Ellis recognized, that is to say, that the production of the aesthetic as a category separate from the 'necessary' (i.e. the utile, in the Bataille restricted economy sense) was complicit in a kind of (from any rational POV) inexplicable diminution of the possibilities of human experience. Why must architecture be part of a banalizing culture of vampiric undeath? Why should only the privileged be able to enjoy their surroundings? Why should the poor be penned into miserable concrete blocks?

Ellis referred to beauty as a 'strange necessity', cutting through the binary of needs = biological and aesthetic = cultural luxury. Bodies deprived of attractive surroundings were as likely to be as depressed - or to use the superbly multivalent Rasta term, downpressed - as those deprived of anything they more obviously 'needed'.