What if God was an architect ?

What if the God with an inordinate fondness for beetles (400,000 species and counting, so far) was an architect of domestic buildings : what would those homes look like ?

I suggest that they would look very much like the intensely polychromed and extremely variegated exuberant homes of the Victorian Era.

What Americans tend to call "the Painted Ladies" and we here in Nova Scotia know as "Gingerbread Houses".

And if Hitler was an actual architect and not just an architect manque, what would his homes all look like ?

I suggest they would be the concrete,steel and glass equivalents of Leni Riefenstahl's all-lookalike photographs of the ideal human figure.

Figures all alike in their perfect prime of youth : tall and fit with symmetrical features :  rendered in concrete as eternally perfect , frozen in their vigorous youth thanks to either Riefenstahl's stills camera or Speer's massive concrete.

Very 'Thirties' indeed : smooth, seamless, streamlined, moderne.

Function following form - no 'useless' decorations or 'flawed 'gargoyles.

No Romas, no Jews, no Handicapped or Gays : biological synthesis would render a perfect human species and eugenic plenticide would eliminate any mistakes.

In a word : modernist, brutalist architecture : smooth, hard, cold : the ideals of eugenics captured forever in grey grey concrete, glass and steel.

It is not at all a coincidence that when architect Le Corbusier was born in 1887, so was the Age of Modern Scientism and that when he died in 1965, so did it.

For it was his eugenic architectural ideas that can be seen dominating both the 1939-1940 and 1964-1965 New York World's Fairs, sites where his vision of a smooth, grey, perfect World of the Future was most widely propagated .

For there was no sign of 400,000 different kinds of beetles - and no God either - at either of these two Fairs ....

Nature bowls last : Matter over Mind, 1939-1945

Sir Charles Lyell as intellectual godfather to Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will".

Who would have known ?

But it was Sir Charles, in a 1863 book, who first summarily dismissed materialism as a philosophy with a single memorable phrase : "MIND OVER MATTER".

He opined that all the evidence from evolutionary progress ('ever onward to those broad sunlit uplands') indicated that the mind was gradually but steadily winning dominion over mere matter obstacles.

Oh yes, what Canadian can forget that 'dominion' was word de rigueur  for English language intellectuals in the sunny 1860s ?

'Mind over Matter' : Lyell's memorable catchphrase came to sum up Modernity's essence for the populations and leaders of the Allied, Axis and Neutral camps during WWII.

So, in its spirit, on the very first day of the war, headlines all the world over (incorrectly) blatted "German tanks maul Polish horses".

But in the dying days of the European phase of the war no such headlines came out, that by the Spring of 1945 , now "Polish horses haul German tanks".

The tanks were disguised as Polish peasant  haywagons, en route to their last role as hull down pillboxes in the battle for the German heartland.

The Germans had no more gasoline for the tanks and in any case had run out of engine spare parts to re-start them.

German morale was still high..... but motor oil supplies were very low.

In Japan : ditto, ditto.

There legions of schoolkids and grandmothers destroyed all the sacred pine trees they could find, all to extract the basis of very little, very crude, airplane gasoline from their roots.

The German tankers were desperate to get their tanks into hidden position before the Soviets arrived, but the Polish horses took their good old time, re-fueling along the sides of the road, eating the Spring's first tender shoots.

The war - for Germany at least - was no longer moving along at Man's Blitzkrieg tempo, but rather at Nature's own pace.

'Matter over Mind' , at last ....