Pluto in Aquarius' Impossible Architecture and Ideal Cities
Some preliminary thoughts on Pluto’s momentous first act in Aquarius via 18th century architect Etienne-Louis Boullée, the recent headlines, Balenciaga Harry Potter, and my own Bay Area field notes.
These lacustrine cities grew out of loathing / Into something forgetful, although angry with history. / They are the product of an idea: that man is horrible, for instance, / Though this is only one example. // They emerged until a tower / Controlled the sky, and with artifice dipped back / Into the past for swans and tapering branches, / Burning, until all that hate was transformed into useless love. — From “These Lacustrine Cities” by John Ashbery
I’m writing these Pluto in Aquarius reflections from yet another port of call, as I embark on the garden hermit arc of my 12th House annual profection year. I’ve found myself in the “back house” of a close friend’s sprawling property in Rockridge, where I’ll be riding out the next two months of Pluto in Aquarius opposing my Leo Sun, which coincides with my Jupiter return. A majestic oak extends its Jupiterian protection on the property, and all I hear is bird song, owl hoots, squirrel chatter and the occasional busy-bodying of a wild turkey through the snowbells. I’m in heaven.
My 12th House contains Taurus and this latest outpost feels like a physical manifestation of that sector of my chart. I’ve always imagined my 12th as a secret garden, with sequestered idylls, crumbling arcades, hedge mazes, and prayer labyrinths. I wanted to find somewhere that felt safe, hidden, and tucked away as I continue to clear these psychic decks. I’m planning to finally break my European exile in June, as Pluto returns to Capricorn — a pilgrimage back to Barcelona, which I’ll be embarking on with great intention. I want to leave the Bay Area with as light a heart as possible.
For now, I’m exploring the alchemical possibilities in my own third house backyard. Overhanging the entrance to the back house is a curtain of angel’s trumpet, or brugsmansia, a slightly sinister flower that caught my eye ever since moving to the Bay Area. If you want to transmit a message to someone beyond the veil, you can write them a letter and use one of its pale yellow blooms as the envelope. Burying the packet in the earth will ensure that the missive is received. Indeed, they look like antique mouth pieces bending toward the earth — their trumpets browning at the edges. I find their presence comforting and may just have some letters to dispatch into the soil during this Pluto transit.
The day after Pluto ingressed into Aquarius I couldn’t help but notice the majestic trees uprooted by a particularly brutal storm — one of many to rip through these lands in recent weeks. My theory about the Bay Area is that it’s a lightning rod for shifts in the zeitgeist: a sort of Uranian semi-conductor grounding immense waves of innovation, gold rush, destruction, and creative revitalization. Wandering the monumental neoclassical architecture of Berkeley the other evening, through a strident hail of bells, Sather Tower felt like an antenna itself: its fraught chamber music translating the spirit of the times.
In any case, a felled tree is nature’s Tower card. Entire root systems pulled from the earth, like ancient gorgon shields. Hunkered in my past Lake Merritt apartment, I watched as branches were stripped from the tree in front of my window, like an ax frisking kindling. A sobering reminder of the Dionysian force and frenzy that’s sending its riptides through the element of air now (until June 11th, anyway). I’m not surprised that the ingress arrived in a flurry of tornadoes too, as Pluto’s spiralic energy is unleashed into the medium of aether. Mississippi’s twister was the worst in a century, and even LA saw a freak tornado touch down. More recently, multiple twisters touched down in Missouri, killing five.
Many astrologers have been talking about the crash of the Silicon Valley bank, as a larger financial crisis threatens for the first time since 2008 — the last time Pluto changed signs. That the bank run was triggered by a social media frenzy brings the Aquarius slant on Pluto’s seismic tremors. Whether or not the financial dominoes will continue to fall, the SVP collapse is a foreshadowing of what might unfold as Pluto’s fear contagion is unleashed in a sign associated with electrical grid networks and the hive-mind itself. I will add that Cash App’s CEO, Bobby Lee, was tragically stabbed to death in San Francisco on Tuesday night: a hint at the battle lines being drawn in this new Plutonic age.
An Elon Musk-led petition to halt the further development of AI technology, which frames this moment as shaping the future course of civilization, further reflects the intensity of Pluto changing signs. I think a lot of us have the sense of being at the threshold of seismic forces and irrevocable changes that will only be fully comprehended in retrospect. I wonder if we’ll look back to this moment, despairing at how thoughtlessly Pandora’s box was prised open. The corporate arm’s race of competing AI tools will likely side-line any attempt to put on the brakes on this technology and its potential ethical and existential quagmires. Pluto can bring the frenzy of gold fever and AI is the hottest gravy train out there.
The TikTok trial was another major news story over the ingress, which speaks to Pluto’s will to power now lodged in a sign associated with tech and the internet itself. The question of who is pulling the strings of our most powerful technologies and social media networks will be a major arc of this 20 year transit. We do well to remember that Pluto was “discovered” during the rise of fascism, when propaganda was first employed as a tool of war — perhaps most powerfully through the film medium. Though the TikTok trials have feigned a paternal and protective stance against a convenient Eastern foil — this is all about power.
Indeed, it’s beginning to emerge that the proposed TikTok ban is a Trojan Horse for the much larger Restrict Act, which aims to block or disrupt financial holdings from foreign adversaries that pose a risk to national security. From what I understand, the bill would give governmental access to basically anything connected to the internet: your chat history, your photos, your security system — even your doorbell. If you’re suspected of fraternizing with a “foreign enemy” your entire digital footprint is free game for the government to build a case against you. The bill proposes the banning of VPNs as well, punishable up to 20 years in prison (approximately the length of Pluto’s time in Aquarius).
Of course we’ve been living in a panopticon of mass surveillance for quite some time, so it’s hard to feel much of anything about the Restrict Act — however dystopian its terms. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to see the timing of this potential bill as Pluto ingresses into a sign that rules over all grid networks of electrical connectivity. The institutional capture of every nook and cranny of the internet will be much more blatant in the coming decades, as the powers that be clamor to assert their control over any technology with influence over the Aquarian rabble.
Bitcoin will likely be a flashpoint in these power struggles too. Its natal chart actually bears the imprint of the last ingress of Pluto into a new sign — Capricorn. The chart has an Aquarius stellium too with an exalted Venus in Pisces free-floating above clunkier bank intermediaries. As a riposte to the mass bailing out of banks during the 2008 banking crisis, the decentralized currency is about as Aquarius as you get and will be another major contender in the Plutonic skirmishes to come.
I should mention that Pluto’s first toe dip in Aquarius heralds a longer period of Plutonic transition, as the planet of katabasis roves back and forth over this threshold between cardinal earth and fixed air. If ever we were living in liminal times… The sun-dazzled escapee from Plato’s cave will need to return to the grotto of shadows and beautiful lies — for a couple more missions anyway.
The guillotine-friendly last tour of Pluto through Aquarius, between 1778 - 1798, is a reminder of how easily we can lose our heads — and even our humanity — in a sign poised between the realm of mortals and angels. The myth of Ganymede is one way into this complex archetype, whose figure takes up a lot of real estate in the constellation of Aquarius. I’ve mentioned before that Ganymede was kidnapped by Zeus, incognito in an eagle suit, the prince forced into the role of cupbearer (and likely sex-slave). It’s through this role that the Ganymede witnesses the ceremony of ambrosia: the elixir that grants the Olympians their immortality. Ganymede is the prince who ends up knowing too much, beholden to divine mysteries that make his return to an ordinary princely life impossible.
Aquarius is, indeed, a liminal sign. In the Northern Hemisphere, Aquarius season is still the dead of winter, but the days are now getting longer. Instead of focusing on conservation and the management of earthly stores, there’s the hope of spring returning: a projection forward into this gathering of the light. A championing of the idea of light and how humanity shall be organized in this enchanted space of pure Apollonian reason.
Aquarius is therefore a sign of conceptual spaces and collectivity: love’s squid ink diluted into endless watery washes of agape. The zealotry and idealistic fervor that can grip Aquarius is explained by the miracle of light returning — the fleeting intoxication of a future state of perfection. Revolutions looking good on paper and all.
It’s no coincidence that The Enlightenment reached its peak during the last tour of Pluto through Aquarius, coinciding with the start of the industrial revolution. The extension of our fleshy limits into the immortality of gears and pistons is very much an Aquarian story too — though I think the machines will have the last laugh as fortune’s wheel turns again in the coming decades.
All of this is to say, I think there’s a very real possibility that Pluto’s tour of Aquarius will bring wonders and man-made horrors alike, from which there’s no turning back. We will be altered. What we understood as the baseline, or Turing test of our “humanness”, will be put into question. Whether it’s an AI angel telling us to “be not afraid” in infinitely splitting tongues, or the Dionysian frenzy of violent ideological mobs — or something we cannot even conceive of yet — at some point we will see too much and nothing will be quite the same after.
From this standpoint, an 18 month period of Plutonic inbetweeness makes cosmic sense. We’ll need time to process this emergence of a new technological will-to-power and to decide where we fit within an increasingly automated world. Perhaps it’s not a question of the bots gaining sentience but a much less glamorous affair of machines replicating like rabbits and simply crowding us out. That viral AI-generated video of Harry Potter in Balenciaga swag, with its endlessly looping role-call of yassified wizards with absolutely nothing in their eyes, is a hint at what humanity’s swan song could look like: Harry Potter and the Vanishing of the Buccal fat. Absolute nightmare fuel.
The fact that Saturn will be lodged in Pisces (and co-present with Neptune) through this long Plutonic transition, bobbing along in the bathysphere of a mutable water sign, speaks to the inevitable uncertainty and confusion of the coming years. We will need to be flexible and constantly adjust to new information and horizons. The mind-fuck of the coming years will make the era of “fake news” seem quaint in comparison.
Speaking of Neptune, I’m embarrassed to report that the deep-faked image of the Pope in impossibly cool drip was the first AI image to fool me (knowingly, anyway). The AI-generated images of Trump’s imagined arrest were also circulating around the time of the Pluto ingress, heralding the wild west of unregulated circulation of speculative or even revisionist images. As long as Saturn is co-present with Neptune, the limits and bounds of our known reality will continue to warp and bend.
Another image has been making the rounds that captures the spirit of these times: glass tanks filled with algae goo are proposed as an alternative to trees in urban spaces. I can’t think of a more perfect marriage of the detached thought experiments of Aquarius and the kelp-core of Saturn in Pisces. Aquarius, by the way, has a fetish for terrariums: any sealed world they can observe, prod, and break down into data-points. A brave new era of social experiments dawns.
Finally, I wanted to end on a lighter note and offer these sublime visions from futurist architect Etienne-Louis Boullée whose drawings of “impossible architecture” were produced during the last tour of Pluto through Aquarius. The whole idea of a theoretical architecture is of course deeply Aquarian and Boullée himself is a card-holding Aquarius.
Anthony Vidler, writing for the Architectural Review, reminds us that many architects and artists had their lives cut short during the French Revolution. Boullée was one of the few to survive, however, leaving behind almost no built works though he did produce a trove of architectural drawings. They feel strikingly modern. Boullée was interested in genres of architecture that didn’t yet exist: the ludicrously monumental but also modest “private” works, as well as “buried architecture” — and even an “architecture of shadows”. Here’s more from Vidler on Boullée, capturing the Aquarian urge to create hypothetical cities in the sky:
“Spanning the years 1784 to 1799, that is, through the last years of the Ancien Régime, the Revolution, the Terror, the Convention, to the rise of Napoleon and his expedition to Egypt, Boullée’s drawn projects display no direct political affiliations with any of the reigning doctrines or parties; rather they espoused a belief in scientific progress symbolised in monumental forms, a generalised Rousseauism derived from the Social Contract, a dedication to celebrate the grandeur of a ‘nation’, and, more often than not, a meditation on the sublime sobriety of death. Yet taken as a collection, as an almost encyclopaedic representation of the necessary institutions for an ideal state, and joined to the preface he wrote at the end of his life, Boullée’s late works may be interpreted as contributing to his underlying vision of an ‘ideal city’.”
In a recent post I connected Pluto in Aquarius to the recent flurry of headlines around balloon espionage, as these anachronistic crafts have captured the collective imagination once more. In fact, the first ever hot air balloon was launched from Versailles in September of 1783, falling within the last Pluto in Aquarius transit. Boullee actually witnessed this first “aerostatic flight”, which further shaped his architectonic imagination. His design for a theoretical cenotaph of Issac Newton definitely has balloon energy.
Saudi Arabia’s construction of futuristic “giga-city”, “The Line”, is perhaps the closest equivalent to Boullée’s “ideal cities” — though lacking the elegance and romance of the French architect’s visions. The 170 km long linear city, plonked in the middle of a desert and clad in mirrors, is set to be finished in 2045 — just two years after Pluto finally leaves Aquarius. Construction began in 2022, during Saturn in Aquarius, the future city announcing itself as a revolution in urban architecture, with no cars, streets, or carbon emissions.
However, concerns have already been raised about the vast carbon footprint of “The Line’s” construction rendering any future environmental benefits negligible — not to mention the mirrored surface’s danger for bird life. The construction is also taking place on the historic homeland of the Huwaitat tribe, with 20,000 tribes people already relocated. Three of the people forcibly evicted have also been sentenced to death. So yeah, just a hint at the hubris that can grip Aquarius and the potential human cost in the drafting of its rarified utopias.
I’m sure I’ll be writing more about Pluto in Aquarius in the coming weeks. For now, be gentle with yourself tonight on this super Chirony Full Moon, lodged in the decan ruled by the Three of Swords. Extend yourself, and others, ample grace as we’re all likely feeling extra tender. I’ll be hiding in the ridiculously deep Japanese soaking tub myself, as all of this cardinal sword play squares my Cancer Moon.
I’ll let Bjork’s oracular channeling have the last word.
Will you be posting again soon?
poignant as ever thank u!!!