LIA and the Iron Age Cold Epoch: Similitudes and Sequels

Abstract

This concluding chapter distinguishes between the loss of place, as the masculinization of open spaces in the city, and placelessness, a primordial essence of the urban feminine and the urban subconscious. Synonymous to the notion of Terrain vague, introduced by Ignasi de Solà-Morales, placelessness is the raw authenticity of places of urban decay such as one described by Jean-Paul Sartre in his 1933 novel, Nausea. Urban decay, often a niche of a previously planned precinct which failed, keeps re-emerging in city-form no matter what intensity of regulatory imposition is forced upon the urban environment. Urban decay is an ongoing, repeating event, an expression mainly of the archetypal femininity of the Eternal Return. Along with the Axis mundi, largely communicating masculinity, both environmental gender archetypes have been distorted or banished altogether through late modernity. In his painting, The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh shows the nightly sky above the city dispersed with images of cup-and-ring marks and of the spiraling Ouroboros. The archetypal bond, or its late loss, between the built form and the sky is either celebrated or mourned in this painting. Though van Gogh’s intent may forever remain unresolved, the imagery of The Starry Night alludes to a closure of an epoch.