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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.
I generally think that both nice, harmonious and disturbing, disharmonious works of art can be appreciated. Some people like classical music, some like punk rock. Some watch My Little Pony, some watch Chernobyl.
With texts (now that I am out of school), audio, video, paintings, theater, opera, sculptures, video games I can mostly decide what I want to consume.
Not so with architecture, in most cases. I mean, if I don't like Disney castles, I can stay away from Disneyland. Perhaps it is even feasible to stay away from a shopping mall if I think it is a crime on good taste.
But most of the buildings I visit are not this way. Picking a school and employer uses complex scoring functions, and 'do I like the building?' is not gonna be in the top ten deciding factors. For living accommodations in cities, there is even less slack to spend on architectural taste: if by some miracle I find a place which fits my other criteria, I will not care if the facade is raw concrete or if some sick fuck decided that the outer walls should weep blood like in some horror movie.
So in my point of view, most big buildings should not strive to be expressive in the same way as literature or video games are. Making them extra ugly is uncalled for, but making them extra nice from the outside is also not necessarily: schools are places were we store kids so they don't distract their parents from working, making them super nice looking would simply sugar-coat that fact. The kid getting thrown in the trash can by some bullies will not be very appreciative of the scenery. Nobody visits the DMV because they really like it there. Of course, buildings should be comfortable from the inside, have good light, short walking distances etc, but this is a rather straightforward optimization problem.
So my gist is, if it is not a new art museum or opera house or villa for some rich guy, you probably don't want a fancy artsy architect who has read Heidegger, just tell some civil engineer what your constraints are and let them optimize.
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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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It’s interesting, because I can see a lot of myself in both of these guys.
Although I’m retired from performing, at various points I have been a musician, an actor, and dabbled in playwriting. And having gone to school with other artists, I’ve been a part of numerous conversations about art - what is art, is art inherently transgressive, what is the nature of the tension between art and entertainment, is it an artist’s responsibility to expand consumer’s horizons, etc. - and I’ve always found myself somewhere in between the two extremes. The dispute between Alexander and Eisenman mirrors the tension within myself. (“Inside you there are two wolves. One is Christopher Alexander, the other is Peter Eisenman…”)
I love pop music. Even the most cloyingly generic, harmonically predictable, lyrically lowbrow, etc. However, I also listen to metal, although far less often than I used to in high school and college. Now, even within the framework of “heavy metal” (which is actually a pretty wide umbrella term encompassing a large variety of sub-genres) I generally prefer music that is slickly-produced, with tightly-controlled and non-dissonant vocals, whether clean or unclean. Listening to metal is a good outlet for feelings of frustration and disharmony, but it is best when it provides catharsis and resolution of those feelings, rather than exacerbating them.
I’ve had arguments with friends who are into far more intentionally-bizarre-and-alienating music than I am, and I find myself taking the Christopher Alexander position: Why is bad for music to make people feel good? Why would you listen to something that’s designed to be grating? What is the point of Merzbow and Melt Banana? Theres some mental block within me, as there is in Christopher Alexander, that renders it impossible for me to even comprehend or model the mental state of someone who enjoys that stuff. Yet conversely, when I talk to someone who hates metal music, I find myself in more of the Eisenman stance, explaining why some level of dissonance can actually act as a sort of beauty in itself, by providing contrast to more harmonious and pleasant feelings. A more nuanced and varied palate is good for everyone, right? The world can’t all be sunshine and rainbows all the time. Where’s your outlet for negativity?
When it comes to movies, I’m far far closer to the Eisenman stance. I just get almost nothing out of the predictable Dashing Virtuous Hero Defeats Evil Villain and Saves the Princess story, unless it is executed absolutely masterfully. I have said multiple times (with only a bit of exaggeration) that I never want to watch another movie with a happy ending. Not that I don’t think such movies should be made! I believe that the common people need and crave that style of entertainment, and I don’t want such things taken from them. But I’m very happy that some filmmakers still throw a bone to people like me who like our films challenging, ambivalent, stimulating, and nihilistic.
This sometimes gets me into fights with smart people of a more conservative bent, who lament the very existence of non-didactic art. They seem to believe that all art exists (or should exist) to promulgate pro-social narratives about virtue. But where does that leave people like me, who are more comfortable inhabiting mental states full of tension and anxiety and alienation? They can’t understand what anyone would get out of watching Seinfeld (a show about nothing!) or the films of Woody Allen. They can’t comprehend why someone would want to watch Requiem For A Dream. Well, they can stick to watching the ninety-fifth installment of The Fast And The Furious, but I’m happy that they haven’t yet succeeded in stamping out all art that doesn’t comport with their preferences.
So then we get to the question of: is architecture an art in the same way? Does it contain philosophical and discursive content, such that an architect who merely gives the unwashed masses what they claim to want is the equivalent of a musician who writes nothing but (as John Lennon accused Paul McCartney of doing) “writing silly love songs.” Clearly there’s nothing wrong with a musician who writes abrasive or unhappy or disharmonious music, so long as he doesn’t force everyone to listen to it. A building is different, though, because everyone who passes by it is forced to look at it. And when it’s a building that people are forced to look at every day, because it’s in a busy area, or it’s a government building that people have to interact with against their will, there is absolutely an element of forceful psychic harm being done to people. Like strapping them to a chair and blasting Dying Fetus at them all day.
But then, what does that mean for a man like Peter Eisenman? His chosen art form is architecture, and that’s what matters to him. Should he be forced to live in a city where there are no buildings that suit his tastes? Where all buildings are harmonious (and all music is David Guetta, and every film is a Disney movie) and he is treated like a villain for wishing to introduce some element of his own tastes into it?
In the debate, Eisenman says he’s very happy to be able to live in New York City, where there are eight million people who feel the same way as he does. This is interesting to me because I nearly moved to NYC, I had an overall great experience when I spent a week there in 2016, but it had never occurred to me that the thing people actually like about the city is all of the disorder and disharmony. Those seemed like things everyone agreed were unfortunate downsides that one must suffer through in order to access all the better things about the city. I never thought there was any serious number of people who embraced the chaos and disorder - the graffiti, the cacophony of car horns and unintelligible conversations, the mishmash of architectural eras, the homeless zombies and the occasional smell of human urine and shit - as a positive good! And it occurred to me, hearing Eisenman say that, that there are probably people who have the power to make NYC less disharmonious, but choose not to because they want the city to be a refuge for those like them who have disordered internal lives and who want their external world to mirror that disorder.
I think that people like Eisenman - and people like me, when I’m in one of my more disagreeable moods - need and deserve to have the opportunity to indulge their own tastes and to see them reflected in at least some small corner of the world. The problem is giving them immense power to force their tastes onto the great mass of people who will be harmed by them against their will. If people want to seek out novelty and disharmony, it should be there for them to find. It shouldn’t be the first thing people see every day when they exit their front doors. It shouldn’t be shoved down their throats every day. And if Eisenman feels that he is having treacly vapid harmony shoved down his throat every day, then he needs to suck it up and come to grips with the responsibility that a minority has to the majority around it.
To force this off on a tangent, please let me have some examples of this:
If you had a few more mainstream and a few less mainstream examples, that would be great. (I have some ideas — e.g. Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Paris Texas — but love to hear of this is on the right track or you have completely different ideas.)
For what it’s worth, I’m not sure I associate this with the “inflict psychic pain” category. I’m more in the camp of “this describes a difficult but likely universal experience”.
Uncut Gems is my ur example of a painful movie done well. European or Japanese torture porn, even the very basic example of Trainspotting, is emotional masturbation for nihilists. Technical competence for actors can be displayed in the grey experiential spaces between saturday morning cartoons and A Serbian Film, but a great performance can be teased out in relatively benign normie works like Marriage Story or even Jojo Rabbit. Depressing films don't automatically translate to quality scripts, unless we assign said value to it on our own preference matrix.
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Sorry, what’s your basis for this?
Eisenman doesn’t appear to describe himself as a socialist. Alexander doesn’t suggest it, either. Lots of constructivists were open socialists, but this is a generation later. Gehry, probably not a socialist. Hadid, nope. Derrida and other deconstruction enthusiasts had a…complicated relationship with Marx, let alone the broader socialist movement. Equating postmodern, deconstructivist architecture with brutalism and high Soviet realism is missing the point.
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I think you're making this to complicated. No matter what Eisenmann says about his goals - many, many people who care about architecture agree that his designs look cool as fuck. And that's entirely enough.
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An aside, but I don’t understand why there is so much contention about what constitutes good architecture. Buildings are obviously not just for “economic function use”, because humans have human needs beyond economic function and they experience a positive mood from beauty. Beauty makes us value a thing more and makes the beautified thing more memorable. This is all obvious from glancing at cultures in history, understanding psychology, or just common intuition. There is no need to justify any architectural style beyond “I find this sufficiently beautiful” because beautiful things make us happier. You don’t need to scientifically explain why repeated motifs in a building make us happy (does it imitate foliage? Human symmetry?), because if it is beautiful it is beneficial to our emotional state and community. There may be edge cases where it is unclear whether prioritizing function or beauty is better, but this is trivially solved by simply asking its users which they prefer — it is always going to be some balance which is intuitively obvious.
My theory is that the inhuman competition to become a top architect actually selects for inhuman people: strivers who have undeveloped faculties for sensing beauty or intuitive philosophy, and whose architectural values are downstream from their senseless avarice and vainglory. Normal people — the people who create civilization through their balanced moral living, and for whom civilization exists — are disgusted by these people and their creations. Normal people are filtered out of being top architects because they care about beauty and balanced living (the symmetry of seasons): they pass off studying to enjoy a beautiful day or a beautiful girl or a beautiful moment, while the senseless one doubles down on his blueprints.
Yeah this is actually a pretty fascinating take I hadn't thought of before, but I tend to agree.
Same thing with the financial system. The brutal competition means the people who make the rules are way out on the tail of the distribution.
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I wonder if Charlie Munger was a socialist.
To say the same thing clearly, this is not related to socialism at all. Actual socialist architects in socialist countries tried to maximize the utility of the buildings they designed, they just approached the question in a straightforward mechanical way, which is different from both Alexander's Taoist approach (the building whose beauty you notice is not beautiful) and Eisenman's "architecture is art, art must make you question your priors" approach.
Very much agreed. The Soviet Union built Brutalist buildings because they were trying to build quickly and cheaply in unreinforced concrete, and something-resembling-brutalism was the optimal way of doing that given the limitations of the material. (In the same way that the optimal steel-and-glass building is an ugly, boxy, skyscraper or that Gaudi claimed that the optimal stone building is something structurally similar to a Gothic cathedral). Something like the Derzhprom building in Kharkiv is profoundly not hideous - it looks like the form is following a function. Building things that were more Brutalist than they needed to be was an affectation of Western leftists trying to mood-affiliate with the Soviets.
Alternatively, the same log can be used as either a pillar or a battering ram, depending on the context in which the user is located. Neither Soviet architects nor Soviet officials were interested in inducing alienation in their home population, because their revolution was complete.
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Eisenman is also a bit of an odd figure to play the part of the socialist hell-bent on the cultural destruction of the west, I doubt he has much sympathy for anything approaching the doctrinaire socialist reorganisation of the economy. He's also a bit too in love with the work of Speer and the italian fascists (see his book on Terragni). In this interview, he largely claims his personal political affinities run conservative and notes his American projects were mostly funded from the right. This also includes this very funny aside:
To the extent I've had much impression of his public persona it has been one that is a bit self-obsessed and if aesthetically radical at one point in time, never really had a broader political project and had since settled back into cantankerousness. The other thing I remember from him recently is him comparing Trump's buildings to Stalin's architecture.
It seems to me that it is far from uncommon for people to be 'high-decouplers' regarding the linguistic/semiotic/philosophical/epistemological observations of the postmodernists and deconstrutionists like Foucault and Derrida, and their political and economic positions. Another classic example: the IDF's use of D&G
I don't think much decoupling is actually required. Both Foucault and Derrida had a relation to orthodox Marxism that was complicated at best, and both have been criticized by more strictly doctrinaire leftists as being "conservative" (not in the Fox News sense of course, but in the sense of providing insufficient support to the cause, and being liable to interpretations that could aid the enemy). So it's not surprising that people from all over the political spectrum could take inspiration from their work.
This talk also happened ten years before Specters of Marx.
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At which timestamps from the debate does Eisenmann state what you paraphrased to "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" or "I am an architect. I build buildings that harm your mind."? I am not watching all that, but my prior is that you heavily misrepresented what was said because you think communists are evil [and thus they surely must want to make maximally ugly buildings] or because you think those buildings are maximally ugly [and that could only be because communists are evil].
@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.
This looks more like free association than an answer to sun’s question…
I also think you’re misrepresenting Eisenman and Eisenman enthusiasts. Could you show me where he says “ architecture is meant to make people psychologically uncomfortable,” “Buildings must literally impose psychic harm and pain,” or “An architect has a moral imperative to create such pain among the populace”?
How is it "free" association, it's literally a link to an article a local "Eisenman enthusiast" gave himself. How much closer to "meant to make people psychologically uncomfortable" can you get, than talking about how awesome it would be to do Lovecraftian architecture, but having to settle for mere allusions?
This just strikes me as proof positive for OP's thesis. Cognitive dissonance, no one would be so comically evil to do such a thing, therefore people aren't saying what they're clearly saying.
I think everyone in the chain probably believed what they were saying. I don’t think what @sansampersamp said Gage said Harman said about Lovecraft tells us much of anything about Eisenman!
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There's no cognitive dissonance because there's no evil here, anywhere.
Eisenman's buildings range from "fine" to "pretty darn cool" in my view. "...Architecture that similarly alludes to a deeper or alternate view of reality" in a Lovecraftian fashion is also cool. Rad, even. I want more of that. Sign me up. This isn't even some complex "well we have to understand the dialectical nature of suffering and how even negative emotions can be valuable" shit. This is just very straightforwardly an architect who makes cool buildings that he thinks are cool and other people think are cool. There's no malfeasance here, no shenanigans.
To me, your question sounds akin to someone saying "how exactly can you support Harry Potter books pushing Satanic propaganda on our children?" It's hard to provide an answer because I disagree with the entire framing.
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Is this good enough for you?
Transcripts are easily available online.
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And if he provides the relevant quotes, are you going to change your mind on anything substantial, or just grudgingly concede that specific thing?
No need for this epistemic meta-jousting, full transcript is here. The quotes obviously aren't in there but I was reading them as a (poor) attempt to summarise Eisenman's position.
Because it's sun_the_second that put the quote marks around them.
How is it a poor attempt?
Perhaps my literacy level is not as high as yours, so you will need to help me as exactly where you see a desire to "maximize the amount of discomfort and pain" or "harm your mind", or a claim that "buildings must literally impose psychic harm and pain on the people who view and use the building".
How do you understand the words "harmony" and "disharmony"?
Also, when he says "And I’m not convinced that that is something I should have to live with all my life, just because the majority of people feel comfortable with it." how does that not straightforwardly say he wants to make people uncomfortable?
I primarily understand harmony and disharmony in terms of cleaving to notions of geometric proportionality, e.g. as formalised by Palladio. You could probably extend that to congruity in style and materials, both internally and in context. Personally, I can see deviations from this as well-executed or ill-considered, but it'd be an exceptional case I'd consider to be psychically harmful.
In the second case, he's saying he wouldn't like it if the entirety of his aesthetic experience was like Mantovani, who he regards as popular, but a bit vapid, saccharine, and unchallenging. I'd agree that some buildings, such as his Berlin memorial, succeed by being more challenging and this is appropriate for it's purpose. Conversely, most people wouldn't style their own house en brut, but it still appeals to some people.
But here you're softening the original statement to make it sound plausible. If he really wanted to "maximize the amount of discomfort and pain" his buildings have an unambitious amount of rusty syringes and razored door handles.
I feel like something is being left out by such a technical definition. You can define harmony in music in terms of mathematics too, but I don't think it's wise to completely leave out of the defintion, the effect being constantly bombarded by disharmonious chords would have on a person. And I'm pretty sure Eismann is aware of that, given all the talk of "comfort".
What is supposed to be the difference between "challenging" and "deliberately causing discomfort" in your opinion.
No, you're doing the opposite. For example OP was explicitly talking about "psychic" discomfort and pain, and you deliberately left that out to make him look ridiculous.
Also, an architect will be limited by building safety codes, and the threat of having his license taken away and/or going to prison, which will prevent him from fully leaning into his sadism.
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I am skeptical that:
The quotes from this specific debate will likely not change my mind on 2, 3 and 4.
Do you think this portrayal of his views is more honest than his portrayal of Eismann's views?
That's not what he said. He's saying one of the reasons one might deny that Eismann's aims to maximize disharmony is because they're too low-IQ to understand what he's saying.
That's not what he's saying. He's saying that in the even that you do understand what Eismann is saying, you might be inclined to go into denial, because no one could be this comically evil.
What is the point of all the navel gazing about what Eismann specifically said, if you're not going to change your mind about anything substantial then? If it's just about the specifics of what he said, maybe focus on that?
I do think OP would generalize to all socialist art. Ex. here.
I’d say 3 and 4 are covered by the “middle school” section. OP is using Eisenman, socialists, disharmony as moral imperative, and Brutalist high schools interchangeably. He also categorically ignores the possibility someone might agree with one or more of those things. That partitions anyone who does into the stupid, the motivated reasoners, or the evil.
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Not the person you’re responding to, but the entire discussion is pointless if its main outrageous premise turns out to be completely false. You’re not going to convince me on points 2 through 4 either, but if Eismann did in fact explicitly say he wants to inflict psychic harm, then we can have an interesting discussion about why such cartoonish levels of villainy are allowed to exist in society.
Instead, it appears that Eismann only talked about creating artistic disharmony, and then you equivocate artistic disharmony with psychic harm. The original question of “How is that possible?” is answered with “Because the scenario presented simply wasn’t true.”
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I think you are going too far in trying to link everything bad that modern elites do to socialism/communism/other bogeymen of the Right. The biggest blights on Western cities tend to be planted there not by socialists, but by multibillionaires and conglomerates who have the money and connections to force through their vision with the antisocial chutzpah of a Randian protagonist. Meanwhile, the communist hipsters and left-wing college students tend to congregate on leafy Gothic Revival campuses (only disrupted by the occasional piece of glass blobitecture that's probably called the Bill and Melinda Gates Building) and in cozy book/coffee shops that would make Alexander proud. Compare the stark neoclassicism and opulence that Stalin decked Soviet cities in to Union Station, the Port Authority Bus Terminal or really anything about the NYC metro.
These observations are not consistent with anti-human architecture being a consequence of communism or socialism. The simpler theory is that both bad architecture and socialist rhetoric are enduring fashions among Western elites, without necessarily having any particular relation to each other except for the most basic commonality that useful elite fashions must be inaccessible to those unwilling or unable to invest time and money and be open-ended to keep the competition going.
I googled 'Peter Eisenman socialist", and it brought up a 2004 interview where he specifically says that "most of my clients are Republicans, most of them are right-leaning. In fact, my client in Spain for the cultural center at Santiago de Campostela is the last Francoist minister", and that his biggest critics are leftists.
Seems a bit silly to suggest that he's part of a grand Marxist conspiracy now, doesn't it?
Conveniently, he echoed my own thoughts on the issue!
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My apologies, I haven't watched the video yet. Did he say why he wants his buildings to cause pain?
It's reminiscent of a quote from my favorite Freudo-Marxist podcast: "real art cuts into you; it takes something away from you". And this immediately struck me as quite correct. The greatest aspiration of art is the experience of the mystical, in Wittgenstein's sense of the term - the that-which-must-be-passed-over-in-silence. This is a fundamentally traumatic experience - it is the discovery of what is most uncanny in what is most familiar.
This doesn't make any sense to me. Why must "real" art be traumatic? Thinking back to all my most transcendent artistic experiences -- standing inside a gothic cathedral for the first time on a sunny day, attending a production of Beethoven's 9th on Christmas Eve in a beautiful concert hall with perfect accoustics, my first time crowdsurfing at the Warped Tour -- these were the exact opposite of traumatic for me. They didn't take anything away from me. They absolutely filled me with joy. They may have been emotionally overwhelming experiences, but not in any way that I would ever describe as traumatic.
Let me first clarify that I have no interest in policing the boundary between real art and not-real art. I find little use in the distinction between "art" and "entertainment" as well. I think there are simply good and bad works. Even "lowly" works can have many interesting things to appreciate. But there are nonetheless higher and lower works, greater and smaller works - and something about what I said rings true about the greatest works, I believe. It speaks to art's authentic purpose, its highest aim that all the minor tributaries flow into.
Art is the attempt to elucidate the unnameable. It reaches beyond the limits of discursive thought - the logos gives way to Kant's thing-in-itself, Wittgenstein's "the mystical", Lacan's das Ding. All religious and esoteric traditions recognize the element of dread that is inherent in any attempt to transcend this limit. There is the warmth of God's infinite love, yes - but also the vertigo of contemplating God's infinite mind. "And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live."
Contra the later existentialists, Kierkegaard quite perceptively noted in The Sickness unto Death that existential dread is a religious attitude, not an atheistic one. If the world has no meaning and death is the end, then you have nothing to fear, right? You just die and that's it. It's eternal life where things start to get scary. Now the salvation of your immortal soul is on the line. Now there are stakes. Thus there is no religious cosmology that one can seek final refuge in - the traumatic core of reality persists in either case.
Art remains for us a regulative ideal, an unrealized potential, a mere sign. We are still waiting for an art that will fulfill the promise of art. The history of "aesthetic feelings" hitherto is not an ideal to aspire to, but a dream from which one must awaken.
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I agree with all this. Even my darker artistic experiences — such as spending a few hours with Goya’s black paintings in the Prado in Madrid — were the opposite of traumatic. It was moving, transformative. It changed me in some way, fundamentally. Maybe that’s another definition of trauma, but it’s not one I recognise.
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That's nice, but maybe I don't want pass over an entire that-which-must-be-passed-over-in-silence district, as I make my way to the office every day. The utter narcissism of architects is mind-boggling. We have VR and AR now, if you want to live in your brutalist little hellscape, you can do so without bothering others.
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I don't think someone would need a particularly high reading grade level to understand that statement, is this what one would expect someone with low reading grade would take way from Eisenman? Eisenman is saying that comfort and harmony do not constitute the totality of either aesthetic preference or human experience, and just like someone might listen to metal or prefer picasso to kinkade, buildings may accomodate and respond to a broader spectrum of experience. Eisenman's most famous work is the holocaust memorial in Berlin, and it's a good example of both a deconstructive minimalism (removal of ornament and complex form for simple geometry), and pursuit of typically discomfiting vibes: instability, envelopment, angularity. Stripping away detail raises the salience of other aspects of the way the memorial is experienced, e.g. the way the acoustics narrow and quiet, and how temperatures drop as you descend, and how your descent has no clean demarcation between inside and outside, over and under. How the relation to other visitors shifts from the communal ("I am one of visible dozens visiting the memorial") to the incidental ("I bumped into a specific other visitor, who then turned the other way and is again out of sight"). Maya Lin's Vietnam memorial achieves a similar minimalism that is well suited to these kind of structures, which accomodate what Etlin called a 'space of absence' -- visitors can interact with what isn't there, or against what they may have expected to be there. What is appropriate for recognition of tragedy is not necessarily what is appropriate for the home, but our lives have tragedy in them and one of the most difficult and essential functions of art is to articulate and reconcile us to that tragedy.
The first result I see for your 'brutalist high school' search is this Nikken Sekkei project. My own high school's gymnasium was a massive concrete aggregate structure repurposed from a 1917 abattoir, so I am open to arguments my aesthetic baseline is not standard here, but I'd expect kids to mostly regard the scarred-meteor interior there as incredibly cool.
Philosophical perspectives in architecture have also largely moved on from Eisenman's deconstructive minimalism in the (an) opposite direction somewhat towards Heidegger's object-relational ontology/phenomenology via Harman. See Mark Foster Gage's Killing Simplicity.
'Another way of knowing' is the primary rhetorical tool used in socialist and gnostic argument. Socialists have the nous and non-socialists do not. Their knowledge has gone through more dialectical aufheben. Its not that the views of others are wrong. Its just that there is another way of knowing. The thing you like is just one part of a spectrum of experience. Where as the socialists can view the whole spectrum. You like Motzart. He likes Metallica. But what if music had more? What if there was an entire other way of viewing and experiencing music? What if music challenged you? What if it made you uncomfortable with the injustices of the world? A view of music that is limited to the order of the notes is such a limited view. And really its harmful, because it excludes the people who view music as a way to do justice.
No thanks, and no thanks.
The new soviet man doesn't actually exist. Buildings meticulously designed to be discordant and harmful don't actually fill a portion of the populous with warmth. Eisenman doesn't feel comfort in his own buildings. He feels discomfort because he is good at what he does. Discomfort is the point. Take him at his word.
I think Marty Robbins has this one handled:
Your concern is not to help the people. And I'll say again, though it's been often said. Your concern is just to bring discomfort, my friend. And your policy is just a little red. Now, ain't I right?
You state a lot of mockery against an image of a socialist you have constructed in your head and do not make much of an actual case in favor of "there is correct art and wrongbrained communist art".
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I don't particularly care for noise music or black metal, as its a bit abrasive to my ear, but it'd be something of a epistemological leap to assert that no one genuinely enjoys it. Perhaps there is or is not some socialist uberman that exists in perfect equanimity with the entire sonic universe made and unmade, but I don't think the observation that some people listen to Merzbow is somehow contingent on it.
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Great idea! You'd be missing out on a lot of brilliant music if you avoided everything that was challenging.
I'd not be willing to listen to more than 10 minutes of that without a substantial cash payment.
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Great, we've gone from actively villainous architects to those who simply advance a kind of architectural nihilism (yes, I know he denies the charge of nihilism in the next sentence. No, I don't believe him). To the extent that I can glean a point from this, he seems to still be advocating for buildings that are in some way ugly or broken so that people notice them so that they don't merely "fade into the background." This is not so different from Eisenman's perspective of discomfiting people on purpose.
Architecture continues to suffer from "notice me!" syndrome. I don't care one iota about the self actualization of architects or about Heidegger. Architects should be seeking to make beautiful, harmonious buildings. Instead they are writing pomo nonsense and Ctrl+f beauty zero results. So it goes.
Not really. OOO recognises that buildings-as-real-objects fade into the background in a Heideggerian sense when they become tools, i.e. the salience of their qualities is flattened to that which is relational (to the observer and the observer's use, to its constituent parts, and to the larger systems in which itself is a part). OOO questions whether it continues to be valuable for the practice of architecture to load potential buildings under a multiplicity of these relations (to zoning, environmental impact, situation within the street, ad infinitum), such that the reality of the building is obscured rather than elucidated. A building is not a 'machine for living' per corbu, it simply is in a way that is necessarily independent of the observer. The reality of the building is simply too dense to be fully described and taxonomised. Architects should become more comfortable with the vibes and ineffables, and the limited accessibility to underlying reality of objects. An invisible tool, per Harman, is a tool whose myriad qualities other than its specific utility--including and especially its aesthetic qualities--have receded from cognisance.
I have some sympathy for it, first because my time in architecture school was mostly spent within (more egological) phenomenological explorations. Second, because I think we're completely oversaturated with psychofauna in general in today's age (I recently became a parent, and it is here where this saturation is perhaps the worst of all). However, I don't much care for Harman's weird realism as a very practicable defense, and I think OOO has some unresolved boundary issues in its attempts to consider objects as real gestalten independent of their constituent parts.
This is more impenetrable pomo, but I guess I'll try to respond anyway.
Yes really - the whole point of the article is how architects can prevent their buildings from fading into the background, i.e., horror of horrors, fitting in to their environments. That's why it literally ends with endorsing Lovecraftian architecture as the wave of the future. If architects can pull off building stuff that looks disturbing and maddening, it will surely not fade away.
I don't even know what this is supposed to mean. Obviously buildings have to take into account the physical reality of the place they are built.
Reading this gives me vertigo. How did architecture become entirely centered around philosophical navel gazing? We'd all be better off if architects put down the continental philosophers and started again with firmitas, utilitas, venustas.
Again, don't you see the tension here in these two sentences?
What you've suggested here - architecture should be beautiful, architecture should serve a function - is itself a non-trivial philosophical program that must be argued for rather than assumed. Architects can't operate in the absence of philosophical commitments altogether, because this is impossible. Instead, you're asking that they adopt your own philosophical commitments without reflection. Phrased in this way, your recommendation no longer seems as manifestly self-evident.
That (important) buildings should be beautiful appears to be the consensus opinion throughout human history and across cultures wherever humans have been able to build anything more grandiose than a mud hut.
The burden is on the postmodernists to convince us that a five thousand year old architectural tradition is mistaken, not the other way around. They must prove to us that everyone had somehow missed the point until a few French and German intellectuals of the 20th century figured it all out.
So far I've found their arguments lacking.
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Thoroughly endorsed, subscribing to your newsletter. Any discipline that begins to sound like graduate philosophy has a major problem.
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Isn't there a certain tension here?
Why should architects care what you think if you don't care what they think?
Because almost invariably the nonsense people object to is funded by the taxpayer. No one gives a shit some rich guy builds himself a shoe-box villa that has a garden that looks like a carton box.
People object to ugly public buildings, same reason as they object to shit on the street or buildings acting as mirrors and melting down the pavement. Yes, architects at times will build a concave sun-reflective glass facade that melts things.
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They shouldn't.What they should do is flip the damn burger, and leave their artistic frustrations to 3D models no one cares to look at.
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Because people have a responsibility not to shit up the urban commons. That's before we even get to questions about who is paying who's salary, which is a consideration I admit applies only to public buildings.
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Whether I like it or not, I am forced to engage with the buildings that architects build. If architects build repulsive monstrosities, then I, along with however many thousands or millions of fellow poor souls live among the same buildings, have to be subjected to them daily. In contrast, even if I make mean comments about architects online, the architect will almost certainly not even be aware of my existence. Usually, when people’s actions greatly affect the lives of countless others, then we tend to think that they should take those others’ opinions into account.
Now, an architect might respond that he should be unconstrained by the ressentiment of the plebs when he is exerting his own will upon the built environment at massive scales. But if that’s how architects see themselves, then my relationship with them is most analogous to some Persian peasant massacred at the whims of Ghengis Khan’s ambitions. I won’t look fondly upon the Khan among the slaughter as Merv burns.
This is roughly the position I would endorse, yes.
It's ironic that on the one hand Eisenman is being accused of being a socialist, and on the other hand we have multiple people arguing that Eisenman has a moral duty to uphold a certain traditional standard of beauty in the public commons, even if this runs contrary to the intentions of his private financial backers. Should we put all architectural decisions up to a public vote, to ensure that no buildings are ever constructed which the majority would find offensive? If I found the appeal to democracy to be persuasive, then perhaps I would be more likely to be a socialist! But I am not a socialist, and I have no particular fondness for democracy. I will celebrate any opportunity for an artist to carry on his work while unconstrained by the demands of mass taste.
As for Eisenman's work itself, it's maybe not perfectly aligned with my own taste, but it's also not nearly as grotesque as some of the people here are making it out to be. I think his House VI is quite lovely, although admittedly that's largely due to the juxtaposition of the structure with the environs rather than due to the intrinsic properties of the structure itself.
"Quite lovely."
I absolutely love this delivery. My other same-energy example is the Russian Wikipedia page for the one-line poem "Oh, cover thy pale feet!" by Valery Bryusov inviting the reader to access the full text of the poem on Wikisource.
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Why did you fail to quote the most important part?
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This is genuinely hideous.
There's no accounting for taste!
Something about man-made structures that appear to have been dropped in the middle of nowhere just really does it for me. I love the Viaduct Petrobras for similar reasons.
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I think that most forms of culture war are specific extensions of the desire that most organisms have, to alter the environment so that they and others like them can more easily thrive. (I apologize that my comment is mostly tangential to the question you are asking...)
An example from nature: when two males fight over a female, it stresses out both of them, but so long as at least one male is confident that his survival benefits from that stress, there will always be a male willing to create this type of stress for other males.
-One of my theses in life is that most people are world-class at lying to themselves. (And then there's a separate group that aren't lying to themselves, but they are good at lying to others. But I think the first group is largest, partly because the people that are best at lying to themselves are often best at lying to others.)
I think it is fairly common that people are actually warring against others, trying to hurt them, but they are using a "noble" motive to rationalize (to themselves and to others) their harms towards other people. The desire to stress out others is usually subconscious, not conscious.
And precisely because they are harming others, their rationalization instinct is strongest.
-One general way to purposefully harm others is that if there is something which stresses someone out less than it stresses out other people, then it can make sense to try to increase that thing. They and their progeny will then be likely to gain a survival advantage relative to everyone else (but it must be a tolerable stress, if they don't survive the stress then it's not worth it).
But it helps to rationalize the harm they are doing, to protect their own self-concepts & to protect their social status. If you see yourself as the villain, and everyone else sees you as a villain, the strategy will usually backfire.
If people like Eisenman are fundamentally more comfortable with disharmony (ironically, they themselves being more in harmony with "disharmony"), then inflicting it on other people will give them a relative survival advantage over others. Eisenman might have rationalizations for why his architecture style is good for society on net, but I think it's entirely possible that it's just an unconscious self-preservation lie.
Some possible examples of the phenomenon of people stressing out others more than they themselves are stressed out:
-People that tolerate or enjoy graffiti might use graffiti to drive out the people that don't like graffiti.
-Online trolls tend to be comfortable with the overall trolling dynamic, so it can be a useful way to take over a community, as it drives off all of the people that aren't comfortable with the trolling dynamic.
-Using gunshot noises to reduce crowding and reduce rents (hopefully just apocryphal, but it would probably work in reality) https://www.quora.com/Can-I-lower-rent-in-my-neighborhood-by-shooting-blanks-and-playing-guttural-screams-from-loud-speakers-in-the-middle-of-the-night-at-least-3-times-a-week-The-rent-here-is-too-damn-high-please-I-am-desperate-for-more
-Using bureaucracy, red tape, and legalese to make life more difficult for most other people, but easier for you (if you are relatively better at dealing with such environments)
-Some people are just generally better at thriving in societies with an excess of laws and rules, and these people often have no real interest in helping other people to be free of excess regulations.
-Some people thrive in societies in which there are lots of vices present. They are relatively immune to the vices (gambling, alcohol, drugs, credit cards, etc), and can instead profit off of exploiting the more easily tempted nature of others.
-My general impression is that some of the people that care the least about environmental pollution are, for genetic reasons or lifestyle reasons, relatively more immune to the negative effects of pollution. Not totally immune, but more immune. And it seems like some of these pollution-resilient people end up being weirdly tolerant and even eager to increase pollution. It is hard for environmentalists to overcome this phenomenon.
-Some people are very good at self-censoring what they say. So even if they don't agree with the censorship, they may go along with it, since the censorship creates a more hostile environment for the competition. (I'm willing to bet that a decent chunk of men in academia are functionally misogynistic to some degree, but if they can reliably censor that, they might be supportive of rules and norms which drive out the men that are bad at self-censorship, since that leaves more women & jobs for the men that are good at self-censorship.)
I appreciate your comment a great deal. I considered this angle as well. Eisenman speaks to it in the talk. He does not say that he seeks a harmony which happens to be diametrically opposed to Alexander's view of harmony. Eisenman makes clear that he specifically seeks disharmony. The buildings he designs are not beautiful and useful, but only to socialists. They are equally horrible and dysfunctional and painful to socialists as well.
I think this is the reason that Shafarevich concludes socialism is ultimately a sort of complex behavior of suicide. The goals they seek are ultimately terminal to themselves. Indeed, remaking man (in the literal physical, biological sense) such that he can only survive under socialist conditions has been a frequent goal of socialist groups. See 'new socialist man' or 'new soviet man.'
That said, I am out of my evolutionary-biological depth at this point. I suppose you could posit a selection mechanism that is selecting only for a group to pass on its genes, and those genes happen to be ones that derive pleasure from anti-harmony. But, I don't think group selection of this type is necessarily proven out; I think it is individual selection all the way down, with group selection as more of a second order phenomenon. I think, But like I said, I'm out of my depth here.
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I am not reluctant to say, "the reason [Issue X] is a problem is because people are stupid," but I don't see how it applies here. "Ugly buildings are bad" is not the kind of proposition that 90IQ (hell, even 70IQ) people would find hard to understand.
I think your comment is a bit dismissive of my point (or at least the point I attempted to make). Merely 'ugly' buildings are not at issue here. This communist architecture is not attempting to make buildings which are merely ugly, or buildings which meet a particular aesthetic that all non-communists agree is ugly.
Rather, they are making weapons. Every aspect of the design is specifically selected to cause disharmony and discomfort along all conceivable dimensions. Real factories are designed to maximize output (and ideally safety). Every single aspect of the factory is designed and tested to achieve that goal. The worker has 10 square feet of space, because he needs 10 square feet of space to do his job effectively and safely. Any more or any less and his output decreases or accidents increase. The lighting is such that he can do his job, but its not so much that it damages his eyes or gives him such a headache that he cant work. At least that is the goal.
If Eisenman or other such socialists designed this factory, every single choice would be made based on what caused the greatest degree of disharmony and psychic pain. If they had the data to determine the geometry most likely to create discontent among the workers sufficient to spark a riot or a labor strike, or cause the workers to divorce their wives or leave their churches or abandon their nations, they would build it. As Eisenman said, it is a moral imperative for them to maximize those effects.
Its not 'ugly buildings are bad.' Its 'these people are putting immense resources into harming you and everyone you know and everything you love.'
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I would go further- talking yourself into believing ugly buildings are good requires a high IQ to understand what the arguments are saying.
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See, I have this general take that ability to perceive beauty correlates with IQ. To some approximation everyone can, but -- well, for example, I think that stupid people are less-able to distinguish true beauty on a woman, say, from clownish makeup artlessly intended to evoke a superstimulus response. This is just based on personal observation among friends.
Porn ties into this opinion. I'm not a fan, and while I'd like to say that's entirely for reasons of personal virtue (mostly it is, I hope), the reality is that I find the overwhelming majority of porn 'actresses' so incredibly visually unpalatable that I'm unable to enjoy the material. (There are pretty ones, but those just make me sad.) Meanwhile, the average consumer of porn clearly has no problems here.
I think this extends to aesthetics in media, belief systems, and architecture, too. I think a lot of people out there in ugly places are genuinely insensitive to that ugliness. I've traveled a lot and live in what I think is one of the most beautiful places in the world. Expensive, but worth it to me for that reason. Yet I constantly run into people who are here for whatever reason, talk about how they hate it, and look at me with blank expressions when I mention the natural beauty. It just doesn't register for them. But I also travel for work a lot, and go many places which are aesthetically soul-crushing, and find the inverse of the phenomenon there. People don't seem to notice or care, and on the rare occasion that I've tried to ask the question (as politically as possible), they generally have no idea what I'm talking about. But I notice that, the smarter a person is, the more likely it is that they see things my way.
Anyway, to the matter at hand, my guess is that on some psychological level people are being measurably harmed by these environments. But you might be surprised, as I have been, at how entirely unaware they are of the situation.
I'm glad I'm not the only one! The typical woman in mainstream studio porn looks terrible. I'm not big on most celebrities either. I find "average" women to be far more arousing. I always just attributed this to my own sexual deviance though, not to IQ.
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This isn't because they have room temperature IQs, it's because of the hedonic treadmill, plus the fact that most people have other things going on besides noticing the buildings. When you're visiting a place and you see some awful cement shitshack of a building it's a terrible affront. When you pass that building twice a day on your commute, you simply accept it and move on.
Which is not to say that it doesn't matter if buildings are beautiful or ugly, simply that the beauty of a building is not always salient. I talked to a guy living in Vienna about what a beautiful city it was, but for him it was just boring.
In general I seriously doubt that appreciation of beauty is tied to IQ, and in fact it might be inversely related to IQ. One of my smartest friends, when faced with some postmodernist affront to the senses and forced to evaluate its beauty, will squirm and change the topic to its "interestingness". He's used his intellectual faculties to conquer his innate sense of what is beautiful and what is ugly. Meanwhile polls of the hoi polloi consistently find a preference for buildings that our ancestors would have considered beautiful. I also suspect that even non-human animals experience beauty, but I admit this is speculative on my part.
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Here's a simple alternative hypothesis.
Almost no one actually saw that debate live. Anyone who didn't see it live can't update their thinking and behavior unless the information contained in the debate was transferred to them. In 1983, a large supermajority of the people in a position to transfer that information to the public at large either directly agreed with or were at a minimum ideologically allied with the supervillain, understood that the ideas expressed in the debate would disadvantage their interests if they were clearly understood and widely disseminated, and so declined to disseminate them to the broad public in such an unvarnished form. Either they kept the ideas from getting a public hearing, or they made sure they were spun sufficiently to actually sound attractive to enough of the populace to not be a strategic own-goal.
I have a simpler alternative: people expect a certain level of gnostic contrarianism from artists. The starving artist is a stock trope. So is the passionate, unstable genius a la Van Gogh.
When this describes a painter or a musician, the effects are contained. When applied to an architect, though, there are actual externalities. That’s Alexander’s attack on Deconstructivism:
Eisenman responds that such feelings enforce a status quo. The need to feel comfortable is a psychological dead end, making the audience shy away from—he calls it “cosmology,” but I think it’s something more like “truth”? He argues that we won’t deal with our real anxieties by papering them over with neo-Greek facades. Cliché at this point, perhaps, but much more in line with the popular conception of a gnostic artist. I can see why people, especially those who are way down the postmodern rabbit hole, find him convincing.
Transcript here.
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I agree about the actual debate at the time in which it happened. I mean to use the debate to raise the larger point that the debate is typical of socialists and socialist communication. And then ask the question of why do people not respond to clearly professed evil.
edit: I also agree that many were aligned.
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