0.01%: The irrelevant monumentality of the global supra-government

Abstract

In 360BC, Atlantis, an island described in Plato’s dialogues “Timaeus” and “Critias”, a mythical utopia dominated by the powerful and inhabited by the opulent beasts of luxury located in the Atlantic just beyond the Pillars of Hercules – on the Strait of Gibraltar. The utopian civilization became a great naval power. Their homes were made up of concentric islands separated by wide moats and linked by a canal that penetrated to the centre. The lush islands contained gold, silver, and other precious metals and supported an abundance of rare, exotic wildlife. There was a prodigious capital city on the central island. Its culture was advanced and was protected by the god Poseidon, who made his son Atlas king and namesake of the island and the ocean that surrounded it. As the Atlanteans grew powerful, their ethics declined. Their armies eventually conquered Africa as far as Egypt and Europe as far as Tyrrhenia (Etruscan Italy) before being driven back by an Athenian-led alliance. The Atlanteans exploitation of their environment – the misuse and abuse of natural forces was the immediate cause of their divine punishment, the island was beset by earthquakes and floods, and sank into a muddy sea. This is how the utopian turns into the dystopian vision. Plato’s myth defines the rules of the Western world’s dialectics on the society and, therefore, on the ideal city. Let us not forget that for the Greeks, the philosophical and the physical aspects of the city coincide in the idea of Polis. Among others, the mentioned dialectics in this thesis are based on the use of the allegoric description whose sense can be perceived by negation (what we call today dystopia) or, alternatively, through a positive vision (a utopia). This thesis aims to evoke the first dialectical mechanisms, that of the narrative by denial. Not by chance, my project sets out a supercontinent on the strait of Gibraltar on the spoils of Atlantis, an isolated territory designed to attract the World’s Wealthiest, the 0.01%. A landscape of consumption is built, constructed on the foundation of exploited minerals and resources, with the peripherally of the monumental. The city of the 0.01% is structured around the interconnected system of control through the global economy, and the concentration of power in the hands of a shockingly small number. Islands are organized in a structure following this network of global control, including industry, interest, investment, personal relationships. With the size of each island revealing its owners wealth, with each location revealing the unseen hierarchy within the 0.01%. A contemporary reinterpretation of the myth of the Island of Atlas, in which the parasitic and opulent architecture of the fantastic island, thought as a luxury and pictoresque folies park, is a critical and metaphorical representation of the decay of the modern society and the prelude of a social collapse due to resources exploitation. Inspired by the Renaissance inventions of Filarete ‘Sforzinda and by the Romantic trend of the Architecture of Fantasy, An “out-of-time” architectural treatise is compiled. A treatise on the mansions of consumption is created, criticising the trivial irrelevance of architectural monumentalism as expressed by the typology of the super wealthy. No plans, no sections. Only facades: as the growth of the richness is leading to a new level of illiteracy, the Classical treatise turns, therefore, into a market catalogue.