#architecture & morality

[rackcty]

revisited this awesome fic (the open road & other anesthetics by tactfulgnostalgia) and could not resist their dripless outfits

[iluvmorales]

12:15am , E-42 Miles

Summary Miles just really needs his lover

a/n none

warnings mentions of threats, near death experience, death, trauma (?) angst w love/fluff

‘come over’

Was all the text read, sent at 12:15. Miles had a tendency of getting home late from his job, but when it was past 11, it usually meant something went wrong.

It didn’t even take a minute for you to grab your coat, throw on the hood and head out the door. You took the elevator down and took a late night cab to the place, seeing as how it was dangerous for a girl to walk the streets at night since they could, and most likely would fall victim to lots of crimes.

You tipped the driver, before stepping out infront of the building only for Mrs. Morales to open the door and let you in with a smile, but worried expression on her face.

“Hola mija..” you smiled at her softly; “Hola, ¿El está bien?” You asked, not speaking too loudly. She just shook her head; “Yo no sé mija, he just- won’t talk to me” she sounded worried as she lead you up the stairs and into their apartment.

“Talk to him, por favor Mija” she held one of your hands between both of hers, with a pleading look in her eyes. “Of course” you placed yours on top of hers squeezing before turning to go into miles’ room.

You didn’t even knock, simply opening the door and closing it behind you. The room was pitch black, the only light coming from the moon as this side of town was always dark. “Miles?” You whispered, trying your best to find his figure.

Then you heard rustling in the bed, and miles peaked his head out. “Vida mia,..¿Que paso?” You cooed, making your way to the bed and sitting next to him.

He only turned to face you, tired eyes boring into yours. “Nada..pero I just really need you right now” he mumbled, arms snaking around you and pulling you closer so that his face was now in your lap.

Your heart pounded, but ached at the sight of how exhausted he looked. You lightly tapped him making motions for him to sit up, to which he did, slowly. He gave you a questioning hm, his eyes still giving you that same look.

“I know you don’t want to talk about it, but you’re worrying us all. At least tell me something, anything” your hands on his neck and cheek, caressing him as if he’d break.

He sighed and closed his eyes; he swallowed the lump in his throat thinking about the situation earlier that night. “They..almost had me today” You could hear the pain in his voice, and the way his face twisted when he thought about it.

You wrapped your arms around him, legs now sprawled out across the bed as you pulled him in. “Oh miles..” was all you could get out, holding him so tightly. He almost died today, and it was a possibility it could happen again. “just the thought of loosing you..fuck” you squeezed him, tears threatening to spill.

His arms were now hooked under yours, holding you. “I’m sorry mamí” was all he could mumble, a tear now falling down his cheek.

“It’s not your fault miles, I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for you” you loosened your grip, rubbing circles on his back, and one hand coming up to wipe the tear from his face.

It was rare miles let you treat him like this, ever since his father passed he believed it was his job to provide and protect, take the role of “the man of the house”. He forced himself to grow up faster.

“I’m just so glad you’re okay” you mumbled, placing a kiss at the top of his braids. You both laid there staring at the night sky from his window.

Miles enjoyed the feeling of being held and comforted, being cared for. But he knows sooner or later he’d go back to the role he played, and have to tell you the truth.

the truth being how they held him at gunpoint, retrained, then threatened to kill you if he ever, stepped out of line again.

[fatehbaz]

Whitewash is extremely moral. Suppose there were a decree requiring all rooms in Paris to be given a coat of whitewash. I maintain that that would be a police task of real stature and a manifestation of high morality, the sign of a great people. -- Le Corbusier

A shocking call for compulsory whitening is made at the end of a key modernist manifesto. The pronouncement is associated with the signature whiteness of modern architecture -- an aesthetic regime that was presented as a complete revolution of the built environment in the 1920s and became the unconscious default setting of everyday life. Just look at the predominantly white background of most of the kitchens, offices, living rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms around the world [...]. Le Corbusier didn’t simply call for whitewash to be imposed by the police in the name of health. It was meant to act as a form of policing in its own right, a technology of surveillance that would put in motion an ever-expanding culture of self-policing. Whitewash exposes every dimension of life in front of it to judgement. It acts like “a court of assize in permanent session” that will “give a power of judgement to the individual,” and thereby “make each one of us a prudent judge.” [...] A “Law of Ripolin” -- the brand name of the hard impermeable and washable enamel “sanitary paint” invented at the end of the nineteenth century [...] is needed to ensure that all interiors are painted white to target any form of dirt or darkness:

Imagine the results of the Law of Ripolin. Every citizen is required to replace his hangings, his damasks, his wall-papers, his stencils, with a plain coat of white ripolin. His home is made clean. There are no more dirty, dark corners. Everything is shown as it is. Then comes inner cleanness [...]. When you are surrounded with shadows and dark corners you are at home only as far as the hazy edges of the darkness your eyes cannot penetrate. You are not master in your own house. Once you have put ripolin on your walls you will be master of yourself. [...]

---

Whiteness manufactures health, morality, and intelligence. [...] The office of a modern factory that is “clear and rectilinear and painted with white ripolin” is a place of “healthy activity” and “industrious optimism.” [...] Le Corbusier’s routinely authoritarian and often explicitly eugenic and fascist impulses, associations, and actions make him an easy target. But there are endless, quieter, ultimately more controlling and insidious celebrations of whiteness in other hands. Le Corbusier is but a tip of the vast iceberg of whiteness. [...]

The very idea of an interior is the effect of this everyday violence. Architecture is never simply complicit with authority. Authority without architecture might not even be thinkable. [...]

There is no apolitical concept of health; no natural body or brain waiting to be cared for or abandoned by medicine and architecture that is not already an effect of those biopolitical regimes.

It is through the question of sickness that architecture reshapes the human. The idea of a healthy architecture is always about the health of a small group relative to multiple others [...]. Whiteness is coded as a fragility requiring protection through continual acts of preemptive violence. Whiteness is not a thing but a defense and deployment of power over others. [...]

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Whiteness in Le Corbusier’s The Decorative Art of Today, for example, is simultaneously the most modern thing to do, the very symptom of modernity, and the most ancient of gestures. [...] Le Corbusier’s argument was first published in a late 1923 issue of L’Esprit Nouveau [...]. It was, after all, the extended “Voyage d’Orient” of 1911 (including the Balkans and Greece, but especially Turkey) where Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, the young architect from a small mountain town in Switzerland who would a decade later rename himself “Le Corbusier,” became “besotted with white” and convinced that the future of architecture was white. Whiteness is discovered in the lands of the non-white; of those seen to be closer to deeper human history and therefore to be admired and learned from. In fact, the very point of going to the East was to encounter its “great white walls” as an antidote to the self-absorbed decadence of architecture in the North, as Jeanneret explained [...]. Jeanneret expresses nostalgia for the more intact and mesmerizing whiteness of the great mosques and vernacular houses of Constantinople (Istanbul) [...] [and] “Algiers-the-white.” [...] This pervasive sense of contamination provoked the call for a second, more explicit law to impose whiteness not only onto industrial culture, but also onto its victims: the people of color and places seen as newly “unhealthy” -- requiring, as it were, a dose of “their” own medicine. [...]

---

The “white” architecture of the 1920s drew on countless experiments in whitening buildings in the name of health. This included, precisely, the use of Ripolin that had already become standard in clinics, hospital wards, and sanatoria rooms at the turn of the century.

In 1899, for example, the Touring-Club de France, inspired by one of its [...] cyclist members who was a doctor, started a campaign for an easily disinfected “hygienic room” in hotels that would be Ripolin-lined [...]. Hotel rooms were treated as hotspots for contagion [...]. Given the largely upper-middle-class membership of the club, this anxiety about disease was also class anxiety, fear of the unclean other. The tourist was to be mobile yet isolated by a prophylactic whiteness that would itself travel in advance.

The Touring-Club exhibited such a prototype “white room” with toilette and toilet spaces designed by Gustave Rives at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris -- strategically placed just inside the entrance of the Palais de l’hygiène [...]. The Touring-Club installed a series of such model chambres hygiéniques in automobile shows, congresses on tuberculosis, and international fairs. It was successful in persuading thousands of hotels to install such spaces [...].

Ripolin was used “everywhere,” for example, on the walls of the “hygienic housing” project for workers in Paris by Henri Sauvage and Charles Sarazin in 1903–1904. [...] The project was originally intended to feature a radical all-glass street façade with every window surrounded by webs of floor-to-ceiling hexagonal glass blocks [...] which would have been the most polemical housing structure possible, the most therapeutic role of glass, more extreme even than any sanatorium. The design was produced in immediate response to the new public health law of 1902 and the associated new building regulations. [...]

---

It is always about control of the threatening other of epidemic disease and control of the laboring poor, itself coded as dark, migrant, and contagious, a disease in its own right. And throughout this discourse of control, there is a seemingly “modern” disdain for disease-incubating ornament in favor of smooth white surfaces. [...] What is remarkable in the end is this trans-historical resilience of whiteness [...]. It orchestrates life and death.

---

All text above by: Mark Wigley. “Chronic Whiteness.” e-flux (Sick Architecture series). November 2020. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[sophiaphile]

"Like The New York Times, CNN and network news programs, it [PowerPoint] appears to be neutral, unbiased and free of any leanings one way or another. Just as a hammer does not tell you what kind of house to build, Microsoft would like us to think...that their product is merely a neutral tool. It is faceless, and it is what you put into it that counts.

However, every piece of software comes with its own set of biases and tendencies. The most obvious bias and the easiest to see in PowerPoint, is the Auto Content Wizard, a feature that makes outlines of presentations with bullet points for those who feel they don't know how to make a presentation themselves...

However, there are more subtle sets of biases at work. The way the PowerPoint is structured and the various options provided have not only been limited...but they have been designed assuming, a priori, a specific world view. The software, by making certain directions and actions easier and more convenient than others, tells you how to think as it helps you accomplish your task. Not in an obvious way or in an obnoxious way or even in a scheming way. The biases are almost unintentional, they are so natural and well-integrated. It is possible that the engineers and designers have no intention of guiding and straightening out your thinking; they simply feel that the assumptions upon which they base their design decisions are the most natural and practical. You are thus subtly indoctrinated into a manner of being and behaving, assuming and acting, that grows on you as you use the program."

—David Byrne, "Exegesis," Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information

[sygneth]

I had this idea for a while now but I didn't really have time to go shoot photos, so finally I just digged through my old photos and found something I could use.

Postcards from Revachol vol. 1

The technique is digital painting on photos (photos are mine as well), don't worry I didn't paint all that

The thoughts behind this project (or a deep and thorough analysis of Revacholian [suppposed] architecture and urbanistic, long):

Ever since I played the game I have been thinking of how Revachol reminds me of my birth city (where I have been living for past 25 years) and I couldn't really get why. But then I started to think. And oh boy, not in a long time was I this happy to be an actual architect.

I know we have never seen any of Revachol besides Martinaise but what we know is that Revachol have been founded around 380 years ago. If the cultural/architectural periods in Elysium are comparable to what happened in our world, that would mean the city's beggings were in something baroque-ish, and it's golden age was probably at the turn of baroque and classicism. What is important is that Revachol is not a medieval city. There is no old downtown with a city wall and narrow, curvy streets. Baroque and classicist cities were all about good planning, composition, wide streets, representative buildings in strategic places, and later also good functional layout and generally being a good-to-live place. We know the city must have been a great, rich place, very representative, as it was said to be the capital of the world. It was a monarchy until the communist revolution some years ago, before the events from the game. What this pattern reminds me of, is actually the history of Saint Petersburg. Also a baroque/clacissist city, also a capital, also got through a communist revolution.

We also know that Revachol, or at least it's parts were based on a mashup of Paris and Tallin (the latter I don't know much about, unfortunately) with some 90's post-communist CEE climate sprinkled on top. Paris has been re-built at some point of its history (around 1850), the streets have been widened, the city structure got more organised, the facades of the buildings gained a characteristic style (there was an actual law how they should all look but it didn't work very well honestly, but still gave the city a more consistent style)

Okay. That was about St. Petersburg, Paris and Tallin. Where is my city in all this mess?

Let me explain.

My own city isn't one of those cities with old boulevards and medieval centers. It was a small city until 1820, when somebody noticed its potential and started to build factories. With the factories, there came workers and with the workers, a need for places to live in. The city developed quickly, but at that time the cities didn't really grow in an uncontrolled manner, it had to be planned. And those plans were mostly inspired by Paris and Saint Petersburg. The tenement houses in my city were practically copied from those one in Paris and the whole urbanistic design of the city was based on the urbanist laws in St. Petersburg. So now you can see why that was important.

Another thing is that both Revachol and my city are cities of immigrants. My own city at some point was said to be "a city of four cultures", are there was a similar number of Jewish, German, Polish, and Russian inhabitants. People came here to work in the factories from all over the country (or rather what have been the area of our country before the annexation, as there was no country of Poland in the XIX century) and they stayed, started families, and started to be from here.

And then, after WWII my country fell behind the iron curtain. In the communist times there have also been major architectural changes in here. Some of the buildings in city center were knocked out, some typical socialist architecture started to appear. In the pretty much city center there is a high-rise residential area of concrete blocks that are 20-something floors high. And looking at those blocks in the distance here really, like really reminded me of this part of my own city. And here we come to another point of this ridiculously long essay, but I guess that is the last of the important ones.

There are no modern-looking skyscrapers in Revachol. Taking the technological level of development on Elysium seems similar to the ~90s in our world, there should be technologies to build high. The thing is, there is either no money for that or no need (or both). I know this is a general tendency of European cities (Paris, Stockholm or Amsterdam doesn't have any modern American-style skyscrapers too), but this was something I noticed about my own city a long time ago before I even considered studying architecture. The highest buildings are those high-rise multi-families, churches, and chimneys. In Revachol we see the chimneys of the power plant as the most prominent thing in the city panorama.

One more thing is the socio-economical aspect of my city. The golden age of the city passed with the XXth century. The city was poor, neglected, and dirty, the city center was a place where people were actually scared to go in the night. There still are parts of the city where I would rather not go after dark. Times have changed, but the renewal of the city takes time, and what we still have, are tones of half-empty tenements, with closed or barely-alive little shops on the ground floors, tired people, and a lot of graffiti everywhere. And especially hearing of Jamrock, I just couldn't take the visions of familiar places I walked myself thousands of times off my head.

(The last one teeny-tiny detail. Unimportant. But if anybody got here, I have to mention it. Remember how I mentioned the industrial character of my city? It was actually mostly the fabric industry.

And we know Precinct 41 has its seat in the old silk factory. That's all. That's all I had to say).

Even though Łódź is not nearly as big as Revachol, I feel like there are particles of her. They are hidden under the roofs of tenement houses, in the abandoned shops, in the smoke of the cigarettes of strangers at bus stops. They are not easy to find and most people will pass by not even noticing. But if you know where to look, maybe they will let you find them.

Or maybe she will find you.

[dramoor]

Jerusalem Chapel, Bruges, Belgium - consecrated 1429

Owned by the same family for 17 generations. Used for a scene in the 2008 movie, In Bruges

(Photos © dramoor 2022)

[boasamishipper]

Make Me Write

Rules: Send me an emoji corresponding to the WIP and I’ll write 3 sentences for each emoji and share it.

My WIPs:

❤️ - No Grave Can Hold My Body Down (Bobby/Athena amnesia fic)

🏠 - Modern Architecture (Post S2 Pete/Perry)

🧑‍⚖️ - Code of Conduct (Dan/Harry S4 AU, prequel to Judicial Impropriety)

⚖️ - Moral Obligations (Dan/Harry S4 finale AU)

💭 - Contributory Negligence (Judge Leon AU Fic 4)

🌹 - Untitled Degas/Paris RomCom

[jt1674]

[marejadilla]

O.M.D, “Joan Of Arc”, album “Architecture & Morality”, 1981. "Joan of Arc" is a 1981 song by English electronic band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD), released as the second single from their third studio album Architecture & Morality.

[sparklywaistcoat]

I recently finished reading Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and was struck by a bunch of resonances between elements of that story and parts of C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength. I'm blogging about some of those resonances here. (Yes, only some. There's more. Also Hill House is a gold mine all by itself. I'mma have blogs for days.)

Click the link above to read on!

[thepursuitofunderstanding]

The moral of the story? Beware of intellectuals who make a monotheism out of their theories of motivation.

Jordan B. Peterson

[musicandoldmovies]

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - Architecture & Morality

A small masterpiece

[someidioticdream]

sometimes i'm like i think i'm gonna become a nun their lifestyle really resonate with me and then i remember the like. believing in god part. and i'm like aw shucks :(

[dailyalbumrecs]

Architecture & Morality - Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark

A band that was inspired to use synthesizers after seeing Kraftwerk live, Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark is an interesting band that I quite like. OMD considered themselves to be an experimental band that ended up getting labelled as pop, and with the weird noisy intro to Maid of Orleans, the sounds of the song Architecture and Morality, and some other parts of this album I can understand that label of being experimental. This album has not one but two songs relating to Joan of Arc, a song named Joan of Arc and a song named Maid of Orleans. My favorite song is Maid of Orleans.

Apple Music:

Spotify:

[gorgynei]

fascinating parts from this brennan interview about downfall

downfall was recorded in one week and brennan described it as "one of the most intense roleplaying experiences [he's] ever had"

if avalir was showcasing the age of arcanum, downfall will showcase the actual calamity

even though avalir and aeor seem similar on paper, brennan says the stories could NOT be more different. the themes, player motivations/briefings, and genres are completely unique

downfall embraces the nuance and complexity (moral and otherwise) of the gods and digs into the idea that the gods "called a truce" to fell aeor and what that actually means

brennan says aeor actually has a large population of refugees from the calamity by the time downfall takes place. however, they didnt have a large impact on the city's architecture and so by the modern era their cultures and presence in aeor (and wider exandria) have been almost entirely lost

overall downfall seems to focus on the ways that small errors in history can change a lot

brennan describes his experience with dm'ing in exandria as "going into a sandbox and creating the toys you're gonna to play with there"

the population of aeor is "demographically meaningfully different from who was living in aeor at the height of the age of arcanum," according to brennan. basically, not every aeorian will have bolo's accent (sad)

aeormatons will be in downfall in some way

setting, plot, and character backstories were worked on in tandem

on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of tragedy, brennan said downfall would need an entirely new axis. there is a "different kind of horror" in downfall, something that is distinct from "xenomorph chasing you horror"

brennan said "there are moments in downfall where i could feel my stomach wanting to drop out of my body"