I saw Star Trek last night and while I do have many things to complain about and praise, the only aspect that I feel worth mentioning is the difference between the star ships. I thought it was interesting that the Romulan ship is this intricately organic ship, like a petrified ivy plant, or a many tentacled octopus counter-intuitively moving with its appendages at the bow. There is hardly any sense of technology in there, and electronics seem like stumps and foliage buzzing with bright lights. At certain angles, it looks like the heroes might fall to the depths of the ship—which begs the question, who would build such a perilous form of transportation—and when one of the Romulans does disappear into the dark abyss, the depth seems so bottomless as to resemble the pit of a planet.
By contrast there is the USS Enterprise, whose shape, of course, is well known. The electronics in it remind me of a Swiss town: clean, with an emphasis on glass, light and soft angles. And--unlike the Romulan captain, Nero, whose face peers out so often from no-place in the bushes of his ship--the captain of the Enterprise sits dead in the center, at a contraposto as he makes his decisions. The USS Enterprise is classicism in its truest sense, with a postmodern sterile orthogonal look: you would be happy to wake up there as an invalid if this was a hospital, for instance. This is the architecture of the future. It is organized, clean and absolutely nothing is accidental.
Needless to say the organic shape of the Romulan ship embodies evil, although you can't deny it also captures the height of technology, though we're not sure why. Torpedos and lasers shoot from the ship, but we aren't sure who is pressing what button, or where the screens are located or how they are held into place. This ship is a dark place, much like the underworld of Blade Runner. The pit of the future L.A. where shops and storefronts and residence brush up against one another haphazardly. One man sets up his noodle store and so another man uses the adjacent corner to decide where the boundaries of his shop will be. There is no planning in cities like this; this is a shantytown, and it serves to set the tone of the movie so well, in a familiar yet displaced city. One we recognize but is somehow estranged from us because, yes, it is the future and Replicants do exist. On the other hand, the abode of the creator of the Replicants is geometrical, futurized yet so classic, a pyramid rising high above the ghetto. The perfect form of his building shuns the tortuous, twisted form of the city. As a pyramid could not be found in nature, as trees and animals tend to prefer asymmetrical shapes, the pyramid thus belongs to the hand of man and, possibly, the hand of god.
The ideal structure and the ideal city evidently is one that is mapped out completely. Everything has its place and nothing is accidental. The city began quite the opposite, one could easily imagine: someone builds a house, and someone else builds his next to it or even on top of it, with adjacent walls, and this continues until you have a city. It is no surprise then that one of the oldest known city Çatalhöyük, in modern Turkey, with around 10,000 people living there at one time, has no obvious public buildings and no streets. Does a city like that embody evil? Hardly, but it does seem outdated now (How could they not think of streets?). Then by deduction, the most modern town is the opposite, not haphazard, but planned and constructed and only then occupied. And indeed this is how houses are made, and sometimes entire neighborhoods. That's why Levittown was so great at the time, the first suburban town must have felt clean, perfect, ideal in some way to the families that first moved there. But now, not even a century later, it's outdated. Perhaps even the most ideal city requires a bit of organic growth.
In any case, sometimes this is how I feel about my house. Although you climb up a flight of outdoor stairs to reach the door, the rest of the house rises high above our corner. And scraped up against the side of our house, as though imposing and threatening our building, towers an apartment complex. In the evening, when the bathroom window is open, I go in there and turn the light off and open the blinds. A distant light pierces the window in split lines and a few voices can be heard in apartments not able to be seen from ours, but the voices drift into the room as though the bodies from whence they come are nearby, almost talking to us. My room, the bathroom and my roommate’s room share a common shaft and sometimes, when people in other apartments converse, it seems as though we are in the true underbelly of the monster that these buildings form, pressed up against one another, where voices can be heard muted and tampered by the skin and tissue of the monster’s organs.
There are windows below, and I am not sure where they lead, but at times in the morning and late at night (always at the extremities of time) I can hear the hum and soft clicks—like the distant engine room of a freighter—of a washer and dryer tumbling clothes. The kitchen window over the sink shares another space and there are staircases and other anonymous windows that I can see from there. Black stains have dripped down the walls of this shaft and I wonder who, if anyone was supposed to clean this shaft. The conclusion I have reached is that it was never supposed to be cleaned. It was built haphazardly with cleanliness nowhere near in mind. Only perhaps 1. structural support, 2. ventilation and maybe, 3. natural lighting, though it is so dim, I highly doubt it. Over time the air shaft has taken on its own qualities and has gone way beyond what any designer or architect had ever imagined the original look of these buildings to be. I don’t imagine the house I live in was supposed to be pushed between two other houses, but they are. Much like the floor of a rainforest receives no sun light because the trees have over so much time grown, competed in height and, as a result, shaded sometimes completely the floor below, our apartment is bested by the proprietors above us.
And now sometimes, when I wake and my eyes first light upon the shaft, the belly of the center of darkness of the air shafts and I see a clouded light coming from the windows and I drift back into sleep I envision myself falling endlessly, like the doomed Romulan, into the depths of the earth.
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