MODERN
ARCHITECTURE
1. What could be architecturally grosser than
the rectilinear skyscrapers which tower up in an unequivocal display of the
utmost architectural superficiality, their translucent monolithic structures
ample testimony to the heathenistic criteria
typifying the worst aspects of modern life?
2. Certainly it would be hard to escape the
conclusion that architecture had 'gone to the dogs' with these superficially
square towers whose material ugliness would appear commensurate with the worst
of all possible architectural hells.
3. It is as though the city has come to
diabolical fruition with these rectilinear monoliths whose existence would be
out of place in any but the most extensively and intensively urban
environments.
4. Extensive and intensive urbanization gave
rise to these grossly superficial monoliths which confirm the transmutation of
town into city, as of purgatory into hell.
5. The worst that could happen architecturally
... has happened, namely these rectilinear monoliths, but so, too,
paradoxically, has the best, albeit in comparatively short supply at present -
I allude, of course, to such curvilinear monoliths as confirm an unequivocally
subjective disposition.
6. Whereas the town or traditional city was
divisible between squares and domes, the modern city, or rather those areas of
the city which are peculiarly modern, exemplifies a like distinction between
rectilinear and curvilinear monoliths.
7. Clearly not all monolithic structures are
rectilinear and effectively metachemical; the
majority in most cities may be, but curvilinear monoliths attest to a
metaphysical alternative which possibly - though I wouldn't bank on it - offers
hope for the future.
8. After all, things are usually more one way
than another because that's the way most people, or even a given people, happen
to be, whether through choice or commercial necessity or financial greed, or
whatever.
9. Things could conceivably change for the
better, i.e., towards a more metaphysical disposition, but not within societal
contexts based on and esteeming freedom.
10. For it is precisely in freedom-worshipping
societies, or countries and peoples especially given, through a female bias, to
the objectivity of free will over the subjectivity of natural determinism, to
freedom as opposed to binding, that metachemical and
chemical predilections are able to flourish, not least of all in terms of
rectilinear styles, both 'high' and 'low', of architecture.
11. Therefore it is inconceivable that physical
and metaphysical orders of architecture could flourish to anything like a comparable
extent in free societies, but only in ones more consciously dedicated, through
sensibility, to the subjective bindings of natural determinism.
12. I call such societies cultural and civilized,
both in terms of enhanced self-respect in natural determinism for males
(cultural) and of constrained not-self freedom in free will for females
(civilized), and they contrast with the barbarism (unconstrained free will) and
philistinism (self-disrespect) of free societies.
13. For free will is primarily female and natural
determinism primarily male, the one having intimate associations with metachemical and chemical orders of not-self, the other
even more intimate connections with physical and metaphysical orders of self.
14. Rectilinear monoliths are as unequivocally
indicative of free will as curvilinear monoliths ... of natural determinism,
the former exemplifying the objectivity of female freedom and the latter the
subjectivity of male binding.
15. At least, that would be the case in the event
of an alpha/omega distinction between translucent rectilinear monoliths and
opaque curvilinear monoliths.
16. In the case of equivalent translucencies,
however, we are dealing rather more with primary and secondary orders of
freedom, as between the free objectivity of the female not-self and the free
subjectivity of the male self, the former rectilinear and the latter
curvilinear.
17. Only in the case of opaque orders of
curvilinear and rectilinear monoliths would it be possible to infer primary and
secondary orders of binding, as between the bound subjectivity of the male self
in the enhanced natural determinism of sensibility, and the bound objectivity
of the female not-self in the constrained free will of sensibility.
18. These 'inner' forms of monolithic architecture,
corresponding to sensible metaphysics and metachemistry,
would be as far removed from the 'outer' forms of monolithic architecture, with
their translucent façades, indicative of the utmost superficiality, as culture
and civilization from barbarism and philistinism.
19. In fact where the translucent, or free, orders
of monolithic architecture correspond to evil in the rectilinear case of
primary freedom (of the female not-self) and to folly in the curvilinear case
of secondary freedom (from the male self), the opaque, or bound, orders of
monolithic architecture correspond, by contrast, to wisdom in the curvilinear
case of primary binding (to the male self) and to goodness in the rectilinear
case of secondary binding (of the female not-self), thereby standing as the
exemplification of a moral alternative to architectural immorality.
20. One cannot envisage such a moral alternative
on any significant scale except in relation to a bound order of society which
is as officially committed to culture and civilization as free ones, if
unofficially, to barbarism and philistinism.
Yet even then ... sensibility does not typify life as much as
sensuality.
