A rather unkempt park in a Balkan city on a summer's day. Everything is dry. A stagnant lake and a few almost white willows at the edge of the dirty water, as if they wanted to touch it. The Little Prince sits on a bench and stares out into the void. The Little Digital Prince approaches on the alley at a brisk pace: the stifling heat does not exist for him. He stops by the bench. 

LITTLE DIGITAL PRINCE [LDP] Hello my alter ego! I get the impression you're sad, melancholy to say the least. What is the matter with you? 

THE LITTLE PRINCE [LP] I'm back on this huge planet and I'm thinking about what happened to me last time. I climbed a mountain to see the people from above. I greeted the sharp cliffs and they immediately responded. They repeated what I said. If I had shouted to the sky where I had come from, would anyone have heard me? Finally I shouted: I'm alone! The peaks answered me: I'm alone! As if they spoke for men, who repeat what they hear around them. They talk only about themselves. With the exception of one gentleman who knew how to ask questions and who drew interesting things.

LDP These things may have happened, but never mind. I now live in another world, in a continuous present. What you call "the eternal humanness" is foreign to me. I feel at ease with those around me, ever since I decided to part with you and abandon this little planet. I can understand what you're saying, but I cannot feel it. People are right when they deal exclusively with themselves: that's what it means to be connected.

LP You are my future. I know that I was once here, far away, among vast expanses of sand. I, the homeless one, was happy when that gentleman built a house by drawing a crate with holes for my sheep. I used to be happy when I looked at that drawing. 

LDP "House", "home", you utter these words too often, you and those who seem to regret the richer reality behind them, as you say. Reality is in front of the words, just a step away. Your friend used to draw boxes. The house is a box we can live in, detached from the rest of the world, and from the past. A well-made box inside which I can move easily. I don't rummage in words, instead I use them as I need them. 

LP I can talk about what I know, and so can you. I don't need a box to feel at home, and if I had a home, it wouldn't be a box. I'm less nostalgic than you think. What matters to me is a certain kind of relationship with things and beings, which I call habituation. Time is its environment, as geometric space seems to be your environment. 

LDP You're right. I know only one time: the time I need to travel a certain distance. I've told you what I think about the mania for rummaging in words, which you call "thinking". You are a child, the child I once was; you live with your flower and the beings you love. Yet you look at things the same way your invisible masters do, from whom I have totally detached myself.

LP Which masters? I'm still looking for them. I consider the world in its continual birth, greeting what comes my way with a kind of wonder. I enjoy every sunset. If I contemplated several sunsets in a row on a tiny planet, I wouldn't enjoy them less. I'm looking for a friend, this means I'm alone. But my solitude is not uneventful.

LDP You use strange words. About your masters I know something. They exist; you must separate yourself from them in order to be free at last. I am. The world is what I see and grasp, nothing more. When you understand that, you will be strong. For now you depend on those masters you do not know; they are inside you. 

LP For me, the world comes with the habituations. With the feeling of being at home. It always seems to me that I am at home, because everywhere there is a being to be tamed and things that I can look into and deal with. As long as these beings and these things are around me – I know they will be – I will feel at home. A home is not a box, but rather this feeling that I might call inhabitation. I name things, I don't grasp them. I'm not a lover of concepts.

LDP You don't like concepts? And yet they are beautiful because we can build them. I'm not unenthusiastic either, dear who-I-once-was-and-never-will-be. Nothing excites me more than building: the act of building and the idea of building. I know that the spaces I design are good for everyone. Those people you call, with a vaguely reproachful air, "adults" also build ideas. I in turn grasp ideas firmly and reject anything vague. I am as interested in the precise conception of spaces as well as in their construction. As you can see, I became an architect.

LP An adult told me a few days ago that an architect is primarily concerned with this feeling of being at home. Do you think he didn't know what he was saying? And yet I thought the idea was beautiful; it arises, it's not constructed. I realized that my barren piece of rock where there are no buildings is also habitable. It is my place – a place. You should start here before you build.  

LDP O, my-former-self, what are you talking about? Have you become a concept lover too? Give up concepts: you don't know how to build them. How can you think that my profession, architecture, can have anything to do with these vague words like place, dwelling? I assume your friend also uses such words, 'history', 'memory', 'tradition'. They're useless, believe me. You can't give them up, very well. I do not need them; we live in a world where these ideas are no longer relevant. I build for the people who live in this world. That's why I am powerful, rich, appreciated, in a word famous. 

LP I'm happy for you. What do you have to say about the word "man"? Is that also a concept?

LDP Of course. Without it I couldn't think about space, specifically the spaces I build. Man is body-in-space, a body endowed with the ability to think. Man is in this world and thinks his multiple connections with the world. People who are in this part of the world and know it find their bearings in it and are happy. Their thinking is accurate. This word, accuracy, corresponds to my state. Your masters used it too; I learned it at school. That was a long time ago. 

LP Those you call my masters were not without power and ambition, some of them. Yet for them happiness was primarily the movement toward the invisible which they called the quest. They said we must search with the heart. As if one were looking for a treasure buried in the garden. Almost nothing is known about it; a legend says it's there. This hidden treasure is the soul of the house. And part of ours. There are no buildings where I live. But a house without a soul would be a mere box. I dream of houses with hidden treasures.

LDP I don't understand what you're saying, but I see how you orient yourself in the world, or rather beyond it. Something in you is rummaging around in the word "man". Your child's soul is restless. You seek; I have found. 

LP Something of me is left in you. You also think a house is made in the image of man. 

LDP Yes, for my body, your body, our body, the one that sees, hears, touches, moves, as I said. And we architects anticipate the movements of the body, and so we give meaning to the spaces we build. 

LP Don't you think that spaces are also for the heart, i.e. for the feeling? 

LDP I don't understand this singular. We have feelings that connect us to others and that belong to the moving body; they are also movements, e-motions, that we control by thinking. 

LP I have the impression that there is not much difference between a human being and a more perfected clock; that's what you think, if I'm not mistaken. 

LDP You're wrong. In some respects the perfection of the watch is superior. However, the clock is man-made and man is nature-made. He does not need anyone to work, as long as he works. He is more powerful than the clock, than any object and any being, as long as he is aware of his power. The powerful man does not rummage into words, does not let himself be carried away by images, but instead works on his emotions until they become controllable. It is for these people that I build. 

LP I understand you're talking about adults. Children need other people. 

LDP Yes. I have become an adult, even if my appearance is not totally different from yours. You'll be surprised: my spirit is also partly yours, the-one-who-I-once-was. 

LP I would be grateful if you could tell me in what sense.

LDP It is a certain contact with reality, with the world around us. Which some would call naive. We don't shy away from telling it like it is. We don't talk about the same things, but the things we do talk about materialize in front of us. We have firm convictions and we enunciate them in the most natural way possible.

LP Without a doubt. However, this word, "conviction", does not inspire me. I do not find myself in this strengthening of the feeling, in it being fixed within certain limits. Feeling is infinite. Emotions, whether passed through the filter of reason or not, remain on the surface.

LDP I have the impression that you have the inner gaze, as you call it, directed towards the singular, towards the one and only. I understand to a certain extent what you mean, but I remain a man of the multiple, of diversity. My thinking spontaneously adheres to everything that happens in the world, in today's world. I am for the many, in and for their world, and the many are for me. And nothing seems to me more false than the assertion some make: that there is an irreducible difference between the soul, as they say, and the social world. They also use a pretentious word to describe it: "heterogeneity".

LP One of my masters used it, if I'm not mistaken, in his Diary. Can you please tell me one thing: if you are not concerned with the one, the uniqueness and the unique, how can you relate to the many, I mean to each one of them? Is a relationship between two people, regardless of its duration, a lifetime or a minute, not unique? And does it not assume that every man is self-aware in this way: to-be-unique? I address the other, I want to know something about him, I expect the same from him. A dialogue takes place between two unique people, doesn't it?

LDP Two - why not? Usually there are more of us. All right, let's say two. With friends I talk about professional achievements, about trips to distant lands, about fine drinks and luxury apartments by the sea. Sometimes about politics; we find that we have the same opinions. When I'm with clients, I guide them. We are talking about spaces. They will appropriate their spaces, those spaces within which they will move, because I designed them for this purpose. My ideas become tangible realities. That's all I care about.

LP A relationship can exist between a human and any other living being. Sometimes it seems to me that through it I see and feel the world, a larger world. If you love a flower that is somewhere on a star, this is enough to make you happy just to look at the stars. All the stars are blooming. I read these lines somewhere.

LDP I learned at school that this kind of expression is called poetic. Who else expresses themselves this way today? Not even teenagers. They want pictures and words backed by pictures. In good magazines, the texts are descriptive, so that they can be understood by all. But it's the photos of the buildings that matter.

LP Again the adults, only them. As if they weren't children too. In my travels I have seen strange adults. Some of them lost in calculations, all of them concerned solely with themselves. They lived on a small invisible planet, or rather inside it, in the sphere of their concerns, which they felt no need to leave. Some were architects. They talked a lot about space and spaces, less about people. I tried to find out who they were building for. They kept answering me: for bodies in motion.

LDP I hope you appreciate the rigor of our job. Three categories of people like my edifices: architects, politicians, and last but not least, those who believe what others tell them.

LP I don't believe what adults say. I trust the voice of my heart.

LDP You think that people ask themselves certain questions, and that they still believe in art, in the works that "are", as you say. But works of art and architecture are also integrated into the circuit of communication. No one questions what they are in themselves. If I build a building and I say it is valuable, people believe me. My position in society is the best argument.

LP I noticed that this is how the adult world works. Everyone has only one thought: to say what others are saying, probably to think the same. It's not hard to make them believe anything. At first it seemed strange to me that things happen this way; later on I understood. He who does not look at the invisible with the heart sees only the visible with the eyes of the flesh and does not seek anything beyond. If you are not anchored in the invisible, the word "beauty" has no meaning for you, in the end.

LDP You are a child. You see the adult world from a distance, you don't participate in it. What you say made sense in yesterday's world, not in today's, the only world that exists. You believe that one man's thoughts can be true, that any one thing can be beautiful. You can't understand that the truth comes when the many repeat certain sentences. We manufacture everything, including the truth, which depends on our will.

LP So the houses, which are just sophisticated boxes, are also manufactured. I wouldn't live in a house like that. Whether you confess this thought to yourself or not, you believe that architecture is made for architects, that only they understand it. However, there are also architects who feel the invisible and see with their soul the spaces they enter, these spaces also have a soul. They dream for a long time about their spaces before designing them. Their imagination is nourished by poetry, wounded by it: transformed.

LDP You live in another world, the one in which I used to live myself. That's all I know about it: that it existed, otherwise I can't imagine it. For me this world – society – is the only real one. It is beautiful and complex. Why would I be interested in a world that you call wider as long as my activity is carried out in this world, life here being so interesting, so varied? Poetry, literature? Sometimes I have time for this kind of pleasures. However, the field of art has nothing to do with my job.

LP I am not talking about another world, but about the invisible in this world. It exists. What I feel is or should be true for adults as well. I am talking about the truth of dwelling. There are no houses on my planet; but I live there. If I built a house here, its meaning would change the meaning of things. I would make friends with it, with the things in it, with those that are and those that were.

LDP You don't change. Remain an idealist and a dreamer.

LP You are more dependent on the past than you think. Of a certain past, that of Utopia.

LDP Possible. I live in this world as if it were perfect. And the buildings I build are perfect in their own way.

LP I find your world suffocating; I don't feel at home in it. There is too much noise in it, which you no longer hear. I prefer silence, in which I can love a flower. And my houses would be full of silence. For only in silence does each person's truth thrives and takes root. The man who seeks his truth may dwell in those houses, made for him.

LDP Incorrigible dreamer. You will change one day too.

LP Then that will be the end.

LDP I don't care what was and what will be. What is around me satisfies me completely.

LP I appreciate your honesty. In the end we can only be what we are.

LDP That's right.

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