What if the God with an inordinate fondness for beetles (400,000 species and counting, so far) was an architect of domestic buildings : what would those homes look like ?
I suggest that they would look very much like the intensely polychromed and extremely variegated exuberant homes of the Victorian Era.
What Americans tend to call "the Painted Ladies" and we here in Nova Scotia know as "Gingerbread Houses".
And if Hitler was an actual architect and not just an architect manque, what would his homes all look like ?
I suggest they would be the concrete,steel and glass equivalents of Leni Riefenstahl's all-lookalike photographs of the ideal human figure.
Figures all alike in their perfect prime of youth : tall and fit with symmetrical features : rendered in concrete as eternally perfect , frozen in their vigorous youth thanks to either Riefenstahl's stills camera or Speer's massive concrete.
Very 'Thirties' indeed : smooth, seamless, streamlined, moderne.
Function following form - no 'useless' decorations or 'flawed 'gargoyles.
No Romas, no Jews, no Handicapped or Gays : biological synthesis would render a perfect human species and eugenic plenticide would eliminate any mistakes.
In a word : modernist, brutalist architecture : smooth, hard, cold : the ideals of eugenics captured forever in grey grey concrete, glass and steel.
It is not at all a coincidence that when architect Le Corbusier was born in 1887, so was the Age of Modern Scientism and that when he died in 1965, so did it.
For it was his eugenic architectural ideas that can be seen dominating both the 1939-1940 and 1964-1965 New York World's Fairs, sites where his vision of a smooth, grey, perfect World of the Future was most widely propagated .
For there was no sign of 400,000 different kinds of beetles - and no God either - at either of these two Fairs ....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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