SPECIAL HALLOWEEN THREAD

Have you ever felt unease walking around your city? Have you ever experienced discomfort from a building or urban environment? The reason might be due to the very architecture that the modern project has crafted around you.
The beginning of this thread starts with a true story. I was in - of all places - a feminist book store so I could take photos of its colour-coordinated shelves and mock it online. The store was full of the usual trash you would expect... except for one odd-looking book.
Completely out of place, this strange tome lay discarded beneath a stack of books on spirituality. It intrigued me. I asked the cashier about the price but they had no record of the book. They let me buy it for $10. It turned out to be one of my best ever purchases.
The book contained much deep and secret knowledge about how and why modern architecture exerts such a disturbing influence over our collective psyche. I learned more reading this than any other book in the last 5 years. I will share some of this knowledge with you.
Before I do so, allow me to share some of my own thoughts on the subject. Those who recognise my avatar will know that I have long dwelled on the link between architecture and the horrific psychological effects it can wreck on unsuspecting people.
My avatar is taken from Alan Moore's graphic novel From Hell. It shows Sir William Gull who Moore depicts as Jack the Ripper. Jack the Ripper was a personification of the oppressive effects of claustrophobic urban planning; he embodied the cramped dark alleys of Victorian London.
What elevates From Hell from pulpy horror to a work of philosophical genius is Moore's referencing of the constant influence architecture has on the people who live within it. Jack the Ripper is inspired to commit his murders in order to complete a great architectural project.
Moore's Ripper believes that the architecture of London controls the fate of an age-old battle between the forces of the sun and masculinity versus the power of the moon and femininity. Buildings must be utilised to ensure Apollonian dominance.
Every stone and building placed within a city is a geomantic force for good or evil. Buildings more than anything convey messages and symbols from the past where they unconsciously continue to influence the later generations who walk blissfully unaware beneath their shadows.
Japanese artist Junji Ito also knows of the horror of buildings. His manga often depicts the insanity-inducing effects that evilly-designed constructions exert over its inhabitants. His "Town Without Streets" tells of a population crazed by bad planning.
And in his definitive work Uzumaki the culmination of the spiral contamination that afflicts the town is the transformation of the town into unliveable inhuman narrow spiral streets that send its residents minds into similar insane circles and spirals.
Obviously, good old Howard P Lovecraft knew that true horror stems from buildings and architecture. His books are filled with lengthy descriptions of geometry gone wrong and houses or abandoned ruins twisted into unnatural shapes and angles that should not be.
When Lovecraft moved to New York, it wasn't just the unwashed masses that horrified him. He found the city itself a great and terrible shock; the baroque metropolises of his fiction, infested with monstrous beings, are his response to the spectacle of New York.
SPECIAL HALLOWEEN THREAD

Have you ever felt unease walking around your city? Have you ever experienced discomfort from a building or urban environment? The reason might be due to the very architecture that the modern project has crafted around you.
The beginning of this thread starts with a true story. I was in - of all places - a feminist book store so I could take photos of its colour-coordinated shelves and mock it online. The store was full of the usual trash you would expect... except for one odd-looking book.
Completely out of place, this strange tome lay discarded beneath a stack of books on spirituality. It intrigued me. I asked the cashier about the price but they had no record of the book. They let me buy it for $10. It turned out to be one of my best ever purchases.
The book contained much deep and secret knowledge about how and why modern architecture exerts such a disturbing influence over our collective psyche. I learned more reading this than any other book in the last 5 years. I will share some of this knowledge with you.
Before I do so, allow me to share some of my own thoughts on the subject. Those who recognise my avatar will know that I have long dwelled on the link between architecture and the horrific psychological effects it can wreck on unsuspecting people.
My avatar is taken from Alan Moore's graphic novel From Hell. It shows Sir William Gull who Moore depicts as Jack the Ripper. Jack the Ripper was a personification of the oppressive effects of claustrophobic urban planning; he embodied the cramped dark alleys of Victorian London.
What elevates From Hell from pulpy horror to a work of philosophical genius is Moore's referencing of the constant influence architecture has on the people who live within it. Jack the Ripper is inspired to commit his murders in order to complete a great architectural project.
Moore's Ripper believes that the architecture of London controls the fate of an age-old battle between the forces of the sun and masculinity versus the power of the moon and femininity. Buildings must be utilised to ensure Apollonian dominance.
Every stone and building placed within a city is a geomantic force for good or evil. Buildings more than anything convey messages and symbols from the past where they unconsciously continue to influence the later generations who walk blissfully unaware beneath their shadows.
Japanese artist Junji Ito also knows of the horror of buildings. His manga often depicts the insanity-inducing effects that evilly-designed constructions exert over its inhabitants. His "Town Without Streets" tells of a population crazed by bad planning.
And in his definitive work Uzumaki the culmination of the spiral contamination that afflicts the town is the transformation of the town into unliveable inhuman narrow spiral streets that send its residents minds into similar insane circles and spirals.
Obviously, good old Howard P Lovecraft knew that true horror stems from buildings and architecture. His books are filled with lengthy descriptions of geometry gone wrong and houses or abandoned ruins twisted into unnatural shapes and angles that should not be.
When Lovecraft moved to New York, it wasn't just the unwashed masses that horrified him. He found the city itself a great and terrible shock; the baroque metropolises of his fiction, infested with monstrous beings, are his response to the spectacle of New York.
Passage from Lovecraft's story "He":

“Garish daylight shewed only squalor and alienage and the noxious elephantasis of climbing, spreading stone … the throngs of people that seethed through the flumelike streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes”
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