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| Concept art from the French zombie film "La Horde" |
The Zombie Apocalypse has become an increasingly popular pop-culture reference as well as a consistent allegory for an unstable world. Everything from popular memes to elaborate survival guides harken to the unlikely, but nevertheless terrifying, presupposition that an unknown virus will infect the world's population turning the recently deceased into flesh-hungry undead, endlessly pursuing the living.
As Max Brooks the author of The Zombie Survival Guide suggest, the undead themselves act in a viral nature: they are self-replicating, relentless, and unemotional and that is what makes the threat of a zombie apocalypse so terrifying.They exponentially replicate, they never stop, and there is no way to reason with them... you can only run, and run you will! But where to?
There are enough zombie genre films and TV shows to know that there are very few hiding places that the ravenous undead will not eventually get us. The unsuspecting subjects of Romero's Night of the Living Dead retreated to a farmhouse and, later in Romero's "Dead" series of films, Dawn of the Dead put our survivors in a shopping mall. Both proving no good in the long run, though the mall might be one's best bet for a while.
The survivors hiding from the brain-munching zombies in Return of the Living Dead retreated to an active funeral home, which was an epic fail for those unfortunate souls. Or, in more recent memory, the characters in the first season of HBO's The Last of Us take their chances moving through the landscape from place to place (all with varying levels of sanctuary and/or peril) in effort to find a cure for the infection, which happens to be fungal in nature.
Same gnarly outcome though.
This brings us to yet another underlying and deeply psychological effect of surviving the zombie apocalypse: Our perception of the built world, and particularly the realization that our homes, shops, municipal building, and even places of worship, are all equally susceptible to the surging hordes of flesh-eaters gathering outside.
It presupposes that our most intimate spaces, the personal spaces that we retreat to and the social spaces we venture to, the ones that allow us to feel safe and alive and human, no longer can offer the same physical (and mental) refuge they once did.
In fact, they've become just the opposite: prisons where the most likely outcome is a horrible death. Death from being attacked by cannibalistic ghouls or crazed humans; from the distinct possibility of dehydration and/or starvation; or even, when all hope is lost, death at our own hands.
The idea of being trapped in the very buildings that served us in our pre-apocalyptic lives before the infected, the buildings that were created by us and for us generation to generation, is horrifically unsettling.
Even more, it turns the security and civility of Architecture with a capital "A" (the philosophy of what architecture is) upside-down where the relentless pursuit of the living by the dead makes our homes and shops, our churches and city halls, our bars and hotels into our hiding places, prisons, and, quite possibly, our crypts.
If you would like to read more on how to fortify your house against the zombie hordes check out this link!
And if the silly musings here are not enough mental stimulus and you want to read Sam Jacob's argument against the concept of "zombie architecture" and the often misplaced nostalgia of resurrecting historic buildings, check out this link!
Happy Halloween from Urban Times!!!
