Eriugena-the first
Irish metropolis
JOHN CULLY, architect, gives a thumbnail sketch
of his plans
for the New
City for the West.
PREAMBLE; this writer was asked by the Directors of New City for the West to prepare a design for this project, a request that had the effect of giving one to think, and to do so at some length. Not every day is one asked such a thing, it is a little outside the quotidien norm.
FIG. 1 NINE POINT CIRCLE
A Fundamental
Question
What does a city do? Well, of course, that depends. But, I reflected, there are cities and there are cities, and I thought about a bunch of fellows way way back who stepped into history there one time. They didn't have a "soggy, boggy hill", rather they had a dry and stony hill which was scarcely more promising really, but they took what they were given there in the Hopperesque sunlight at the dawn of our history, and they built thereupon a thing you'd never get Planning Permission for today (-"injurious to the amenities of the area………. out of keeping with the idiom of the existing development in the locality …………….. ") and the hilltop thing and the city they built did something. What it did was shape and mould the entirety of our whole civilisation, and it still does so today and will continue so to do for centuries to come, and that is what that city and it's hill, Athens and it's Acropolis, did and does. Why not set our sights this high?
Olivier - dear Larry - had occasion to say in the film Ben-Hur that Rome is a thought in the mind of God, which is the other thing (we all remember the chariot race) that stuck in my mind from that film. It's a useful figure of speech, a useful idea - a thought in the mind of God. Sort of has a ring to it.
An Irish City
Another thought that
occurred to me was this; we Irish have never built a city, nor even a town, at
any time in our history. Certainly towns and cities exist in Ireland, but
always built by new waves of arrivals - Danes, Normans, above all English-never
by the natives. Moreover they have been built piecemeal, and always they have
had an occupation, a garrison, and at best a plantation look to them.
So where to begin? One
will commence with the most pressing urban problem as he sees it -traffic -and
will design with that foremost in his mind, and accordingly will design a
motorway interchange, but with people living in it. Another will place crime in
the forefront of his considerations, and will create a sort of prison camp. A
third feels that social isolation must be addressed, and will seek to create
community
FIG. 2 TRINITY TRIANGLE
by abolishing privacy; here one will achieve again a kind of penitentiary. By the lights of a degraded-if universally practiced social pseudoscience and it's essentially valetudinarian approach (the whole human condition an illness requiring cure) there has evolved virtually the whole of town planning, and a very great deal of what passes for architecture, into universal current practice and indeed current theory.
FIG. 3 LAW OF SEVEN
So, for the first Irish city in all history we need a name. The working title of this city is Eriugena, which name means 'Irish-born'. Then we need to arrange our design priorities. We need to ask, what does the city do?
There is much talk just now - though mostly only among feminists and the like-about the 'changing role of men' (sic), by which it seems that only peripheral roles are being spoken of - but as though these were the fundamental thing. Reader, a man's role is fixed and eternal, cannot change. The role of a man is to make manifest and give witness to Truth in everything he does. Who does not do this is something less than a man.
The central function of a city is to provide the milieu in which the soul of man may live and thrive. The city that does this is emblematic of and articulates the Laws of God-and the Laws of God are the Laws of Nature.
Nature, the work of God, is made up of number and measure; the whole Creation, the ancient Scriptures say, was sounded into existence (-in the Beginning was the Word… ). One of the oldest visual emblems of the process of Creation is the Nine-Point Circle -and that is our beginning; see fig 1.
All events, we are told are governed by the Law of Three, the central position of which is made manifest in fig 2 (triads and Trinities should occur to you….. )
The progression of events is governed by the Law of Seven (Seventh Day…….. ), but here our approach is slightly different. We take the fraction 1/7 and we decimalise it. The answer is 0.142857 repeating. We join these in sequence on our circle-note that three six, and nine do not occur in the series-and the somewhat surprising shape we see in fig 3 emerges.
Look now at fig 4. We have a circle of 8 Kilometres diameter, containing within a basic framework -it's basic boulevard plan -an interrelated articulation of the three most basic Laws of the Creation. Thereafter it will be our purpose to develop in ever greater detail this metropolis in accord with the harmony of nature herself.
FIG. 4 FUNDAMENTAL CITY PLAN
DIAMETER 8 KILOMETRES
ORIENTATION NORTHWISE
Finally; this plan has been fitted to the proposed site in a manner which ensures the inviolability of every known field monument on the site; and it has been orientated as shown for a purpose. The figure derived from 1/7 -the progression of events metaphor- is open to the Northwest, open to the future, for a Goddess dwells in this azimuth, and a singularly trying ratbag she is, if I may say so; the name of this Goddess is Necessity, and she is the Mother of Invention, the Step-mother of all Progress. At the level of the mundane, it is perhaps of interest that this is where the cities transport nexus-it's gateway -also lies. To the Southeast, as the crowning glory of all that has gone before since the crack of time there is to be built that edifice which speaks of, and brings us into, the present. Here, facing traditionally, is to be the Basilica which will honour the devotional intent of the originators of the project.