March 2021 | Eyesore

Commentary on architectural blunders in monthly serial.

Behold the Helix, Amazon’s new East Coast headquarters proposed for Arlington, Virginia, across the river from that great National Swamp of grift and favors known as the District of Columbia. You know what’s going on here, right? Trick question — it’s surely not what you thought. Permit me to explain:

In America, you see, we are now so terminally disgusted and deranged by Modernist architecture, that we all semi-consciously agree that the only satisfactory antidote to it is “Nature.” Which means — architects, listen up! — that we’ve given up on architecture per se and altogether. So… to get through the permitting process — planning and zoning boards and all — the developer has to pretend that what he wants to hoist up is not a building, really, but a Nature Installation (yes, caps). Get it now? Conveniently, this fits but exactly with the latest moral pretense programming (i.e. virtue-signaling) of the super-wealthy class who commission these things: “We’re green!” they boast.

This is complete horseshit, of course. Let us count the ways: They’re not creating anything like a real new ecosystem, just a super-high-tech planting box that requires fantastically unnatural amounts of maintenance. The embedded energy squandered in the building’s infrastructure negates (and then some) any conceivable benefit of hanging green stuff from it. Oh, and by the way, office towers have gone obsolete since Coronavirus demonstrated to companies that employees might as well just work from home.

Of course, these vanity projects have to get their permits far in advance of construction, so this confection no doubt got its approvals before the virus screwed the pooch on this kind of real estate.

“This isn’t just about work. It’s about how you interact with your community,” said architect Dale Alberda, a principal of the firm that designed the Helix, NBBJ.

That’s horseshit too, of course. There’s no “community” there. It’s just another office park, full of buildings that are now equally obsolete — assets-turned-liabilities, almost overnight! The Helix is a perch for Amazon’s big bird, Jeff Bezos, to hose congress members, Senators, and federal regulators, and to keep tabs on one of his crown jewels, the Narrative bullhorn known as The Washington Post.

Okay, so, you probably did realize that the Helix is an obvious mash-up of those two Biblical humdingers: the Tower of Babel and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. All too true. We’re Babylon Release 2.0, you realize… a nation become so corrupt and degenerate that the curtain is coming down on the show. Alas, Babylon…alas us….