In The Power of Gentleness, French philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle describes gentleness as a radical act of courage. Nænne is also about courage, about courage’s discomfort. I look out over the rooftops and hear the architecture of the city whisper: we cannot bear to tell the truth about our massive CO2 emissions. We don’t dare to tell the story of how we house the humans and devour the rest of the world. And yes—the humans are also the world, and they too must soon be devoured.

Gentleness is wrapped in textile uncertainty. The same kind found in Canadian poet Lisa Robertson’s work:

…architecture inaugurates itself as social rhetoric by framing the family and symbolizing ownership conflicts. This is to imagine sociality in terms of capital and weakness in terms of lack…

Gentleness is weak and wavering. Immune to the linear progress of profit. Robertson continues:

…but we experience weakness as pliancy, the structural ability to welcome desire and change.

This pliancy, and this we, dwells inside the world’s deficiencies. It unfolds in the void in a hot dog stand on the outskirts of Copenhagen or in a spontaneously planted garden, in a bread making hut nestled between modernist social housing in Taastrup, in a building collective in the countryside or in an exhibition space in Aarhus whose premises will soon be converted into a discount supermarket. Gentleness grows quietly in architecture’s nooks and crannies. It doesn’t evolve quickly. Perhaps because it takes such courage to build with its porosity. It leaks and crumbles and is always in flux. It requires oceans of time and is not without conflict. The we exists in these places. Desire also resides here.

In James Hall’s Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (1917) gentleness is described as a minor virtue in religious allegory. Gentleness is represented by a woman caressing a lamb. A symbol of spiritual humility and compassion. The soft, loving caress is displayed as an active, protective force, not a passive quality. Gentleness always chooses care over coercion, that is its strength. It lets things grow where they are, where they can. Gentleness is always small; it knows no monumentality. Perhaps this is because it is confined on all sides. Its hardly is always so imminent. A gentle architecture must be a minor architecture—like the one described by Jennifer Bloomer and Jill Stoner. An architecture that operates outside the economy, outside culture, yes perhaps even outside the boundaries of construction itself.

I watch the city’s dim lights, my lacquered nails gripping the gentle hammer. I will hardly succeed in rebuilding it all. Gentleness is also entirely indifferent to such single-mindedness. It is content to sense that the courage is there. It is satisfied to know that The we, with its already built in community, can turn softness into resistance.