Thursday, August 31, 2017

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.243: Inhuman Architecture


This abandoned building offers yet another example of the Brutalist aesthetics informing the architecture of Ministry institutions throughout the borough. Located at the edge of an industrial wasteland where the North Circular Road forms the boundary between Horsingdon and Trentford, the building remains off-limits to the public; it has, nonetheless, attracted its fair share of thrill-seeking urban explorers and spelunkers - indeed, its allure in this regard has been compounded on two accounts: in the first instance it remains unguarded except for the dilapidated signs warning of regular security patrols; and secondly because some of those who have entered its unwelcoming portals have disappeared inexplicably.

That the landscape - both ancient and modern - inhers with praeternatural power appears to be an uncontested truism in Horsingdon, such that it would be surprising if the mysterious Ministry did not employ such power as a result of its investigations into the arcane secrets and occult enigmas of the region; as a case in point, the hard modernist angles of this abandond and now hollow structure speak to an abject and inhuman totalitarianism which seems to have been the Ministry's ultimate goal: marshalling the spectral horrors and alien science unearthed during its delvings throughout the region to produce a new political order - one defined entirely in terms of a cold, uncaring universe of absolute, featureless uniformity, and governed by the absolute mechanism of an vast, indifferent and unwavering bureaucracy whose only purpose is the effacement of difference. One can only begin to imagine the kinds of monstrous transfigurations and deformations of the human essence such a system, instantiated within the very architecture of the place, might have once been inflicted upon the building's occupants - and one can only speculate as to how this might pertain to the disappearance of those lost souls since claimed by the edifice.


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