ILLUMINATI ARCHITECTURE
The history of Architecture indeed is a seamless progression. . .a seamless progression of ideas memetically translated from other fields. This is as true of the Baroque Period as of the Modernist movement, only at times has the impetus for change in the field come from Architecture itself, when some technical obstacle was overcome. . .a new arch or building material discovered — how often does this happen?
It is happening now — the most fruitful fields of architectural investigation are in the fields of materials science & the new structural forms implicit in these new materials.
Buildings that are grown from the meshing of plant forms, buildings that are half-light & data-streams, spray-on buildings, coral structures. . .Illuminati Architecture will mold these to the need for new experiences & new expressions.
Luckily, modern architecture has prepared the way by totally destroying architecture as an art, removing new productions of any implicit Mana
— much as all the other arts have been destroyed preparatory to their chrysalid emergence — making it instead an industrialized process churning out an endless stream of reproductions on a reductionist model.
Of course that is just the macroscopic view of the moderns, if we examine the minute details we see those endless squares & cubes as a framing device for a group of technocrats whose only evidences of personality were their supreme egos.
The pictures are all the same — the faceless Corbusier, Gropius or Van der Roe. The posing face of a concrete prison — devoid of joy and thus implying intellect, by pretending that the principles of their architecture were scientific they managed to impose a vision upon a western culture dedicated to tooled memetica but often incapable of understanding it.
These structures no longer possess even the most remote intellectual validity or interest, as the fractal geometries of Mandelbrot clarify.
Instead a synthesis of natural forms — such as reefs, cellular structures, & the shifting seacoasts — along with the intricate detailing of medieval, gothic, & baroque architectures, all informed by an understanding of the new mathematics & the new physics becomes possible & necessary.
Everything is inherently symbolic by the nature of the Human Mind, in attempting to create an Architecture devoid of symbolism the Moderns symbolically dehumanised themselves & everyone who had to live in their rat-traps; it was the unfortunate logical progression of assuming first that all values are equal to positing that all values are worthless, those two most pernicious memes which have infected Western Civilization & in that process of infection nearly destroyed it.
In recent years new architects have attempted a return to a system of symbolism with limited success.
Symbolism as a Fad among the Rich
Perhaps they make pretty summer houses for the idle rich but the “symbolism” is one of intellectual dilettantism.
But walk through one of these homes — marvel at the pastel representations of Gods & Muses no one has believed in for over fifteen hundred years, characters which only specialists in mythological studies can keep straight — Persephone does not symbolize the growing plants to us
She only represents antiquity, as pretty much every other dead god and goddess does.
Neither are the homiletics of 17th century Deists especially improving of the living intellect, no matter how many Books of Virtues are shoved down its craw — who wants to live in a theme park of Dead Philosophers?
These houses are the architectural equivalent of wrapping a collected works of Shakespeare around an iphone.
To be symbolically meaningful architecture must Illuminate the concerns of its society, & contain a coherent symbolic system understood by that society. This does not mean that the society must agree with the symbolism — but only that symbols must obviously be understood to symbolize anything.
Symbolism is an argument in the philosophical sense, establishing what is important to those who inhabit a structure, linking Tooled & Cultured Memetic fields & to represent in its domain a model of current cosmological thought, because in the end all symbolic systems illustrate a theory of Universal Principles.
The Preceding article was written by Agent 81 as part of her special on Memetics at the University of Stanford
