The Architecture of Woe
We live amidst the dead temples of slumbering, industrial gods. What will we do if they wake once more?
by Kurt Schiller // Illustration by Sam Hindman
This novel dramatic paraphernalia consisted first of all of the Gothic castle, with its awesome antiquity, vast distances and ramblings, deserted or ruined wings, damp corridors, unwholesome hidden catacombs, and galaxy of ghosts and appalling legends, as a nucleus of suspense and daemoniac fright.
— “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” H.P. Lovecraft, 1927
If you ride the train from Philadelphia to New York, up along the Northeast corridor as it winds through suburban Philadelphia and on through New Jersey—past Trenton, up along Princeton Junction and Metuchen and Metro Park—wedged uneasily between the brief stretches of bucolic country and dense suburban sprawl, you will see the corpse of industry.
Vast red brick buildings hunker alongside the tracks, factory floor windows long since blown out or shattered by the thrown rocks of decades of idle teenagers, walls collapsed to reveal steel and iron beams, lead pipes, reams of asbestos, in some places the rusting bulk of old machinery. Smokestacks rise like ancient towers from the industrial heath, bearing the names of forgotten companies—Northeastern Tap & Die, Abrasive Company, Frankford Chocolate Company. Watchmakers, toymakers, shoes, boilers, machinery; the engine of a dead economy, gone to seed.
You can look out the window of the sleek metal Bombardier passenger car as it rolls by at 75 mph, and watch the broken glass and caved interiors of these architectural husks parallax by—a flash of old paint, a spray of graffiti, a bouquet of tangled metal fences, and they’re gone. Lost in your wake, but waiting. Lurking.
There is a haunting, dead quality to old buildings. They speak to us of lost possibility, of what was once mundane but which has been rendered fantastical by the passage of time—to walk their corridors or trip through their dust- and brickstrewn courtyards is to follow ancient footsteps, of men and women dead for decades and centuries. There is an energy to them, a sense that the past still lingers there. That it might reach out and take your hand, and pull you headlong and irresistibly back beyond your birth into the foreign realm of yesteryear.
This strange, haunting allure of lost yesterdays is especially poignant to those of us who came of age in the sheared wastes of a deindustrialized America. From Bethlehem to Cincinnati to Detroit, and a hundred more cities and towns beyond, a vast swath of the American workforce lives amidst the hulking remnants of abandoned factories and crumbling industrial infrastructure, the rusting edifices that might once have succored an earlier generation—providing, if not equity, then at least a suitable reward for the daily toil of alienated labor.
It’s a landscape that has become little more than the stage on which a later generation scrambles for economic purchase, as well as a cruel joke on a grand architectural scale. What greater mockery could there be than to labor in ceaseless gig-work in the shadow of the abandoned infrastructure of better jobs long since vanished? To raise your face to the sky and see the outline of empty shells where people once dwelled, and toiled, and—in their own way, in yet-insufficient measure—prospered?
This sense of cruel displacement, of alienation from the present, of the forces of hauntology manifest as a singular edifice, is no doubt why horror has always had such a fixation on the architecture of yesterday.
A vast swath of the American workforce lives amidst the hulking remnants of abandoned factories and crumbling industrial infrastructure.
The Gothic writers—who in the 18th and 19th centuries might credibly be said to have invented horror itself, or at least the literary tools of horror—were deeply fascinated with the conflation of time and place, and the strange sensations this process could elicit. Along with their kindred spirits the neoclassicists, the creators of Gothic literature saw in the crumbling castles and tumble-down mansions of Europe both a window into the past and a symbolic representation of the decay and decadence of the wealthy, the holy, and the pious. (The neoclassicists on the other hand saw ruins of an earlier time as symbolizing humanity’s lost golden age, an imagined past of simple shepherds, truth speaking poets, and wise scholars. Their horror, such as it was, was a horror at what was lost to time and might never be again.)
The implications of this emotional architecture of horror are immediately clear to even the casual reader. When the doomed hero of some Gothic tale approaches a mildewed manor or crumbling battlement, they aren’t merely approaching a haunted setting, but the shade and shadow of a bygone era. The House of Usher and the Castle of Otranto are structures that shift uneasily beneath the weight of both years and deeds alike, as if a physical curse of weight and mass had been lain upon them, bearing them ever downward to their doom. This hauntology, this fundamental disconnect between now and then, of the past returning to vex the future, is what keeps Gothic heroes shackled to the past, what drags them from the present and backwards into myth and legend. When Usher falls, it is two-fold: as the literal building sinks into the muck and mire at the end of the tale, so too does the figurative House of Usher sink into a doom of its own historical manufacture.
This same obsession with the displaced architectural remnants of another age, haunted with meaning and portent, was inherited by Gothic fiction’s modern descendants: detective fiction, slasher films, murder mysteries, psychological thrillers, science fiction, and countless others. And within this vaunted lineage, few genres might be said to stick so closely to the Gothic formula as cosmic horror and weird fiction.
Whereas the architecture of Gothic literature was explicitly hauntological, the at-times literal “Spirit” of the past making itself known in the present, cosmic horror blends the displacement of time with an equivalent physical and quite literally existential displacement. These tales and the horror that accompanies them are an opportunity to venture not just into the past, but into the categorically unknown and unknowable—into ontological impossibilities whose very existence is inimical to the observable, coherent reality in which humankind resides.
The strange dominions of Lovecraft and his stylistic descendants are not just edifices of the past, but of other realms entirely.
In a letter to Reinhardt Kleiner in March of 1920, H.P. Lovecraft wrote:
“I should describe mine own nature as tripartite, my interests consisting of three parallel and dissociated groups—(a) Love of the strange and fantastic. (b) Love of the abstract truth and of scientific logick. (c) Love of the ancient and the permanent.”
H.P. Lovecraft, personal letter, 1920
And indeed we see these three themes throughout his oeuvre, persisting as he transitions from his early more explicitly Gothic writings into the cosmic weird for which Lovecraft would become best known. There is a clear kinship between the protagonist of 1922’s The Tomb, drawn obsessively back to his family’s aged mausoleum, and the ill-fated scientific expedition of At the Mountains of Madness, pulled irresistibly forward to their doom within a vast stone city uncovered deep within Antarctica, a relic of an earlier age.
These buildings, these structures, of lost and doomed civilizations, return again and again throughout cosmic horror’s long reach, past and present. At times they appear as the lost tombs and ancient cities of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, or as the “corridors torn deep in living stone” of Ann K. Schwader’s 2007 poetry cycle “In the Yaddith Time.” We also see this same dynamic beyond the written word, in the hell-cursed abandoned spaceship of Event Horizon, and the vast cyclopean plazas of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. (We see it even in works far-flung from the horror genre itself, as in Babylon 5—in which the overwhelmingly Lovecraftian ancient race of Shadows dwell in a vast and buried stone city on a dead planet, and hide their living bio-ships deep beneath the surface of other worlds.)
Critically, though, the strange dominions sketched out by Lovecraft and his stylistic descendants are not just edifices of the past, but of other realms with vastly different rules and purpose—starry lands of night and myth, elder dominions where existential threats lurk beyond the glimpse of man’s ignorance. When we, as readers or viewers, encounter the forgotten temples of star cults and cosmic deities, or stumble upon ancient god-machery still humming in secret power, it’s clear that these places are not just impossible to comprehend in an engineering sense—something that might likewise be said of ancient wonders like the Great Pyramid, Roman aqueducts, or the unimaginable hydroengineering of the Aztecs or the ancient Sinhalese—but in an ontological sense as well. They are places where the universe we know—one of understood and documented rules and contraints—might suddenly give way or be superceded by something quite different, where the end of all existence might suddenly and surprisingly manifest, or send us tumbling into impossible corners that elude the grasp of the mind. The architecture itself is cosmic, horrible, and definitively Other and Else.
(Perversely, one might even argue that Lovecraft’s own worldview—a relic of a bygone era, unwelcome and malign today and distasteful even in its own day—is itself a piece of hauntology, a jagged shard of another age emerging unwanted from his fiction like a specter from the hollow dark, reminding us denizens of Now that we remain eternally in the shadow of Then.)
When this architecture of the cosmic strange manifests within familiar landscapes, the result is chaos and madness. Consider Lovecraft’s dead and drowned R’lyeh, with its strange geometries and priestly king; the foreboding techno-tombs and biological annihilation of the Alien franchise, peopled with corruptive viral pathogens, ichor-flecked exterminating bio-weapons, and hell-mad androids; the slumbering tombworlds and god-scorned automatons of Warhammer 40,000—the reappearance of this architecture, emerging from strange rifts or woken from its slumber by ill-advised explorers, heralds the return of ancient ways. It is a blight and a threat upon the landscape.
When this architecture of the cosmic strange manifests within familiar landscapes, the result is chaos and madness.
To dare to dwell among or even visit this unearthly architecture is to place an entreaty upon dark gods to rise, return, and scour the world we know from the face of reality. And while the ancient evils of Gothic horror—ghosts, vampires, necromancers, and alchemists—are driven by all-too-human urges like greed, hunger, lust, and hatred, the things awoken in cosmic horror are of an unutterably alien scale and scope. They might exterminate us as soon as notice us, send us reeling and senseless as soon as blink, or return to dreamless slumber for no fathomable reason whatsoever.
Here in our modern, scientific, and capitalist era, the architecture of cosmic horror has increasingly—and tellingly—been encountered not by scientific explorers but by commercial enterprises, or those in their employ. Consider the ceaseless attempts of Alien’s Weyland-Yutani to plunder the dead ruins of ancient worlds for weapons and technology—a churlish, greedy, and hubristic pursuit that brings doom on entire worlds again and again.
And these same urges—and their consequences—can be seen to play out here in our own world, upon the lost architecture of industrial capitalism. The abandoned blast furnaces and foundries of old steel mills, or vast grain silos and production houses—these are relics, the vacant homes of an absent god, stripped of all meaning in a post-industrial era. But the capitalists of our own world are not so different from Weyland-Yutani, if indeed they can be said to differ at all: while the inhabitants of these towns look on a closed steel mill with sadness and longing for jobs lost and wages missed, capital can conceive of these buildings only as an attractive site for short-term redevelopment, reconstruction, and repurposing. We might mock the doomed protagonists of At the Mountains of Madness or Prometheus, choosing to delve deeper into forbidden architecture in search of riches and knowledge, but where exactly lies the difference? Countless industrial centers—from Buffalo to Pittsburgh to Detroit—are even now working to “revitalize” the forgotten ritual sites of industrial capitalism, to reclaim them as casinos, condos, and convention centers, the shortest-term gain for the minimum effort. We don’t care about the grinding, crushing collapse of our economy, and the impoverishment of generation after generation—we see real estate, we see leasing opportunities and attractive retail space.
But are these ruins of another age that far removed from the temples of a dead God, haunting us to this day? Do we not feel their power calling to us? Vast swaths of modern politics battle over their reclamation and reuse. Their adherents beg the heavens to let them return, to pick up metal tool and artifice and resume the ancient ways—to manufacture, to mine the riches of the deep Earth, to bask again in the glory and prosperity of an economic golden age. They represent a forgotten creed that longs to return.
And lest we forget, the consequences of disturbing the industrial past are no less dire amid capitalism than in the pages of fiction.
* * * * *
In 1953, a plot of disused land was sold from Hooker Chemical Company to the school district of Niagara Falls City. It had once been used as a dump site for municipal waste, including the byproducts of dye, perfume, and solvents used in the manufacture of rubber and latex. The district had pressured the chemical company to sell or face an eminent domain case and, after the company assured the school district that the land had been properly cleaned and vetted, it was ultimately earmarked as the site of two new schools. In 1957, the city also began construction on several developments of single-family housing on the plot of land—now known as Love Canal.
It wasn’t long before the residents of these new developments noticed that something was very wrong. When it rained, strange smells lingered over the property. Slick black or colorful ooze, like crude oil, seeped from the ground in yards and on public playgrounds. Plants would not grow.
Subsequent construction uncovered buried caches of 50-gallon drums filled with chemical waste. Tests later discovered toxic levels of dozens of chemicals, including the human carcinogens benzene and dioxin, which had seeped into groundwater and into basements and homes. These were by-products of the industrial production that once used the land. Cancer levels and nervous disorders spiked. In the end, more than 800 families were evacuated and hundreds of homes were bulldozed. More than 8000 tons of dirt was scoured from the ground to be hauled away and made “safe” again.
A letter was later discovered, written by one of Hooker Chemical’s vice presidents to the company president, R.L. Murray, revealing that the company was not only aware of the danger but knowingly let it be turned into a school to evade liability:
The more we thought about it, the more interested Wilcox and I became in the proposition, and finally came to the conclusion that the Love Canal property is rapidly becoming a liability because of housing projects in the near vicinity of our property. A school, however, could be built in the center unfilled section (with chemicals underground). We became convinced that it would be a wise move to turn this property over to the schools provided we could not be held responsible for future claims or damages resulting from underground storage of chemicals.
Bjarne Klaussen, Vice President, Hooker Chemical Company
Is this very real tragedy so far removed from the cosmic horror and weird fiction that we recognize from horror media past and present? The motives of capitalism are as inscrutable as any starry God. Its adherents serve its inhuman purposes no less diligently. The Doom is no less real.
Love Canal and other industrial “accidents” are the grim reality of the cosmic architecture of modernity. How else are we to view the Minamata catastrophe, in which the release of methylmercury by the Chisso Corporation led to poisoning and birth defects in more than 2000 people after the chemicals made their way into seafood consumed by the local population? Or the contamination of hundreds of people—including the deaths of three adult and a young child—in Goiânia, Brazil, after an improperly disposed-of radiation source was salvaged from an abandoned hospital? Who knows how many other, similar sites blight the land, undetectable to us until it’s too late?
Love Canal and other industrial “accidents” are the grim reality of the cosmic architecture of modernity.
That science plays such a foremost role in these catastrophes should come as no shock, either. Cosmic horror was built in part on a distrust of science—on this notion that we might unlock terrible demons hidden in the fabric of our reality’s mechanisms and inner workings. Consider these words from The Call of Cthulhu, spoken by its doomed narrator:
The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
This may have seemed like paranoia or a flight of fancy at the time—decades before atomic bombs could erase a city from a map, or a tsunami-battered nuclear reactor could transform an entire district into a tainted landscape of ruin—but in retrospect, it seems almost quaint. When a baseball sized piece of radiology equipment salvaged from an old hospital can taint an entire town, isn’t there some wisdom to these words?
* * * * *
About twenty minutes north of Philadelphia is the small riverside suburb of Tullytown. It’s a small community of just over 2000, and it dwells quite literally in the shadow of society’s cast-offs and refuse: across a narrow stretch of the Delaware River, enormous mounds of landfill tower cheerfully up into the sky.
This is Waste Management’s Penn Warner facility, a modern dump built up over the last several decades, encircling and abutting two large freshwater bodies of water, Van Sciver Lake and Manor Lake. These lakes are themselves the remnants of an enormous industrial gravel mining operation from the early 20th century. Here, the land was scoured and then remade by the vanished forces of industry—and now it is being remade again.
It’s, actually, strangely pleasant. The rolling green hills stand out like ancient earthworks, looming incongruously up from the otherwise flat land of Bucks County. Solar panels dot several of the hills, gleaming darkly in the sun. Drive out across the narrow strip of land that splits the two lakes, out between the cheerful grass-laden landfills, and it would be quite easy to forget their true purpose and significance—were it not for the constant activity of heavy machinery tending to the land, checking, packing, repairing, bulldozers and heavy trucks forever just at the edge of hearing.
There’s one other thing: occasionally, rarely, some quirk of industrial geology causes a foul smell to drift down off the landfill and across several nearby towns. It lingers for an hour or two, then vanishes. If you’ve lived in the area for long, you simply no longer notice—and apart from an occasional tiff in the local papers, and a periodic court battle from towns that have grown fed up with the odors, nobody mentions it much.
But if you were to climb up one of the hills and turn your gaze to the north—if you slipped past the guarded gate, and wound your way through bare dirt roads carved between and into the sides of these manmade hills—you would see the Port of Bristol and what remains of the old U.S. Steel plant.
First opening in 1952, the 1600-acre facility was a major production location for pipes and other steel wares on the east coast of the U.S. Huge container ships plied the Delaware, and thousands of people worked there in reliable union jobs. By the Eighties, production had begun to slow, and the plant closed more or less for good in the Nineties. Like many heavy industrial sites, the soil is badly contaminated with heavy metals like arsenic, lead, and other byproducts of the steelworking process.
These “gods” are a haunting doom of our own creation, and if they come to plague our tomorrows it will be because we chose to worship them today.
For people now growing up in Lower Bucks County, the steelworks are almost a legend. A myth. Something a grandfather or uncle might talk about: describing hard work down in the foundry, heat blasting your face. The road to the plant site is easy to stumble onto by accident from the nearby Route 13. It’s blocked with a manned gate—approach it unwarily, and you may be briefly grilled by a disinterested security guard, then told to turn around and go back the way you came.
Soon, though, all this may change. Capital has again taken notice of the site, and its easy access to both deep-water shipping and the northeast corridor’s freight rail. In 2020, a deal was struck with NorthPoint Development to take ownership of the site and transform it into a high-capacity “logistics hub.” Vast warehouses to service the shipping needs of Amazon and other retailers would be built at the site, and work may return—the old rituals, so to speak, might soon begin anew. The bargain, the trade-off of labor for wages, stands to be renegotiated, of course—after all, these aren’t the reliable union jobs of the U.S. Steel days, but modern, “efficient” warehouse labor of the kind favored by Amazon and their kin. Exploitable. Fluid. Precarious.
But even apart from the obvious consequences of low pay and appalling working conditions, we know from past experience that these “revitalizations” rarely come free, if they come at all. There is always a sacrifice. Consider Amazon’s recent cross-country tour, turning up on the doorstep of city after city and promising rewards and splendor—jobs, perks, new life—if only they would debase themselves more deeply and pathetically than their fellow cities: tax cuts and abatements, infrastructure improvements, fast-tracked approval processes. The restructuring of civic agreements to entice these new corporate masters, at the expense of the people.
These cruel bargains, these modern demands for sacrifice from workers and municipalities, are proof enough that the old gods yet live—and that there are those who would wake them. These are no longer the vast manufactories of post-war prosperity, but the fevered sacrificial pyres of Amazon, Uber, and a hundred other stellar beasts of the vast economic night, creating new and ever more inventive ways to destroy and consume any who would let them grant purchase. They are perhaps the unruly children of yet older beings, their histories stretching back to the original gothic—when factories truly were castles, and managers lords—but they live with us even now, no less godlike for their immediacy and the newness of their architecture, the strangeness of their exploitation.
If there is a lesson to be learned from our god-haunted present, and the templed landscape it left strewn in its wake, it is this: these “gods” came because they were called. They are ultimately a haunting doom of our own creation, and if they come to plague our tomorrows it will only be because we chose to worship and engineer them today. Humanity is ever its own antediluvians, and the prophets of today will become the doom of tomorrow if we again heed their call.
But the future need not rot beneath the corpse of our own decisions. R’lyeh won’t rise if we can turn back from the threatening surge of churning waves and rising, impossible architecture. We might yet roll back the stone on these ancient tombs of industrial wisdom, and seek new ways, ways that do not require us to supplicate ourselves to these new gods, as once we did the gods of old.
Let the dead gods sleep. Let them dream, and die.
Else, in some distant and unimagined time, when the last engine has stopped, the final hour been logged, and the ultimate wage paid at last, the inheritors of today’s woes may yet climb from the slime and look up at the ruins of our gods… and despair.
Kurt Schiller is the editor of Blood Knife and co-host of the podcast Parents Just Don't Understand. You can find him on Twitter at @mechanicalkurt.
