TOWARDS AN ABSOLUTE ARCHITECTURE

It is probable that, with the development of a Social Transcendentalist civilization, all forms of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois architecture would be demolished to make way for the uniquely proletarian forms in due course. Already, since the late-twentieth century, the mould of proletarian architecture has been established, at least in its rudimentary form, and we need not doubt that such a mould - collective and transcendent - will be further developed and/or remodelled in the future, so that apartment blocks will become more the architectural rule than, as at present, the architectural exception.

If we endeavour to categorize domestic architecture according to class-evolutionary stages of development, or to stipulate the appropriate domestic environment for any given class, beginning with the aristocracy, we may arrive at conclusions similar to the following: a large country house and/or castle for the aristocracy; a small country house for the early-stage grand bourgeoisie; a detached suburban house for the late-stage grand bourgeoisie; a semidetached suburban house for the bourgeoisie; a terraced suburban house for the early-stage petty bourgeoisie; an apartment and/or bedsitter in a city tenement for the late-stage petty bourgeoisie; and, finally, a small flat in a city block for the proletariat. Such, rightly or wrongly, is how I estimate approximate class stages of architectural evolution, and in an open society which is advanced in years, having embraced a proletarian stage of architectural development, one finds all earlier modes of architecture still in existence, complete with their specific class owners.

Thus while proletarians ascend by lift to their flats on the ninth or tenth floor of a communal high-rise in the city, aristocrats may still be found climbing the wooden stairs of an ancient country house. While late-stage petty-bourgeois types wake-up each morning in a cramped bed-sitter, early-stage grand-bourgeois types go to sleep each night in the spacious bedroom of their quite affluent small country-house. Such is life in a relative civilization, with its open-society distinctions not only between the rich and the poor, but also between the country and the city.

Life in an absolute civilization of transcendental integrity would, one fancies, have to be quite different from that - indeed, so different as to attest to a uniformity of architectural styles and domestic environments. A post-atomic closed society would have no aristocrats in it for a start, and scarcely any bourgeoisie, so that neither rural nor suburban modes of architecture would be encouraged. The emphasis would be on developing proletarian architecture within an urban environment, and this would certainly entail the demolition of suburban and early urban modes of architecture in order to make room for the inevitable spread of late urban architecture as the city expanded, literally engulfing formerly petty-bourgeois and bourgeois environments. So terraced houses no less than semidetached and detached suburban houses would have to make way for the urban blocks destined to supplant them. Eventually a proletarian uniformity of architectural style within a uniform environment would arise, testifying to the lower, or relative, phase of People’s civilization.

How 'relative', you may well wonder? Well, firstly to the extent that there would be numerous blocks of flats in any given area, each block separate from its nearest neighbours. But secondly in terms of a materialistic style encasing a spiritualistic content, a rectangular or square design housing proletarians, those absolutely electron equivalents in relation to the proton- or neutron-biased classes stretching from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. So the rectangular, then, may be regarded as a materialistic form, a mechanistic design stemming, in some degree, from the Diabolic Alpha, and this no less so in a high-rise block of flats than in a country or suburban house. In early proletarian architecture, a rectangular design is the norm. But this could not be the case in late proletarian architecture, with the higher phase of People’s civilization, since such a phase would be absolutely orientated towards the Divine Omega. Consequently an absolute mode of architecture would have to be developed, a mode curvilinear in design, the circular a comparatively spiritual form intimating of divinity conceived as transcendent spirit, with particular reference to the goal of evolution in the post-Millennial Beyond.

So a curvilinear style of architecture, in complete contrast to the aristocratic inception of architecture in palatial or country-house rectilinear styles. A truly absolute mode of architecture, the proletariat living in more intensive collectivizations in a more extensive communal setting than where the preceding relative mode ... was concerned, one large circular tower comprising the equivalent to a residential sector of a city, a kind of omega city, built in such a way that the maximum number of people can be accommodated there in relative dignity, a central circular space enabling the residents on the inner side to look out onto the space and/or other half of the building some hundreds of yards away, while those on the outer side looked out onto - well, why not another such curvilinear tower a few hundred yards away?

Or, better still, why not the circular tower built in such a way that it spirals out in a series of concentric circles, the residents on the outer side of the central tower looking out onto the inner side of the adjacent tower, while those on the far side of the second arm, as it were, of the spiral would be looking out onto the inner side of its third arm, and so on, through successive spirallings, until the entire population of the area was accommodated in this omega city, replete with shops, cinemas, etc., on the ground floor of each arm of the spiral?

Certainly this second suggestion involves a more absolute approach to architecture, doing away with distinctions between one tower and another in any given locale and establishing, in consequence, a more homogeneous city, not simply an isolated block of flats in the country. We may also speculate that if Meditation Centres were to be built into them, the best possible place would be in the centre, from which spiritual cynosure the domestic arms of the spiral would curve outwards in an ever-expanding arc.

Thus any given city would be complete in itself, on religious no less than on commercial or domestic terms. It should be possible, in addition, for people to get from one arm of the spiral to another without having to venture out-of-doors, simply by following a ground passageway which led from the outermost ring of the city through each of the arms of the spiral to the Meditation Centre at its heart. In this way people would be spared contact with nature and enabled to maintain an intensely-interiorized and highly-civilized lifestyle - in complete contrast to the aristocratic inception of civilized evolution in the country.

Because proletarian civilization should be concerned with the maximum interiorization of life, it follows that not only access to the open country, but natural light must be minimized in order to reduce contact with nature as much as possible. Although proletarian architecture would appear comparatively lightweight and transcendental in construction, employing synthetic materials, its glass-like outer casing should not be translucent but, increasingly in the future, of an opaque constitution in order to preclude the entry of natural light and necessitate recourse to artificial lighting, preferably of a neon, i.e. electron-biased, type.

Likewise instead of air entering the interior of the buildings from without, special air-conditioning filters linked to oxygen containers should be employed in proletarian architecture not simply to reduce or exclude contact with the natural but, more importantly, to condition man towards greater dependence on the artificial, since that is a means to the supernatural, and artificially produced oxygen would induce a clearer consciousness in its recipients than naturally produced oxygen - trees having largely become discredited phenomena, subject to destruction.

So a free humanity aspiring towards omega divinity would necessarily require to be freed from dependence on natural light, which stems from the sun, that component of the Diabolic Alpha, as well as from dependence on natural air, which stems in large measure from trees, those offspring of the Diabolic Alpha and mirrors of the galactic-world-order, serving, in some degree, as the prototype for feudal society. Obviously, anything akin to a feudal arrangement would be taboo in a People’s civilization, and so one can take it as axiomatic that the artificial production of oxygen, no less than of light, will become essential to the psychological and moral well-being of the future proletariat.

As to the curvilinear style of advanced proletarian architecture, one should add that a positive commitment to the Divine Omega presupposes a defiance of the Diabolic Alpha, so that such architecture ought really to taper down slightly at roof level in order to defy gravitational force upwards, while at its lower end a slight tapering upwards in defiance of gravitational force downwards would not be out-of-order. Quite possibly such curvilinear architecture will be built, in any case, on raised inner platforms and/or outer pillars, thereby being elevated above the ground in accordance with transcendental criteria - the overall appearance suggestive of levitation. This is already true of certain advanced petty-bourgeois skyscrapers in New York and other American cities, so there is no reason why it should not subsequently become the norm in a fully developed proletarian civilization.

Moreover, it is also possible that, rather than simply living in high-rise blocks of flatlets raised on stilt-like supports, people will eventually live in space in cosmic flatlets, and within an architectural context not all that dissimilar from the one outlined above, replete with permanent recourse - obligatory in space - to artificial lighting and artificially produced oxygen, not to mention artificial heating. Such space cities would certainly constitute a more transcendental context than earth ones, enabling the occupants to cultivate their spiritual potential to a degree impossible to achieve on earth, where there is always so much gravitational force.

Could it be, I wonder, that the post-Human Millennium - a time when human brains are artificially supported and sustained in communal contexts - will be partly set in space in such curvilinear space cities? Why should not the post-Human Millennium, particularly during its higher phase, be set in a context closer to the definitive Beyond (of literal Heaven), where the goal of transcendence (of pure spirit from the superbeingful new-brain collectivizations) may well prove easier to achieve?

Ah, I should not allow my imagination to run away with me like this! But I do not think it can be too far off the mark. Certainly such space cities would not preclude contact with the earth, nor need one suppose that everyone would necessarily have to spend their entire lives in them. They would enable a more advanced life form to conduct its intensely spiritual affairs at a transcendent remove from the earth's gravity, and hence in a context appropriate, one feels, to an exclusively omega-oriented aspiration. If what directly stems from the Diabolic Alpha is rooted to the earth, why shouldn't what may, one day, directly aspire towards the Divine Omega be free from the earth's gravity in an almost heavenly context?

However, all this far-out futuristic speculation does not invalidate the foregoing suggestions concerning proletarian architecture on earth in the coming Social Transcendentalist civilization, and we need not doubt that proletarian earth cities would have to precede space cities, which, in any case, may well prove more applicable to absolutely post-human life forms than to the ultimate stage of man's evolution.