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Notes -
On Communist Supervillains, Cognitive Dissonance, and IQ.
1 . Communist Supervillains.
Somewhere on the motte I found a link to a 1983 Harvard debate between architects Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman. The debate was shocking not only for its content, but for its clarity and its age. It made me do some thinking about communism, cognitive dissonance and IQ. Hence this post.
Alexander and Eisenman are/were eminent architects and professors of architecture. In the debate, Alexander explains his philosophy of architecture. Alexander focuses on harmony. He explains how important it is for the building to accomplish its purpose, for the persons who use the building to literally feel comfortable in whatever that purpose might be. Alexander also explains his process (iteration and full-scale mock up) of achieving that harmony. If the purpose of a square is to provide students a place to relax and feel free from distraction, the square must actually create that mental state. There must be harmony between these things.
Eisenman is a deconstructivist (socialist). Eisenman views the creation of disharmony as a moral imperative. Eisenman explains that architecture is meant to make people psychologically (and sometimes physically) uncomfortable. Buildings must literally impose psychic harm and pain on the people who view and use the building, or it has failed its purpose. An architect has a moral imperative to create such pain among the populous.
This is real supervillain shit. Eisenman is an influential architect, part of a whole school of architecture, who spends his time, and his students time, and untold sums of money, refining their skill at creating buildings that are mathematically ugly, disharmonious, and cause psychological pain to those who view and occupy them. And he explains all of this in absolutely clear and calm language.
Now, for students of socialism, Eisenman's outlook is not noteworthy. Socialists of all stripes are notorious for compulsively committing their thoughts and plans to paper or speeches. However, for me, the Alexander v Eisenman debate highlights the absence of public backlash. At least, not enough to prevent them from making such buildings.
You would think that if an architect responded to a city's call for plans for a new middle school building and said 'my plan is to create this building, which I believe will maximize the amount of discomfort and pain felt by anyone who gazes upon or enters it,' that his plan would be immediately rejected and that he would probably suffer some sort of social consequences. Apparently, that is not the case. Apparently, you can successfully make that pitch without much trouble.
How is that possible?
2 . IQ
My first hypothesis is that a sufficient number of persons are literally incapable of comprehending these words and ideas, even when spoken plainly and directly. However, I am not familiar enough with the IQ literature to validate this hypothesis.
I am familiar with the basics of literacy levels. As you can see, the levels come with clear examples, and explain what a person at a given level can or cannot understand. If Eisenman's statements were written, then we could plug them into the levels, and determine who would understand.
However, I am interested in who could understand Eisenman's plain statements regardless of medium (written, spoken, etc.). What IQ would be necessary to understand the statement 'I am an architect. I build buildings that harm your mind.'? Does anyone have a source which equates IQ scores with conceptual understanding in a manner similar to the literacy levels?
3. Cognitive Dissonance
My second hypothesis is that sufficiently many people do understand what's going on when they encounter socialists like Eisenman extolling their plans to do evil, but that a majority of those people with an IQ sufficient to understand in theory, are in fact blinded by cognitive dissonance. That is to say, most people's minds will not let them take seriously the idea that whole departments of people believe that turning buildings into psychic weapons is a moral imperative. Even when the evil doers state their intentions plainly and have a decades (millennia) long history of success.
Edit: Adding a comment I made downthread. I rest my case.
@sansampersamp is an architect. Let's see what he has to say about 'where architecture has gone' since Eisenman.
Okay. What does Gage say?
There might be some youngsters or non-english speakers in the audience. Let's double check the essence of Lovecraft:
So architecture has moved on from Eisenman to getting as close to emparting "cosmic dread, forbidden and dangerous knowledge, madness, non-human influences on humanity, religion and superstition, fate and inevitability, and the risks associated with scientific discoveries" as they can.
No, no. They're not evil. They're just trying to create buildings that replicate the effect of an alien presence so profoundly dangerous that merely conceptualizing a infinitesimal part of it drives you to madness.
Wait, that edit just confuses your case.
You’ve argued that anyone sympathetic to Eisenman is either stupid, deluded, or evil. How does the taste for Lovecraft fit in? Aren’t these people specifically “moving on from Eisenman”?
I notice that none of the actual quotes you give talk about causing pain or madness or “psychic damage.” The closest is Eisenman romanticizing disharmony, which he justifies not as painful, but as true. Gnostic bullshit, yes. Blueprints for R’lyeh, not so much.
I think you’re reaching. Brutalists, Eisenstans, and today’s architects don’t all fit in this group you call “socialists.”
I think his point is that things have gone even further from the merely normal extremes of "pain" or "discomfort." Architects are now, by their own description, deliberately trying to induce madness with their designs, which to me would seem to be somehow even further beyond the pale than the previous goals of "pain" and "discomfort."
But they’re not. As best as I can tell, Gage said “imagin[ing] architecture that similarly alludes to a deeper or alternate view of reality is an appealing opportunity.” That’s got to be the most boring possible version of madness.
That's just doublespeak. The sentence is so abstracted that it doesn't mean anything. Madness is literally just an alternate view of reality.
Why would one assume that "to imagine architecture that similarly alludes to a deeper or alternate view of reeality is an appealing opportunity" means "I want to literally drive you gibberingly insane" unless one already is predisposed to believe those architects are communist supervillains?
The use of the term "Lovecraftian," as described by the original comment you were replying to.
Here's the fullest quote I could find.
Read plainly, this suggests that the author would like to create "curious and strange" architecture, not "madness-inciting" architecture. "But it says Lovecraft therefore they must mean they want to replicate the worst aspects of Lovecraftian" is an extremely motivated reading.
Note also, Lovecraft's opinion on what is madness-inciting seems to be a lot wider than median.
Again, this is doublespeak. Cthulhu rising from the sea can also be "curious" or "strange." Speaking of Cthulhu, here's an excerpt from "The Call of Cthulhu" describing the drowned city of R'lyeh: "Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen’s command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47° 9′, W. Longitude 126° 43′ come upon a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars."
Here's a description of the architecture of The Elder Things from "At the Mountains of Madness": "The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws and attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie".
If your reading of those passages is that these places simply "[challenge] notions of the architectural norm," then I don't know what else to say.
"Lovecraftian" specifically refers to a type of dread, terror, awe, and hopelessness associated with the knowledge of humanity's utter insignificance when compared to the alien creatures, gods, and beings within the unknown universe. This knowledge, in Lovecraft's stories, generally drives normal people to insanity. So when an architect invokes a "Lovecraftian" design in his or her architecture, you'll have to excuse me if I don't believe that he or she is trying to produce something that stops at "curious and strange."
If I'm being the best faith possible, it can be the case that the architect had merely misread Lovecraft and had invoked him to merely tie his or her works to something recognizable, but if that's the case, the architect would still merely be inept.
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