Freaky Architectural Stuff for Ruin

[trinite]

Here's a possibly interesting twist on architectural horror: the players find themselves on a highway in a wide open wilderness. No matter how far along it they walk, nothing seems to change. It's as though the road stretches infinitely in each direction. From time to time, a car comes along the road. They have to figure out some way to escape from the endless repetition of the road.

[CADmonkey]

https://vimeo.com/6736261

The idea is based on a kind of parody of the former Socialist building style. They used to build whole cities where each house was designed identically to create cheap housing for workers. These ‘blocks’ were so similar that in Soviet times, you could easily wake up at a friends place in another city and still feel like you are in your flat. Even the furniture was the same.

[Review Cultist]

Here's a possibly interesting twist on architectural horror: the players find themselves on a highway in a wide open wilderness. No matter how far along it they walk, nothing seems to change. It's as though the road stretches infinitely in each direction. From time to time, a car comes along the road. They have to figure out some way to escape from the endless repetition of the road.

If you've traveled through the prairies, that's the gist of it, truly an endless hell. I'm also intrigue, and post this question, what stops people from abandoning the road and car (also gas issue?) and heading the intersecting directions from the road?

[trinite]

Here's a possibly interesting twist on architectural horror: the players find themselves on a highway in a wide open wilderness. No matter how far along it they walk, nothing seems to change. It's as though the road stretches infinitely in each direction. From time to time, a car comes along the road. They have to figure out some way to escape from the endless repetition of the road.

If you've traveled through the prairies, that's the gist of it, truly an endless hell. I'm also intrigue, and post this question, what stops people from abandoning the road and car (also gas issue?) and heading the intersecting directions from the road?

I'm thinking that if they just start walking perpendicular to the road, they eventually come to another road, exactly like the one they left. It might be the same road, or maybe just another in an infinite set of parallel roads.

I haven't actually figured out what the resolution to the scenario might be yet.

[Morbid]

My friend was telling me about Ace Hotels, which I feel is fertile ground for a Carcosa/Ruin type series.

The idea is that the company buys up historic buildings with a lot of character as hotels that "appeal to the creative class."  Often they're buildings with an odd history that must be restored or adapted into hotels.  They often have restaurants and entertainment worked in and an emphasis on community among the guests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_Hotel

http://www.acehotel.com/  (If you look at the blog, it's pretty pretentious - something that Portlandia apparently pounced on.)

From the website:

We believe that Mr. Strummer was right when he sang, "If you're after getting the honey, hey — then you don't go killing all the bees," because there is no honey without bees.

which is delightful if you've listened to the Night Clerk.

One of the owners died suddenly in 2013, so if you don't feel too ghoulish working in real world events, that is also an option. http://nypost.com/2015/10/30/family-of-late-ace-hotel-founder-developer-clash-over-ownership/

For my Delta Green game, I am going to start with the planned Chicago hotel and work in many of the ideas from Night Floors and Tynes' Hastur Mythos essay. 

The fact that these are all owned by a corporation that keeps adding to its portfolio immediately adds a sense of conspiracy.  Are all the hotels connected to Carcosa?  To each other?  Are they anchoring their respective cities into Carcosa?

I could see a similar idea working in Ruin with a less flashy hotel chain.  Are those hotels by the side of the highway so homogeneous that you can enter one and find yourself in a different one?  Or when one really goes wrong, can that infection spread through the whole chain?

Still on the note of hotels: the Illuminati room in the Hotel Zaza in Texas.
http://www.vice.com/read/houston-hotel-zazas-room-322-has-got-the-internet-freaking-out  Here's the Vice article on it. 
Ken and Robin have talked about it as well: http://www.kenandrobintalkaboutstuff.com/index.php/episode-123-freemium-democratic-regime/

In short: a strange and creepy room that someone checked into by mistake.  A theme room?  An actual occult site?  A release valve for the emotional toxicity of the hotel's residents? 

[Tim]

My friend was telling me about Ace Hotels, which I feel is fertile ground for a Carcosa/Ruin type series.

I am quite fond of the time I have spent in the two Ace's I have stayed at. That being said I like the idea of a Carcosa scenario were Carcosa is not a ruin in the same ways as is often portrayed. The decadence and decay comes out not from things falling apart but an over emphasis on design taken too far. Everyone obsessions about materials and the perfect placement of things and the questing for the next thing were your worth has little to do with money and everything to do with your status about what have you discovered and your 'authenticity'. You could tie in their bars and restaurants with foods and drinks taken to crazy extremes with ingredients of mythical obscurity and bizarre cooking techniques being on offer.

Could be some interesting stuff here.

[Morbid]

I have not actually been to an Ace hotel (though I'd love to stay in one, opportunity permitting).  Would you say that the design/decor was fairly unified or was it more eclectic? 

I think what they're doing is cool with restoring/rehabilitating old buildings, but that behavior parallels Carcosa itself slowly absorbing people and cities - at least in the Tynes mythos. 

I definitely like the idea of obsessive design leading to Carcosa.  "Night Floors" has the apartment with strange items epoxied together in layers, but what about constantly striving for minimalist elegance or that perfect strange juxtaposition?  Competitive "authenticity" sounds perfect, with the King in Yellow being most authentic of all. 

Over the time, I think the themes (decadent design and physical entropy) could intermingle - the residents/guests starting to succumb as they stop taking care of themselves, but they've perfected their surroundings. 

Thanks for the thoughts; I'm still working out how everything fits together.

[Tim]

I have not actually been to an Ace hotel (though I'd love to stay in one, opportunity permitting).  Would you say that the design/decor was fairly unified or was it more eclectic? 

I think what they're doing is cool with restoring/rehabilitating old buildings, but that behavior parallels Carcosa itself slowly absorbing people and cities - at least in the Tynes mythos. 

I definitely like the idea of obsessive design leading to Carcosa.  "Night Floors" has the apartment with strange items epoxied together in layers, but what about constantly striving for minimalist elegance or that perfect strange juxtaposition?  Competitive "authenticity" sounds perfect, with the King in Yellow being most authentic of all. 

Over the time, I think the themes (decadent design and physical entropy) could intermingle - the residents/guests starting to succumb as they stop taking care of themselves, but they've perfected their surroundings. 

Thanks for the thoughts; I'm still working out how everything fits together.

I have stayed at the first 2 (Seattle and Portland) when I think they were still coalescing some of their aesthetics but over all there seems to be a dominant overall pattern per property and each room has its own highlights. My understanding is they take queues from the building so the Palm Springs locations has a lot more of a 60s mod vibe that the others do not share. There signage and iconography seems to be standard but my feeling is that if you were transported unknowingly in the middle of the night from one to another it would be very apparent something had happened were as if you staying a Shearton that is not the case (having traveled some for work one of the worse feelings is waking up and having a moment where you not exactly sure what city you are in because so much is similar - but that is a different thing issue)

My main draw to the idea of doing a poisoned by design game is that unlike the room in the night floors which is obviously crazy is that things seem 'normal' if heightened but eventually you realize it is so very off.

It might be interesting to see the later stages be people moving on from perfecting surroundings to perfecting themselves and you see more and more extreme body modifications or even body integration with the environment.

[Alethea]

Less freaky and more spooky, but found a new photographer with some cool stuff:

[CADmonkey]

A review of High Rise with musings about Shivers and condo culture:

HIGH-RISE IS A HARSH PROPHECY FOR TORONTO'S FRAGILE GLASS FUTURE

Ben Wheatley offers up a tower. He then starts throwing bodies off the sides.

High-Rise is a modern fable, a retro-future designed by director Ben Wheatley and his team (including his frequent collaborator, his wife and screenwriter Amy Jump) as a prophecy for what’s to come for our Toronto condo future. It closely follows British author J. G. Ballard’s 1975 bleakly comic novel about a brand new high-rise building falling into chaos as the air-conditioning, elevators and human decency crumble in unison. In Ballard, Wheatley has found the perfect partner for his pitiless and aggressively confounding filmography, including previous TIFF Midnight Madness hit Kill List and the mushroom-induced psychedelia of A Field in England. Wheatley is a filmmaker who refuses to explain his low-level atrocities to the audience—he prefers to present them.

Our guide through High-Rise’s world is a passive man, Dr. Richard Laing (Tom Hiddleston), prone to slipping from floor to floor, a loner who can drift between the upper classes on the higher levels inside and the younger, poorer families huddled near the bottom—their frustrations piling up as the power is cut, garbage pick-up ignored and hours at the community pool eliminated. Even as new tenants move into the building, these discrepancies continue to fester. Residents begin to refuse to leave, abandoning jobs, friends and relatives outside, including Laing. The world shrinks. Priorities are rearranged as garbage chutes are clogged and dogs drowned.

Laing is not driven to make these choices—he lets the building carry him. He has no fraction to claim him, so he subsumes into whatever group holds power at the moment. This is not a movie where the protagonist pushes the action, High-Rise is tribal at its core. Even Richard Wilder (Luke Evans), the warrior of the working class, finds his own plans for redemption defeated by the very architecture of the building. Choice is secondary to survival. Things are not done by the characters, but to them instead. The environment shapes their actions, but this story is not new. It’s ancient and primal. Even the camera must bend to its whims.

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Wheatley and Ballard point to a pattern—a dissolution of social order that cannot be prevented by technology or progress. Even the most unnatural setting seems to only drives humanity back to its base needs—food, water, shelter, flesh. The past, the basest parts of being human, carry more weight than any building, any new technological development. Elevators become new traps for the hunters. The supermarket on the seventh floor is one last place to forage. Even the soundtrack reimagines this future past for the audience, Portishead performing ABBA’s pop hit “S.O.S.” as a warning for the residents and viewers alike—a dirge for a new world.

Residents begin to harvest the building itself for what they need and reject the outside world. Wheatley’s design team has mimicked the 70s-era incredibly well, but everything is innovative. The products and designs on the shelves are made specifically for this brave new world. The future is behind us. The high-rise becomes a place unto itself—a slow motion horrorshow.

Much like his previous work, Wheatley refuses to provide a straight narrative for the audience and at times, the film descends into an anarchic blend of images without the rules to bind them—as it should. We scurry past a horse on a rooftop, a gang of TV presenters armed with baseball bats and chair legs, a dog drowned in the pool. Parties turn into rituals, sacrifices, religious ceremonies and then dissolve back into chaos once again. Wheatley’s camera starts out sleek and mannered, transitioning smoothly from one floor to the next. However, once the social order slides, the narrative structure breaks under the strain. Viewers slider from one party to another, the camera following bodies as they rise and fall. The film itself opens with an ending.

High-Rise is a spiritual successor to David Cronenberg’s 1975 horrorshow Shivers, another film where things fall apart inside a new, presumably glorious condo building. In both, powerful men find their creations have run amok. The disease is inside. Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons) lives atop his own creation in High-Rise, eventually rendered impotent on his perch. The women in his life, including his wife Ann (Keeley Hawes), assistant Charlotte (Sienna Miller) and even Wilder’s wife Helen (Elizabeth Moss) attempt to preserve a future for their children by whatever means necessary. Initially shoved to the side of the narrative, these characters gather power in the shadows before seizing control on-screen. The building no longer belongs to Royal. It never really did.

Cronenberg’s Shivers treats his building more as a stage for the pre-destined fall, humans retreating back to their basest instincts under the insidious direction of Dr. Emil Hobbes’ parasites and his infected teenage mistress. Sex is the primary drive here, above all else. Let’s recall the scene where Nurse Forsythe confesses a dream to resident physician Dr. St Luc, explaining, “Disease is the love of two alien kinds of creatures for each other. That even dying is an act of eroticism.” In Shivers, this disease spreads through the floorboards, reducing its residents to their most base desires, captive to their own needs. The future won’t save you. The alternate title for Shivers is They Came From Within.

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Wheatley implicates the tower itself as the root of all evil. There is no disease except being human. There is no safe place. Both directors place their towers in the outer limits, as their inhabitants attempt to flee the core. Even as these towers fall, they are building new high-rises around them. There is no plan beyond surviving the next night. And then, the night after that. Cronenberg sends his monsters out into the city, spreading their infection out into the world. But Wheatley knows it will fester from within; there is no need for any outside intervention. All our wounds are homegrown, inflicted by the structure.

As Toronto continues to build its own towers into the clouds without a thought for the future, while housing for the lower classes becomes even scarcer in this city, High-Rise looks more like an unhinged prophecy than a cautionary tale from the past. These anxieties pop up in Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy, as well. Set in Toronto, it traces one man and his double’s dissolution from tower to tower. From the old concrete blocks of St. Jamestown to the twirling glass spires of Mississauga, the language of the city is best expressed through streetcar wires, concrete and endless panes of glass. The men and women of Enemy are penned in and cornered by their very homes, their quiet choices exposed and re-purposed for new, nefarious means. Toronto is rendered as a city of closed off and hidden spaces, spider webs of wire, decaying concrete lobbies and freshly pressed doormen behind black marble counters. High-Rise would approve.

We have traded our concrete brutalism for spires of glass tethered to steel. We have let our lists for subsidized housing grow long for a city of cranes rooted firmly to the ground. We have convinced ourselves that we can afford this, you can afford this, well, maybe someone can afford this, but we haven’t really asked who will live there, inches from the Gardiner Expressway. We haven’t asked how long that glass will hold.

This is a body already falling, paused in flight, asking us all to meditate on its descent before it hits the ground. Wheatley and Ballard ask how long it will be before you find yourself out on a sun-drenched balcony rotating your neighbour’s Alsatian over a cooking fire. The viewer waits for a moment of clarity, for some meaning. The women are coming together on the roof, building a new world, protecting one another. The old ways are not working. Maybe this is just a cycle, a chance for rebirth. Maybe he isn’t really going to eat that dog. Maybe this is just a joke.

When the body hits the ground, the tower doesn’t laugh.

[Adam_Autist]

Anyone heard the Archive 81 podcast yet? It's pretty good.

[clockworkjoe]

Damn I need to see High Rise.

[CADmonkey]

Damn I need to see High Rise.

It'll be playing here in Ottawa next week: http://www.bytowne.ca/movie/high-rise

[CADmonkey]

Final tease before heading out.


High-Rise by Bryan Rombough, on Flickr

[CADmonkey]

A little while ago, this showed up on an Architectural blog that I follow: Punggol Waterway Terraces.  And I was reminded of a bit of urban planning history which I know some folks find "Freaky", Hexagonopolis:











On paper, hexagonal planning had a number of advantages over 'gridiron' planning (which was the norm in 19th century urban development) and was a popular concept amongst urban planners about 100 years ago.  The images above are the work of Noulan Cauchon, an urban planner for my hometown of Ottawa.  If history had gone differently, I might have been born in the first "Hexagonopolis"!

The history of hexagonal planning, its proponents and its ultimate demise was written up in an article in the MIT's Journal of Urban Design which can be found here: Hexagonal Planning in Theory and Practice.  It's quite an interesting paper, which looks at the urban planning problems and discussions which drove the thinking behind hexagonal planning, and the politics behind the adoption of the 'loop and cul-de-sac' model of suburban development in the U.S.