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Wednesday, September 9, 2009

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows

We want to leave these pyramids alone, honest. But they just won’t let us. A few days after posting about the StorageTek pyramid, we were confronted with yet another.

Let’s jump back a sec. We have argued that the pyramid was chosen as a symbol to honor Western social organization, wealth and power. In Blagnac wealth and power is synonymous with the aerospace industry. Architecture evokes the wings of jetliners, plane parts decorate the traffic circles, the names of streets are named for the heroes of French aviation.

The rocades are no exception. Their names link the sky to the land. The Blagnac pyramids are all situated along the Voie Lactée (Milky Way). To the south the rocade is called the Arc-en-Ciel: the Rainbow Road.

When this other pyramid made itself known, we were hesitant to post about it, for you see, it is inverted. We didn't want to push things too far, what with so many other more obvious and clear-cut cases to look at. But it is striking, situated as it is just a scant few hundred meters across from the StorageTek pyramid. What makes it harder to ignore is that it is a fountain with a pool at the base. Just like every other pyramid we have come across recently.

Of all the pyramids discussed on LoS so far, the most debatable is the one in Odyssud park. One could argue that it’s more of mound than a pyramid. Unlike the others in Place de la Revolution and the Centre Commercial Blagnac, it’s not a fountain. It does sit on an artificial lake at the center of which is an enormous fountain, but the beast itself does not spew water. But close enough for government work, eh?

We could go on about the fact the pyramid fountain adorns the entrance to Méteo France and is flanked by incongruous circular landscape architecture (a round parking lot?). That inverted it resembles a kind of funnel to concentrate the powers of the sky onto the earth (what’s a weather service for other than the measurement, prediction of and thus control of the skies?) We could mention the traffic circle decorated like a compass, perfectly oriented towards the north, which like other imagery we have seen near the pyramids, symbolically extends its power around the globe.

The pyramid is a way to raise the aristocracy and the priestly cast closer to the heavens. In this inverted pyramid (another of which can be found under the famous glass pyramid of the Louvre), we propose that the idea was to bring heavens down to earth.

The doctrine of progress and the perfection of nature is thus implicit.

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