Douglas Adams
An architecture of pure fiction

A long time fan of the Author’s “Hitch-Hiker Series” (I still have a set of extremely battered first editions-except volume two, a commemorative issue), my particular interest lies in his brilliantly composed descriptions of buildings, spaceships, & their interrelationships with the inhabitants of a thoroughly weird Universe. Scattered throughout his “trilogy of five”, the novels supply a rich source of material ripe for architectural misuse. As a vehicle for discourse, the following passages have been selected for their follie potential. Entitled “Vogon Constructor Fleet, Magrathea, Milliways, Starship Bistromath, & Outside the Asylum”, they are intended to become backbone or “why” of form generation when applied to my pre & major project research to be undertaken later this year.

Andrew Papson 27.01.04


Vogon Constructor Fleet
DOUGLAS ADAMS, The Restaurant at the end of the Universe, p. 3, & The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy p. 23-61

Like all Vogon ships it looked as if it had been not so much designed as congealed. The unpleasant yellow lumps and edifices which protruded from it at unsightly angles would have disfigured the looks of most ships, but in this case that was sadly impossible. Uglier things have been spotted in the skies, but not by reliable witnesses.
On this particular Thursday something was moving quietly through the ionosphere many miles above the surface of the planet; several somethings in fact, several dozen huge yellow chunky slablike somethings, huge as office blocks, silent as birds. They soared with ease, basking in electromagnetic rays from the star Sol, biding their time, grouping, preparing.
The huge yellow machines began to sink downwards and move faster…
Arthur tripped, and fell headlong, rolled and landed flat on his back. At last he noticed that something was going on. His finger shot upwards. “What the hell is that?” he shrieked. Whatever it was raced across the sky in its monstrous yellowness, tore the sky apart with mind buggering noise and leapt off into the distance leaving the gaping air to shut behind it with a bang that drove your ears six feet into your skull. Another one followed and did exactly the same thing only louder.
The great ships hung motionless in the sky, over every nation on earth. Motionless they hung, huge heavy, steady in the sky, a blasphemy against nature. Many people went straight into shock as their minds tried to encompass what they were looking at. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.
“People of Earth, your attention please…This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council…As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for the development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system, and regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.”
The huge ships turned slowly in the sky with easy power. On the underside of each a hatchway opened, an empty black square… There was a terrible ghastly silence. There was a terrible ghastly noise. There was a terrible ghastly silence. The Vogon Constructor Fleet coasted away into the inky starry void.
Somewhere in a small dark cabin buried deep in the intestines of Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz’s flagship, a small match flared nervously…strange monstrous shadows loomed and leaped with the tiny flickering flame, but all was quiet.
Suddenly a violent noise leapt at them from no source that he could identify. He gasped in terror at what sounded like a man trying to gargle whilst fighting off a pack of wolves. This is what he heard…
“Howl howl gargle howl gargle howl howl howl gargle howl gargle howl howl gargle gargle howl gargle gargle gargle howl slurrp uuuurgh should have a good time. Message repeats. This is your captain speaking, so stop whatever you are doing and pay attention. First of all I see from our instruments that we have a couple of hitch hikers aboard. Hello wherever you are. I just want to make it totally clear that you are not at all welcome. I worked hard to get where I am today, and I didn’t become captain of a Vogon constructor ship simply so I could turn it into a taxi service for a load of degenerate freeloaders. I have sent out a search party, and as soon as they find you I will put you off the ship. If you’re very lucky I might read you some poetry first. Secondly…I repeat, all planet leave is cancelled. I’ve just had an unhappy love affair, so I don’t see why anybody else should have a good time. Message ends.”
The prisoners sat in poetry appreciation chairs-strapped in. Vogons suffered no illusions as to the regard their works were generally held in… “Now Earthlings…I present you with a simple choice! Either die in the vacuum of space, or …" he paused for melodramatic effect, “tell me how good you thought my poem was!” He threw himself backwards into a huge leathery bat-shaped seat and watched them.
The long steel lined corridor echoed to the feeble struggle of the two humanoids clamped firmly under rubbery Vogon armpits…. They had now reached the airlock-a large circular steel hatchway of massive strength and weight let into the inner skin of the craft. The guard operated a control and the hatchway swung smoothly open…He flung Ford and Arthur through the hatchway into the small chamber within…They were in a brightly polished cylindrical chamber about six feet in diameter and ten feet long… “You know its times like this when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young” “Why, what did she tell you?” “I don’t know, I didn’t listen.”… A motor whirred. A slight hiss built into a deafening roar of rushing air as the outer hatchway opened on to an empty blackness studded with tiny impossibly bright points of light. Ford and Arthur popped into outer space like corks from a toy gun.


Magrathea
DOUGLAS ADAMS, The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, p121-3

When they finally stopped it was in a small chamber of curved steel. Several tunnels also had their terminus here, and at the farther end of the chamber Arthur could see a large circle of dim irritating light. It was irritating because it played tricks with the eyes, it was impossible to focus on it properly or tell how near or far it was. Arthur guessed (quite wrongly) that it might be ultra violet. Slartibartfast turned and regarded Arthur with his solemn old eyes. ‘Earthman’, he said, ‘we are now deep in the heart of Magrathea…I should warn you that the chamber we are about to into does not literally exist within our planet. It is a little too…large. We are about to pass through a gateway into a vast tract of hyperspace. It may disturb you’… Arthur made nervous noises. Slartibartfast touched a button and added, not entirely reassuringly. ‘It scares the willies out of me. Hold tight.’ The car shot forward straight into the circle of light, and suddenly Arthur had a fairly clear idea of what infinity looked like.
It wasn’t infinity in fact. Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity – distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The chamber into which the aircar emerged was anything but infinite, it was just very very very big, so big that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself. Arthur’s senses bobbed and span as, travelling at the immense speed he knew the aircar attained, they climbed slowly through the open air leaving the gateway through witch they had passed an invisible pinprick in the shimmering wall behind them. The wall. The wall defied the imagination – seduced it and defeated it. The wall was so paralysingly vast and sheer that its top, bottom and sides passed away beyond the reach of sight. The mere shock of vertigo could kill a man. The wall appeared perfectly flat. It would take the finest laser measuring equipment to detect that as it climbed, apparently to infinity, as it dropped dizzily away, as it planed out to either side, it also curved. It met itself thirteen light seconds away. In other words the wall formed the inside of a hollow sphere, a sphere over three million miles across and flooded with unimaginable light. ‘Welcome,’ said Slartibartfast as the tiny speck that was the aircar, travelling now at three times the speed of sound crept imperceptibly forward into the mindboggling space, ‘welcome,’ he said, ‘to our factory floor.’ Arthur stared about him in a kind of wonderful horror. Ranged away before them, at distances he neither judge nor even guess at, were a series of curious suspensions, delicate traceries of metal and light hung about shadowy spherical shapes that hung in the space. ‘This,’ said Slartibartfast, ‘is where we make most of our planets you see.’ ‘You mean,’ said Arthur, trying to form the words, ‘you mean you’re starting it all up again now?’ ‘No no, good heavens no,’ exclaimed the old man, ‘no the Galaxy isn’t rich enough to support us yet. No, we’ve been awakened to perform just one extraordinary commission for very … special clients from another dimension. It may interest you … there in the distance in front of us.’ Arthur followed the old man’s finger, till he was able to pick out the floating structure he was pointing out. It was indeed the only one of the many structures that betrayed any sign of activity about it, though this was more a subliminal impression than anything one could put one’s finger on. At that moment however a flash of light arced through the structure and revealed in stark relief the patterns that were formed on the dark sphere within. Patterns that Arthur knew, rough blobby shapes that were as familiar to him as the shapes of words, part of the furniture of his mind. For a few seconds he sat in stunned silence as the images rushed around his mind and tried to find somewhere to settle down and make sense. The flash came again, and this time there could be no doubt. “The Earth…” whispered Arthur. “Well the Earth Mark Two in fact,” said Slartibartfast cheerfully. “We’re making a copy from the original blueprints.” There was a pause. ‘Are you trying to tell me,’ said Arthur, slowly and with control, ‘that you made the Earth?’ ‘Oh yes,’ said Slartibartfast. Did you ever go to a place…I think it was called Norway?’ ‘No,” said Arthur, ‘no, I didn’t.’ ‘Pity,’ said Slartibartfast, ‘that was one of mine. Won an award you know. Lovely crinkly edges. I was most upset to hear of its destruction.’


Milliways
DOUGLAS ADAMS, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, p. 76-84

‘Here we are’, continued Zaphod doggedly, ‘standing dead in this desolate…’ ‘Five star,” said Trillian. “Restaurant,” concluded Zaphod. ‘Odd, isn’t it?’ said Ford. ‘Er, yeah.’ ‘Nice chandeliers though,’ said Trillian. The chandeliers were in fact a little on the flashy side and the low vaulted ceiling from which they hung would not, in an ideal universe, have been painted that particular shade of deep turquoise, and even if it had been it wouldn’t have been highlighted by concealed moodlighting. This is not, however, an ideal universe, as was further evidenced by the eye crossing patterns of the inlaid marble floor, and the way in which the fronting for the eighty-yard long marble-topped bar had been made. The fronting for the eighty-yard long marble-topped bar had been made by stitching together nearly twenty thousand Antarean Mosaic Lizard skins, despite the fact that the twenty thousand lizards concerned had needed them to keep their insides in. A few smartly dressed creatures were lounging casually at the bar or relaxing in the richly coloured body-hugging seats that were deployed here and there about the bar area. A young VI’Hurg officer and his green steaming young lady passed through the large smoked glass doors at the far end of the bar into the dazzling light of the main body of the restaurant beyond. Behind Arthur was a large curtained bay window. He pulled aside a corner of the curtain and looked out at a bleak and drear landscape, grey, pockmarked and dismal, a landscape which under normal circumstances would have given Arthur the creeping horrors. These were not, however, normal circumstances, for the thing that froze his blood and made his skin try to crawl up his back and off the top of his head was the sky. The sky was…
In an extraordinary gesture which is pointless attempting to describe, Zaphod Beeblebrox slapped both his foreheads with two of his arms and one of his thighs with the other. ‘Hey guys,’ he said, ‘this is crazy. We did it. We finally got to where we were going. This is Milliways!’ ‘Milliways!’ said Ford. ‘Yes, sir,’ said the waiter, laying on the patience with a trowel, ‘this is Milliways – the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.’ … ‘Now if you care to order your drinks at last’, he said, ‘I will then show you to your table.’ Zaphod grinned two maniac grins, sauntered over to the bar and bought most of it.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is one of the most extraordinary ventures in the entire history of catering… It is built on the fragmented remains of an eventually ruined planet which is…enclosed in a vast time bubble and projected forward in time to the precise moment of the End of the Universe… In it, guests take…their places at table and eat sumptuous meals whilst watching…the whole of creation explode around them… You can arrive…for any sitting you like without prior…reservation because you can book retrospectively, as it were, when you return to your own time… All you have to do is deposit one penny in a savings account in your own era, and when you arrive at the End of Time the operation of compound interest means that the fabulous cost of your meal has been paid for.
Seen from the outside, which it never is, the Restaurant resembles a giant starfish beached on a forgotten rock. Each of its arms house the bars, the kitchens, the force-field generators which protect the entire structure and the decayed hunk of planet on which it sits, and the time turbines which slowly rock the whole affair backwards and forwards across the crucial moment. In the centre sits the gigantic golden dome, almost a complete globe, and it was into this area that Zaphod, Ford, Arthur and Trillian now passed. At least five tons of glitter alone had gone into it before them, and covered every available surface. The other surfaces were not available because they were already encrusted with jewels, precious sea shells from Santraginus, gold leaf, mosaic tiles, lizard skins and a million unidentifiable embellishments and decorations. Glass glittered, silver shone, gold gleamed, Arthur Dent goggled. ‘Wowee,’ said Zaphod. ‘Zappo’ ‘Incredible!’ breathed Arthur. ‘The people…! The things…!’ ‘The things,’ said Ford Prefect quietly, ‘are also people.’ ‘The people…’ resumed Arthur, ‘the … other people…’ ‘The lights…!’ said Trillian. ‘The tables…!’ said Arthur. ‘The clothes…!’ said Trillian… ‘The End of the Universe is very popular,’ said Zaphod threading his way unsteadily through the throng of tables, some made of marble, some of rich ultra-mahogany, some even of platinum, and at each a party of exotic creatures chatting amongst themselves and studying menus… The tables were fanned out in a large circle around a central stage area where a small band were playing light music, at least a thousand tables was Arthur’s guess, and interspersed amongst them were swaying palms, hissing fountains, grotesque statuary, in short all the paraphernalia common to the restaurants where little expense has been spared to give the impression that no expense has been spared. Arthur glanced around, half expecting to see someone making an American Express commercial.


Starship Bistromath
DOUGLAS ADAMS, Life, the Universe and Everything, p.32-38

‘Strange thing to want to tell us,’ snapped Ford. ‘Strange thing to take’. ‘Strange ship.’ They had arrived at it… The most extraordinary thing about it was that it looked only partly like a spaceship with guidance fins, rocket engines and escape hatches and so on, and a great deal like a small upended Italian bistro. Ford and Arthur gazed up at with wonderment and deeply offended sensibilities. ‘Yes, I know,’ said Slartibartfast, hurrying up to them at that point, breathless and agitated, ‘but there is a reason. Come we must go. The ancient nightmare is come again. Doom confronts us all. We must leave at once.’ ‘I fancy somewhere sunny,’ said Ford. Ford an Arthur followed Slartibartfast into the ship and were so perplexed by what they saw inside it that they were totally unaware of what happened outside.
It seemed to Arthur that the whole sky suddenly just stood aside and let them through. It seemed to him that the atoms of his brain and the atoms of the cosmos were streaming through each other. It seemed to him that he was blown on the wind of the Universe, and that wind was him. It seemed to him that he was one of the thoughts of the Universe and that the Universe was a thought of his. It seemed to the people at Lord’s Cricket Ground that another North London restaurant had just come and gone as they so often do… ‘What happened?’ whispered Arthur in considerable awe. ‘We took off,’ said Slartibartfast. ‘Nice mover’, said Ford in an unsuccessful attempt to disguise the degree to which he had been impressed by what Slartibartfast’s ship had just done, ‘shame about the decor’… ‘Deep in the fundamental heart of mind and Universe, said Slartibartfast, ‘there is a reason’… The interior of the flight deck was dark green, dark red, dark brown, cramped and moodily lit. Small pools of light picked out pot plants, glazed tiles and all sorts of little unidentifiable things brass things. Rafia-wrapped bottles lurked hideously in the shadows. The instruments which had occupied Slartibartfast’s attention seemed to be mounted in the bottom of bottles which were set in concrete. Ford reached out and touched it. Fake concrete. Plastic. Fake bottles set in fake concrete. The fundamental heart of mind and Universe can take a running jump, he thought to himself, this is rubbish… ‘What’s Slartibartfast looking so anxious about?’ Said Arthur ‘Nothing’, said Ford. ‘Doom’, said Slartibartfast. ‘Come, he added with sudden authority, ‘there is much I must show and tell you.’ He walked towards a green spiral staircase set incomprehensibly in the middle of the flight deck and started to ascend… What they found upstairs was just stupid, or so it seemed, and Ford shook his head, buried his face in his hands and slumped against a pot plant, crushing it against a wall. ‘The central computational area’, said Slartibartfast unperturbed, this is where every calculation affecting the ship in any way is performed. Yes I know what it looks like, but it is in fact a complex four dimensional map topographical map of a series of highly complex mathematical functions’ ‘It looks like a joke’, said Arthur. ‘I know what it looks like’, said Slartibartfast, and went into it… It was a large glass cage, or box-in fact a room. In it was a table, a long one. Around it were gathered about a dozen chairs, of the bentwood style. On it was a tablecloth-a grubby, red and white check tablecloth, scarred with the occasional cigarette burn, each, presumably, at a precisely calculated mathematical position. And on the tablecloth sat some dozen half-eaten Italian meals, hedged about with half-eaten breadsticks and half-drunk glasses of wine, and toyed listlessly by robots. It was all completely artificial. The robot customers were attended by a robot waiter, a robot wine waiter, and a robot maitre d’. The furniture was artificial, the tablecloth artificial, and each particular piece of food was clearly capable of exhibiting all the mechanical characteristics of, say, a pollo sopresso, without actually being one. And all participated in a little dance together – a complex routine involving the manipulation of menus, bill pads, wallets, cheque books, credit cards, watches, pencils and paper napkins, which seemed to be hovering constantly on the edge of violence, but never actually getting anywhere…. ‘Bistromathics,’ he said. ‘The most powerful computational force known to parascience. Come to the room of informal illusions.’ He swept past them and carried them bewildered in his wake.


Outside the Asylum
DOUGLAS ADAMS, So long, and thanks for all the fish, p. 152-5

His house was certainly peculiar, and since this was the first thing that Fenchurch and Arthur had encountered it would help to know what it was like. What it was like was this: It was inside out. Actually inside out, to the extent that they had to park on the carpet. All along what one would normally call the outer wall, which was decorated in a tasteful interior-designed pink, were bookshelves, also a couple of those odd three-legged tables with semi-circular tops which stand in such a way as to suggest that someone just dropped the wall straight through them, and pictures which were clearly designed to soothe. Where it got really odd was the roof. It folded back on itself like something that Maurits C.Escher, had he been given to hard nights on the town, which it is no part of this narrative’s purpose to suggest was the case, though it is sometimes hard, looking at his pictures, particularly the one with all the awkward steps, not to wonder, might have dreamed up after having been on one, for the little chandeliers which should have been hanging inside were on the outside pointing up. Confusing. The sign above the front door said, ‘Come Outside’, and so, nervously, they had. Inside, of course, was where the Outside was. Rough brickwork, nicely done pointing, guttering in good repair, a garden path, a couple of small trees, some rooms leading off. And the inner walls stretched down, folded curiously, and opened at the end as if, by an optical illusion which would have had Maurits C. Escher frowning and wondering how it was done, to enclose the Pacific Ocean itself. ‘Hello,’ said John Watson, Wonko the sane. Good, they thought to themselves, ‘Hello’ is something we can cope with. ‘Hello,’ they said, and all surprisingly was smiles. For quite a while he seemed curiously reluctant to talk about the dolphins, looking oddly distracted and saying, ‘I forget…’ whenever they were mentioned, and had shown them quite proudly round the eccentricities of his house. ‘It gives me pleasure’, he said, ‘in a curious kind of way, and does nobody any harm’, he continued, ‘that a competent optician couldn’t correct’ They liked him. He had an open, engaging quality and seemed to mock himself before anybody else did. ‘Your wife’, said Arthur, looking around, ‘mentioned some toothpicks’. He said it with a hunted look, as if he was worried that she might suddenly leap out from behind the door and mention them again. Wonko the sane laughed. It was a light easy laugh, and sounded like one he had used a lot before and was happy with. ‘Ah yes’, he said, ‘that’s to do with the day I finally realised that the world had gone totally mad and built the Asylum to put it in, poor thing, and hoped it would get better’. This was the point at which Arthur began to feel a little nervous again. ‘Here,’ said Wonko the Sane, ‘we are outside the asylum’. He pointed again at the rough brickwork and the guttering. “Go through that door”, he pointed at the first door through which they had originally entered, “and you go into the asylum. I’ve tried to decorate it nicely to keep the inmates happy, but there’s very little one can do. I never go in there now myself. If ever I am tempted, which these days I rarely am, I simply look at the sign written over the door and shy away”. ‘That one?’ said Fenchurch, pointing, rather puzzled, at a blue plaque with some instructions written on it. ‘Yes. They are the words that finally turned me into the hermit that I have now become. It was quite sudden. I saw them, and I knew what I had to do.’ The sign said: Hold stick near centre of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion. “It seemed to me”, said Wonko the sane, “that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a packet of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could stay sane”. He gazed out at the Pacific again, as if daring it to rave and gibber at him, but it lay there calmly and played with the sandpipers.


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