I envision a new story, a unique atmosphere, and the image of the building grows more vivid in my mind.

It’s only on the way back that my father tells me Ausfahrt is simply the German word for “exit.” But by then, it’s too late. The magical hotel, elevated to mythical proportions, has already taken root as a metaphor. In my mind’s eye, I see a sanctuary for dreamers and wanderers. For clowns and philosophers, artists and birds of paradise. Free thinkers and revolutionaries. A place where everything makes sense. Where a timeless order prevails. Where humans, animals, and nature live together in harmony—like a new Eden.

Hotel Ausfahrt never left me, and over time it has taken on an even deeper meaning. Because we, as a society, are now racing down a highway - economically, ecologically, existentially – that leads to a deadly cliff. In agriculture, education, healthcare: our systems are breaking down. They no longer serve us. And the same is true for the built environment, my field of work, which has become utterly soulless in the wake of modernism.

If we want to avoid catastrophe, we must take an exit. Not out of fear, but because something better beckons. Another path. An inspiring horizon. A place where space can once again be soulful. Where beauty carries meaning. Where the human scale becomes leading.

It’s about that horizon, that search for soul in the man-made world – that I want to write about.

About space that breathes. Architecture as experience. Senses, books, rituals, systems, the soul of a place. About what we’ve lost, and what we might rediscover  with head, heart, and hand. This first entry marks the beginning of that journey.

Here you’ll find essays that go beyond aesthetics or sustainability. Reflections on how we live, build, feel, create. Short reviews of the books that inspire, fascinate, or confuse me. Not a manifesto. Not a manual. Not hard science. But stories to help us find the off-ramp on the road to Hotel Ausfahrt. Because, as the poet Muriel Rukeyser once wrote, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” And so it is.