Introduction

This text should not be perceived as anything other than a mystical instruction for a functional action or, simply, a poetic essay on topic that concern the author.

While reading this essay, you might find it odd that, despite the title referring to architecture, seemingly unrelated topics are discussed. Or, conversely, expecting an abstract reflection on a Cathedral, you find yourself with an urban and architectural perspective you didn’t anticipate. However, I believe that nothing in our little worlds can be entirely isolated or separated into another dimension. Aren’t the buildings around us reflections of our bodies and faces? All those decorations we love and use to distinguish different eras — aren’t they the physical continuations of people from centuries past? Everything that a has touched bears their humid mark. By examining these imprints, we sometimes correct mistakes or inspire ourselves to make new ones. It’s easy to think about long-past events and decide what would have been the right course of action. However, waiting for the death of an era so that perhaps (though unlikely) future generations might build a less bloody society on its remains is not an appealing prospect for those still living. Perhaps the least violence, which risks becoming the greatest, is depriving a person of the opportunity to die. And since this option is technically impossible for now, we are left with half-measures. It is impossible to force people not to commit violence against each other. We can only try to eliminate all the factors that contribute to its spread. People should treat each other like patients who happen to be in the same ward. A person should perceive another person as someone equally ill with life, which arose beyond their will. They should feel unity in common misfortune, alleviating each other’s symptoms. We are taught to accept the rules of the game, not to hope to surpass them. We are doomed to ponder which game to play in order to spend our time satisfactorily. With the understanding that this is just another game, qualitatively no different from the others, I propose, perhaps, not the most destructive model that could help (or just be enjoyable) those who are fortunate enough to be born and breathe at present moment.

What Cathedrals?

To understand this unpleasant situation we are in and move closer to its realization, we need the concept of the New Cathedral. It has been influenced by my life amidst Eastern European architecture so don’t be scared by its apparent narrowness. Because of this some readers might find the context hard to grasp, but that’s okay. Almost every country has social housing, self-built homes, or old neighborhoods with dilapidated buildings. People do their best to adapt these spaces to their needs, even with minimal resources. Meanwhile, local authorities and developers dream of at least “civilizing” these people, or at most, evicting them, taking everything and giving nothing in return. The looseness and unevenness in the body of society have always been and will always be an irritating factor for the advocates of standards and sterility. So it is easy to find parallels. Just as other countries discuss what to do with social housing, in my country there were frequent debates about the fate of Soviet architecture. For many, poor, ugly, cheap, and dirty housing can become a powerful catalyst for challenging all that is considered beautiful, noble, and existing in the realm of ideas. Many people dislike its uniformity, standardization, cheapness, and lack of consideration for the residents’ comfort. There is also discontent with the sacrifice of individualistic needs for collectivist goals, typical of the now mostly defunct Eastern European socialism. When considering what modern individuals dislike about post-socialist architecture, it becomes clear that the issues are poor construction quality (lack of sound insulation, poor wall quality, etc.), inadequate infrastructure for contemporary needs, and individualistic chaos (unauthorized modifications to the building). In the latter I see the potential for nurturing a gothic heart that will blossom into a New Cathedral. The other two will be our soil and nutrients for the future plant.

Renovation strategy

Besides those advocating for the demolition of these structures and the construction of new housing, there is also a compromise position. This stance involves renovating the existing housing stock, following examples like german one. In Germany, the architectural legacy of the GDR is being unified, making these buildings tidier, more modern, and surrounded by adequate infrastructure.

What does renovation offer us if we view it not as a policy of stone and concrete, but as a policy of blood and saliva? How does it perceive the living and non-living materials it works with? It aims to reinforce, polish, and sterilize the bare, old foundation through which, in the absence of a “gardener,” something began to sprout. Bright colors repaint the gray, undecorated housing, uniform insulation with minimalist patterns, air conditioner niches — these and much more are chemicals, poisons, used to suppress grass on garden tiles. Renovation is another layer of concrete meant to lay a more reliable cover over everything alive that might hide within it. Any disruption of this updated order will be punishable by the “gardener.” This transformation is not merely aesthetic; it is a method of control, a means to tame and subdue the organic salacity of life, ensuring that nothing unexpected or unapproved can flourish in its carefully curated environment. In this light, renovation becomes an act of domination, where the lifeless materials are weaponized against the vitality they seek to conceal. Architects and concerned individuals are frustrated by the chaotic nature of this architecture, disliking how each apartment manages its own space, disrupting the overall cityscape. They find the visible manifestations of human needs as distasteful as exposed water, gas, and electricity utilities, preferring to hide them neatly and tastefully out of sight. An air conditioner, vibrant insulation, a satellite dish — is there anything more human than a need satisfied by a function? The monotonous facades of modernist buildings serve as canvases for the expression of human desire for comfort and satisfaction. Each segment of this architecture has its own creator or creators, ensuring none will look the same.

The building serves as a body for the release of individual libido, covered with traces, ejaculative imprints as evidence of fulfilled desire. This pure individual art acts as a trigger, much like Manet’s “Olympia,” forcing the dissatisfied viewer to recognize in Olympia the image of a familiar, desired prostitute. Here lies the main principle of renovation and all sterile architecture, regardless of its aesthetic qualities — shame before the human. Everyone can use, desire the prostitute, as long as it remains “hidden,” regardless of whether everyone knows about it or not. But if this information surfaces on the facade, it becomes an insult, an irritation, an act of pride.

Body Fear

Renovation aims to scrape the products of the flesh off the outer wall and enclose them inside, building an isolating sarcophagus. Everything must remain inside, and what has managed to emerge must be disinfected, hidden from the cityscape. Living in such architecture is a situation of dampened desire, deprived of air and opportunities to come out. It imposes a ban on the trace of satisfaction, which makes passersby uncomfortable, a ban on the industrial smile on the city’s skin, a smile signaling released satisfaction. One can imagine the facade of buildings as a soft sheet under which a person lies, and we see the traces of this process as moving hills and ridges. In the case of sterile architecture, the possibility of such hills is eliminated by replacing the flexible fabric with state-protected concrete. As a result, the creatures living under such a roof are no longer able to move freely; they must adapt, change their ways of satisfaction, and become a damp swarm under a rotting tree. Their bodies deform to enjoy the suffocation of the tomb with the status of an architectural monument. After this transformation, the lack of comfortable torture meets irritation and pain, as if a snail is taken out of its shell, forced to spread its soft body on the surface. The heavier the gravestone, the more it turns the obvious into the hidden, and any hidden thing strives to become what hides it; it strives to become the gravestone. It, in turn, by its weight, displaces human desire, becoming the only way to satisfy it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a new building, renovation, or historical architecture; it is all inherently symbolic, operating with standardized symbols of its era to breed snails behind the walls of monotonous buildings. Architecture continues the habit of people hiding behind symbols, images, stories, roles, standards, identities, any shell that allows the displaced to remain displaced, and the person to remain the symbol they inhabited with their most vulnerable flesh.

Surely, hardly anyone imagines a snail without a shell; it seems wrong and very dangerous, especially for the snail itself. Without its damp dwelling, it becomes a slug, conventionally considered the most disgusting creature, reminding us of what others hide. Nudity to well-dressed, standardized facades appears as an invitation to undress, thus exposing oneself to, without exaggeration, existential danger. It erodes the foundation on which the need for a shell stands, which for the snail looks like inevitable falling into the abyss of nothingness. However, for me a slug, with all its unsightly nakedness and vulnerability, turns out to be more appealing than a snail hiding behind its shell. Despite the rather depressing nature of what was described above, I can still imagine a world where numerous city facades are traces of satisfied desire, not suffocating walls of its torture chamber. The world where a person doesn’t need a symbol or shell to fill their lack, where they are not taught from childhood to hide vulnerable flesh behind the stone of architectural style. No matter the shell, the time, or the place, it is all determined by chance, which then takes the form of aesthetic preference.

Gothic heart in modern days

In search of philophical architecture and architecture of philosophy, I turn to John Ruskin’s essay defining what Gothic architecture is. He says that the Gothic architect does not try to hide the roughness and grotesqueness of his work, unlike the Greek and Egyptian architects who try to build, as they believe, orderly and restrained. The Gothic architect was inspired by natural motifs, by what surrounded him and evoked a sense of grandeur. It is a free, sometimes chimerical, masterful ode to God and His creation embodied in monumental architecture. A light-filled reminder to people of what is above and what is below, who created and what was created. It seems to me that such a grand reminder could be useful today, considering that nothing substantial has changed, especially people. Enthralled by this artistic movement, we could, as in the 19th century, create a stylization slightly adjusted to modern needs, but how?

What is our “forest,” our environment with which we constantly interact? For most, it will be a large or small city, which in the post-socialist space look very similar, especially if we are talking about the latter. So, in this case, our “forests” are residential areas with monotonous development, diluted with shopping centers, parking lots, gastronomic establishments, shops, and other predominantly practical, functional urban decorations. Just as the Gothic architect “understood” that the Germanic peoples came out of the forests and tried to depict this in architecture, so we, his heirs, should not deviate from our roots when building a new cathedral. It should reflect the crowns of banners under which we grew up, not hide the convenience of the asphalt whose heat shaped us. The most typical and planned development of the Soviet period has the greatest potential for revelation in each individual apartment. On the flat foundation of modernist architecture, a person must find their continuation, obtain not a rudimentary but a functional tail, observing which there will be no illusions about their nature. The New type of Cathedral will be built considering a peculiar aesthetic, based on a principle not aesthetic but functional. To serve as a universal example, this structure, and its residents, must cultivate a taste for function that breaks through, forming a unique pattern of purely human needs. Their task is to stimulate hunger as much as a person can physically be dissatisfied, seeking a way to fix it. The builders of the cathedral must practically push themselves to the limit, where the function in relation to the person will be exhausted on the facade’s canvas.

Many people experience disappointment, realizing they are mere biological organisms with an inevitable, prosaic end. However, no matter what effect this has at the moment, in the long run, it loses its brightness. As we “know” (or rather, as one Greek thinker said), my own death doesn’t exist to me — only the deaths of others do. When my death comes, I won’t be here to experience it, so what is there to fear? To break free from the familiar and pleasant torment of the shell, a person must realize not only that they are made of biological material but also that everything they use to overcome this mundane reality only confirms it. It is customary to perceive culture as something that, if not entirely opposite to functionality and practicality, is at least a separate sphere of human life. But if you look closely, you can see air conditioners, satellite dishes, and plastic extensions protruding from every historical monument, through which the remnants of long-dead everyday life flow. The New Cathedral can become a place to dissect the poetic worldview of a mollusk that spends its life hiding its delicate innards by building a culture from its own excrement. It will be an ode to function, another name for culture. Opening a mussel shell, we can be fascinated by its pearls, especially when detached from its origin, but this doesn’t make it a mineral or an eternal rock beyond the mollusk’s existence. This doesn’t make it anything other than a function. The layers of calcium, built up over the years and bound by protein, can easily surprise the viewer or the mollusk and make them think that its work is greater than it is. An excited creature might think that it is more than just an extension of its shapeless body and rejoice.

The very mechanism of pearl formation seemed very apt for explaining the work of culture. Here is a quote from the Ukrainian Wikipedia:

Pearl formation is a mollusk’s immune system reaction. When the mantle comes into contact with a grain of sand, a parasite, etc. (these can also be the mollusk’s own unremoved eggs, small hemorrhages, parts of the epithelium), which the mollusk cannot expel outside, the foreign object is isolated with layers of nacre, becoming the nucleus of the pearl. On the outer layer of the mantle, there are many glandular cells that form the shell layer by layer. Around the foreign object, the mantle forms a nacreous sack, surrounding it and producing nacre. Gradually, it closes, moving the nacre-covered object inward. If the nacreous sack does not close completely, the pearl becomes fused with the inner surface of the shell, appearing as a bulge.

Pearly us

Each pearl has many layers surrounding its core, which once threatened its existence. Each outer layer appears as if nothing but itself exists beneath, as if it has always been there and always will be. Ideological eternity, which people try to trace through history, lasts forever — until it ends with another nacreous layer. This “uranium repository” of individual helplessness and the need for the collective hardly diminishes over time — quite the opposite, especially in difficult times. So why, even at the level of architecture, multiply each person’s damp helplessness, given that it happens without our intervention? Therefore, the Cathedral should remind us of a poorly protected body with organs turned outward — not mummified remains with everything removed to preserve ritual necessity, but living flesh, entangled in itself, suffering from weakly coordinated growths.

This mosaic of separate apartments and their residents will not try to hide the grains behind nacreous walls; instead, it will bring them out. All people do is build monuments to their insides, but this attempt, this Cathedral, could be one of the few examples where it is not hidden. The grandeur of the Cathedral should stand on human insignificance, fostering the awakening of such problems, the realization of which will lead to an even more refined function, exhausting the viewer’s shell to the bottom. The architects of the New Cathedral inevitably will, as was sometimes customary before, be immured in it, more precisely in the nightmare of being human. Voluntary sacrifice for the creation of a new ideal of humanity, one without musty corners that emit the desire to exploit the lives of others for the sake of suppressed person inside the shell.

This new ideal can carry through many lives a direct demonstration of what a snail actually looks like, and around what parasite the charming pearl was formed. The temple in the name of all and none, a guiding constellation that burns with naked decor, traces of released ejaculate and pleasure. And although people are still being born and still dying, the New Cathedral will stand, washed by the sea currents of random, meaningless generations, like a pier covered with the gifts of the sea — air conditioners, double-glazed windows, plastic — symbols of what people are and what will actually remain of them. Not “high” ideals detached from “low” corporeality, not a culture rising above everything, but a simple continuation of the body, its needs and wants. All that will remain is a host of plastic bottles quenching thirst, regardless of whether it is literature, painting, architecture, science, or anything else. A forgotten culture is a dead functionality, museums are recycling factories. Museums are recycling factories that transform the barely usable plastic of past days into our functional everyday life of today.

As long as we do not forget the liberating baseness of everything created by humans, we protect ourselves from the enslaving heights, which more successfully lead to deaths than anything else.