Every few years, a visual language becomes dominant. For a period, it seems like the only possible way for a contemporary space to look. Then it passes. The spaces designed to embody it are left looking dated — not gracefully aged but specifically, uncomfortably of a moment.
This is the essential problem with designing to a trend: a trend is a collective aesthetic preference, not a response to a specific person’s life.
The terrazzo floor that appears because terrazzo is fashionable, and the terrazzo floor that appears because its thermal mass keeps the floor cool and it will look better in thirty years — these are materially identical but philosophically opposite.
The best design is not timeless in the sense of ignoring time. It is timeless in the sense of not being enslaved to a particular moment’s preferences. It makes decisions that will still be right in twenty years. That is Aucitya.