It is the final stages of judging an architectural competition. The jury are split. On the one hand there is a scheme, colorful and blobby and empty. On the other there is a scheme in which the drawings are full of activity, where the architecture acts as a setting. Let's call them blob and setting.

"But I can't see the architecture,"says a critic of setting,"the drawings are so busy with people! What are they giving us? What would I tell my colleagues we have actually got?"
"But that, that ....thing. It's just vacant form. Where's the content?" replies the critic of blob.
"At least I can see it. And what I see looks really exciting."
"But it is just eye candy. You are falling into the trap of being seduced by image. It is just another clever architect playing the commodity game."
"Oh, for Christ's sake, don't give me that political bullshit."
"Look, anyone can draw people," another supporter of blob interjects, " making beautiful form is much more difficult."
"They aren't just drawing people. Of course there is stuff there, it is just that it is background. Kind of modest," says the second advocate for setting.
"Oh that is so dull. So damn worthy. At least these guys are giving us something interesting and new. Something luscious, something soft. "
"Come on, that isn't soft. Just because it has curves doesn't mean it's soft. Look at those plans. Pure hard functionalism masquerading as cuddly space."
"Stop it, " says the jury chair, " this isn't getting anywhere. We had better vote."

Hands go up. Still split, so the chair puts in her casting vote.
blob wins.
Asked afterward why she had tilted toward blob, the chair says she sort of liked the color.

Noir is the setting for our little experiment in stage design; in which programmatic complexities are layered within a conceptual simplicity. Where scene and motif intersect, wing into bench into car into branch, we venture into symbolic ambiguity and (hopefully) the architectural challenge of infusing static objects with a little dynamism.