Rebuilding R’lyeh: Houellebecq, Lovecraft, and the Meaning of Architecture

"If you consider only utility, the things you build will soon be useless... nobody wants to be in it." ~ Sir Roger Scruton, PhD(Cantab)

From The European Conservative

By Steven Tucker

Modern architecture is meant to transform human beings into alien beings upon their own former home-world.

In his 1963 essay “Reflections of a Gothic Mind,” the great American conservative thinker Russell Kirk wrote of how, when it came not only to architecture, but to his outlook upon the world in general, “I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organisation; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful … I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle.”

I was reminded of these sentiments recently when reading a description of a noticeably gargoyle-less modern-day building in Paris. It appeared in Michel Houellebecq’s newly-translated novel, Annihilation: 

A blinding light shimmered on the walls of the High Court. He had never found any particular aesthetic merit in that unstructured juxtaposition of gigantic glass-and-steel polyhedrons dominating a bleak and muddy landscape. In any case, the goal pursued by its designers was not beauty, or even harmony, but rather the display of a certain technical skill—as if the most important thing in the end was that it was visible to any notional extraterrestrials.

How seriously should we take this final quip about what might be termed “alien architecture” here? Before he became a novelist in his own right, Houellebecq produced a book-length literary study in 1991 focusing upon the American master of Weird Fiction H.P. Lovecraft, whose stories tell of demonic extraterrestrial beings from beyond the stars, the most famous and fearsome of whom is Cthulhu, a gigantic, squid-headed entity who currently sleeps beneath the Pacific Ocean in a sunken city named R’lyeh. R’lyeh has a very strange and anti-humanistic architectural quality, just like the Paris High Court in Annihilation.  

In his 1928 short story The Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft has a sailor stumble across this alien Atlantis. The sailor’s name is Johansen, and he describes the place in terms that explicitly recall Modernist or Futurist architecture: 

Without knowing what Futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to anything right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs … [The place] was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours … the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.

Some critics have suggested that Michel Houellebecq’s novels are in many ways disguised adaptations of Lovecraft’s own oeuvre. According to this interpretation, the true alien beings destroying us are not gigantic tentacular-visaged space-demons, but post-human, distinctly abnormal, globalist politicians of the Keir Starmer/Emmanuel Macron-type. These figures possess value-systems every bit as alien to those of the ordinary, ‘primitive’ humans over whom they rule as those of Lovecraft’s ET monsters. 

If this reading is correct, then it is logical that these same humanoid Cthulhus in suits would also need a new R’lyeh. If so, then buildings like the Paris High Court would seem to be physical steel-and-glass outposts of the sunken city itself, and R’lyeh’s chief designer a figure like Le Corbusier, the Swiss Modernist architect (disliked by Houellebecq) who once notoriously desired to flatten much of Paris and rebuild it along more ‘rational’ lines. For Le Corbusier, buildings should not be personalised homes or workplaces, but standardised “machines designed for living in.” But would the true end result of such a post-human programme of architecture actually be to transform men into machines, rather than their buildings?

Tombs designed for living in

In truth, the resemblance between the architecture of Lovecraft’s imaginary alien cities and that of earthly Modernism is actually fairly superficial. Convex and concave surfaces, strange angles and geometries and “vast angles” are all present and correct in R’lyeh, as in so many Modernist structures, but so are innumerable decorative touches that sound every bit as Gothic as the “poor battered gargoyles” perching atop Russell Kirk’s ideal medieval building. 

In Lovecraft’s 1936 story At the Mountains of Madness, the author describes the lost city of another alien race called ‘the Elder Things’ at some length. With its many “monstrous perversions of geometrical laws” and features like “tall cylindrical shafts” and “composite cones and pyramids,” at first blush the city seems to have a Modernist character. Examined more carefully, though, the citadel actually begins to seem scattered throughout with various functionally unnecessary features of a purely decorative nature: “thinnish scalloped disks” and “five-pointed stars,” for example. For all human minds know, the whole place may actually have been one gigantic extraterrestrial cathedral.

In his 1991 study of Lovecraft, Houellebecq imagines the disappointment of an architecturally-adventurous reader of Lovecraft’s fiction heading out into the real human world and trying to rebuild a replica of one of Lovecraft’s fantastical alien cities (here, another rival of R’lyeh called ‘Irem’) for real: 

It would not be rash to imagine a young man emerging enthusiastically from a reading of Lovecraft’s tales and deciding to pursue a study of architecture. Failure and disappointment would lie in wait. The insipid and dull functionality of modern architecture, its zeal to use simple, meagre forms and cold, haphazard materials, are too distinctive to be a product of chance. And no one, at least not for generations to come, will rebuild the faery lace of the palace of Irem.

Someone truly alien like Le Corbusier wouldn’t have approved of any “faery lace,” you see; machines designed for living in had no technical need for such fripperies. Ruthlessly streamlined form and function are, according to the foolishness of the Modernists, beauty personified.

Urban spaceman

In his 1993 essay, “Approaches to Distress,” Houellebecq argues that the successful erasure of anything other than a building’s function in Modernist architecture has essentially transformed the entire urban environment into a gigantic, never-ending conveyor-belt. This conveyor-belt environment is designed to move visitors seamlessly from one sector to another in service of greasing the ever-mobile wheels of international capital. The paving stones beneath your feet may not literally be moving forwards, but they might as well be so. 

Explains Houellebecq: 

This is what happens when a coach full of tourists, thrown off course by the web of exotic traffic signs, drops off its passengers in … the business centre of Barcelona. Immersed in their usual world of steel, glass and signposts, visitors immediately rediscover the rapid stride, the functional and oriented gaze that correspond to the environment offered to them. Progressing between pictograms and written signs, they soon reach the cathedral district, the historic heart of the city. Immediately, their pace slows; the movement of their eyes becomes somewhat random, almost erratic. A certain dazed amazement can be read on their faces (their jaws drop, a phenomenon typical of Americans). Obviously, they feel they are in the presence of unusual, complex objects that are difficult to decipher. Soon, however, messages appear on the walls; thanks to the tourist office, historical and cultural landmarks are set in context; our travellers can take out their camcorders to record the memory of their travels in a guided cultural tour.

Even Lovecraft’s R’lyeh, Irem, and the Lost City of the Elder Ones might have been more immediately comprehensible to confused modern human eyes than much traditional Western architecture, it would appear.

The point of Modernist construction now stands revealed by Houellebecq as being nothing more than to ‘liberate’ [sic] mankind from the binds of time—and thus from his own historic culture. As the tourists enter Barcelona’s identikit business district, which is much the same as their own business districts back in America, they feel perfectly at home. As they enter the locale of Barcelona’s cathedral, however, matters are different. Faced with a genuinely R’lyeh-like piece of architecture such as the Sagrada Família, strewn all over as it is with stone-carved “faery lace,” Gaudí’s strange, organic-looking masterpiece being surely the most authentically Lovecraftian-looking structure on Planet Earth, the confused tourists are confronted with a building that clearly possesses a far deeper structure of meaning, beyond its surface content of mere utilitarian function. 

In general, this is the precise reverse of what the average public building does these days. According to Houellebecq, “Contemporary architecture is a modest architecture; it manifests its autonomous presence, its presence as architecture, solely through discreet winks” such as openly revealing “the techniques behind its own fabrication” in a process known as Bowellism. 

For a building to openly say “Look at me, I’m a building!” by ostentatiously displaying its lift-shafts on the external façade of the structure, as with the Lloyd’s Building in London, or by flaunting what should by rights be its own deepest pipe-innards on the outside of its walls, as with the Pompidou Centre in Paris, is for such buildings to proudly and publicly deny any higher, sub-surface second-order meaning to their existence. It is the precise reverse of something like a cathedral, littered as they traditionally are with carvings and decorations, such as Russell Kirk’s beloved battered gargoyles. These decorative flourishes (unless their mouths happen to simultaneously act as disguised overflow pipes) are wholly unnecessary from a practical engineering point of view, but they point towards the deeper purpose of a building—and thereby, by implication, towards the deeper purpose of the society that built it.  

Capital cities

The deeper purpose of the civilisation that built the cathedrals was obviously religious in its nature. But what is the deeper purpose of the society that spawned all the above-mentioned baleful, functionalist trends in modern architecture? Nothing less than to transform human beings into alien beings upon their own former home-world in the name of global free-market capitalism. 

In Houellebecq’s view: “Reaching its own optimum by creating places so functional that they become invisible, contemporary architecture is a transparent architecture. Since it has to allow for rapid movement of people and goods, it tends to reduce space to its purely geometric dimension.” Rather than a Gothic cathedral, a more emblematic piece of modern, 21st-century architecture might well be a railway station or a motorway junction, a place of pure infrastructure, which is not meant to be lingered over and appreciated by visitors for any aesthetic qualities, but simply to operate as efficiently as possible. It is meant to become an invisible billboard-supporting structure to facilitate the display of utilitarian messages allowing for an ever-greater ease of human fungibility: highly visible and easily parsed departure screens, ticket terminals, direction signs, speed limits, and so forth.

Houellebecq continues: 

More generally, all contemporary architecture must be considered as an immense apparatus for the acceleration and rationalisation of human movements … the point is to facilitate the establishment of many rapidly renewed relationships (between consumers and products, between employees and companies, between lovers), and thus to produce a consumer fluidity based on an ethic of responsibility, transparency and free choice.

In this same spirit, the anonymous and modular nature of most contemporary city-based office blocks and apartment-based living spaces is intended to demonstrate “total fidelity to the aesthetics of the pigeonhole,” in order to achieve the wider socioeconomic goal of “building the shelves of the social hypermarket.” If I walk past my old Victorian era town hall, now repurposed incongruously as a nightclub, then, due to certain unmistakable features of its 19th-century red-brick architecture, such as ornate columns, façades, and engravings indicating its original purpose, I can tell it was once built to fulfil a certain, very specific role: to embody now quaint-seeming old concepts like civic pride. 

Beyond certain simple features like above-entrance signage, however, designed to be infinitely interchangeable as the building undergoes change of tenants and thus change of usage, contemporary municipal structures betray no specific design for any specific purpose at all. Once the council-tax offices eventually move out for office-space pastures new, the same vacated any-space could end up containing just about whatever, from a telesales department to an insurance brokers to a data-entry centre, and not look out of place for its new and no doubt equally temporary role. The old town hall structure, however, will always seem out of kilter with whatever comes to occupy it next, once the nightclub has finally closed down—far easier, in our new, more temporary society of perpetual change upon point of purest principle, to render the buildings themselves every bit as effortlessly interchangeable as the business tenants who see fit to occupy them for a brief year or two. 

Thus, what is supposed to be most solid becomes least so; that is why, for Houellebecq, traditional building materials like bricks, stone, and mortar, have been replaced instead with what might almost be termed building immaterials instead, those which “show low granular resistance” like metal, glass, and plastics. Not only do these tend to be cheaper, they also make it easier to “create polymorphic, uniform, modular spaces.” The ultimate point of creating a world of modular, transposable spaces, however, is to create a race of equally modular, transposable people—or ‘consumers,’ to give this new post-human species its correct Linnean name.

As Houellebecq explains: 

Versatile, neutral and modular, modern places are adapted to the infinite number of messages they are to transmit. They cannot allow themselves to deliver an autonomous meaning, to evoke a particular atmosphere; they can thus have neither beauty, nor poetry, nor more generally any character of their own. Stripped of all individual and permanent character, and on this condition, they will be ready to welcome the indefinite pulsation of the transient. Mobile, open to transformation, always available, modern employees are undergoing a similar process of depersonalisation … Freed [forcibly!] from the shackles of belonging, loyalty, and rigid codes of behaviour, the modern individual is thus ready to take his place in a system of generalised transactions within which he or she can univocally and unambiguously be given an exchange value.

Just as most modern public buildings could sit equally as well in Dublin, Paris, Tokyo, or Riyadh, so most modern employees of the current-day professional class who rule over us are supposed to be able to fit in, live and work equally as adaptably in Melbourne, Toronto, Beijing, or Brussels. The best way to ensure this is to systematically strip both built environments and people of any permanent localised specificity, thereby transforming the entire urban sector of the planet into one gigantic interchangeable Nowheresville. 

Architects of our own downfall

Like Russell Kirk, HP Lovecraft had a profoundly Gothic mind, and, in his youthful study of all things Lovecraftian, Houellebecq wrote of how: 

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was amongst those few men who experience a violent trancelike state when they look at beautiful architecture … Describing his first impressions of New York to his aunt, he claims he almost fainted with “ecstatic exaltation.” Similarly, when he first looked upon the ridged rooftops of Salem, he saw looming processions of Puritans in black robes, with stern faces and strange conical hats, who were dragging a howling old woman to the pyre.

For Lovecraft, a conservative-minded individual of the highest order, the historic built environment could literally conjure up the spirits of the past: he saw such phantoms there, walking again before his very eyes. When he wrote his own descriptions of the fantastic architecture of alien cities like R’lyeh, therefore, the Gothic-minded Lovecraft was not necessarily condemning it as worthless or hideous at all, as readers may at first presume. 

Although incomprehensible to human eyes, R’lyeh’s Cyclopean, non-Euclidean structures presumably possess some actual meaning to Cthulhu himself, very possibly of a sacred or higher nature, it is just that our limited Earthling brains are structured in such a way so that we cannot perceive it. For Houellebecq: “HP Lovecraft’s architecture, like that of the great cathedrals, like that of Hindu temples, is much more than a three-dimensional mathematical puzzle … It is living architecture, because at its foundation lies a living and emotional concept of the world. In other words, it is sacred architecture.”

With the average steel and glass skyscraper or office building today, no matter how concave, convex, or strangely shaped, it is different: there really is no meaning to it, or at least no higher spiritual one (except possibly as a Temple to Mammon). It’s just an empty exercise in engineering, both literal and social. Hence, R’lyeh’s architecture is actually rather less alien than our own current stuff, in certain key, meaning-based, ways. 

Where would an admirably Gothic Mind like Russell Kirk’s nowadays feel more at home, I wonder? In R’lyeh, or the City of London?