JERUSALEM 2002 (Prophecy of New RHA) and JERUSALEM, THE SUDBUED.

When I build a level I cannot keep my mind too far from a kind of modern way of projecting, the contemporary art of news and wonders by all the genii of architecture who God gave us to our time, likely and luckily.

Who could resist to try in the attempt to imitate or simply to replicate this mood and emotions you have when you look at those buildings? Our time is wonderful: for the first time in the history the tecnology and the use of computer is useful enough to make the MANKIND to be the really most creative it could be, without limitations for our mind. Creativeness is inside the man since we were born, but the "new tools" we have (tools built in ages by the man himself) allow this generation of projectists to be "free" of any kind of limitation, this means not beeing linked to a square, to a line, to the perpendicular of the gravity, to columns one next to another just because "we are able to do completely all what we want, finally, and finally unlinked and free", now. But what is the freedom if not used in samples of pure art, in jumps of divine illuminations?

This is from the Frank Oward Gehry's Guggenheim Museum:

(Gehry's Museum in Bilbao, and a screenshot from "Beehives of the Earth" level)

He is my personal myth :)

And what about this?

(Libeskind's Museum with its vital lacerations)

Libeskind and his "Jewish Museum in Berlin" has convinced all the critics. This enspired me for "Jerusalem, the Subdued".
There are different voices, modern, vital, beautiful, and more various than a classical style which was born and lasted so long just because they could build material which could resist just to compressions (and could build just columns and short traves), they could not use all the modern elastic materials which weren't invented. If they had our technology, you can be sure the "classic" would have been different, for "creativeness" is for always. My opinion here, surely.

Rather than to discuss if the egg came first than the chicken LOL, I will tell why "Jerusalem, the Subdued" level was inspired by the Jewish Museum up above for my TR-A.

I said many times in all the Tomb Raider forums around the Globe, that my TechnoEgyptian "fantasious" Empire comes from the Center of the World and an underground passage below Jerusalem hidden since ages was used during the centuries to comunicate from the "two surfaces" of the planet earth troughtout the "TechnoEgyptians Portal" (another level of TR-A): the external surface (where we Humans live) and the internal one (where the Empire is set). This is inspired by the Divine Commedy by our Italian Dante Alighieri (I hope some of those who are not Italian knows him, he is as much important as Shakespeare for Great Britain, and even if with different intentions they were both poets). He invented that exactly below Jerusalem there was the passage to the "Inferno" (aka the HELL with demons).

So, when in the 2004 the TechnoEgyptians will come out from that passage, according with the prophecy in the level set in Jerusalem 2002, Jerusalem itself will be the first conquered location. "Jerusalem, the Subdued", first real level of TR-A set in the 2004, after the short prologue in 2002, shows an already Surface World conquered by the Empire. But how to create the idea of the being "subdued"?

In many ways and many "realistic ways": for example, building a Prison where to take the rebels. And infact JTS has those prison cells... Then, another way to show a subdued Jerusalem is to show the destruction without respect of the religious temple of the prologue: that was substituted by a huge building to create energy from the four natural elements. Some of the prisoners in the cells wrote "They are stealing our energy". TechnoEgyptians had no respect to Jerusalem, to the identity of its population, of their religion, their feelings.

(Textures of the Sanctuary in Jerusalem were drawed by hands, then retouched with Photoshop)

Then, look at that Jewish Museum in Berlin by Likeskind: you see orrible lacerations, holes in the wall, symbol of a lacerated condition of Jewish people, for sadly well known historical motivations. The museum developes in an intricated line and those holes once you look at them from the inside are seen like irregular lines of blinding lights, like rays of light into a dark condition of solitude for an entire population, showed even by the use of nude armed concrete, rude, nasty to the taste.

Jerusalem, the Subdued, so, is set in an "alternative" futuristic 2004. Every man must face reality. War "is" a reality, sadly. But I am not referring to the kind of wars among humans which is too stupid to stay here on discussing about it. I imagined "mankind" as the symbolic meaning it has the term itself: every man belong to a superior "idealistic" being, exactly the "mankind", and this ideally unified mankind is menaced by an obscure problem on "its innermost part". We could call it "evil" Or simply the "fight against yourself".

(Lara wears the same uniform of her enemies in all TR-A)

(Some of the lacerations in "Jerusalem, the Subdued")

In that level, JTS, so, "mankind" is subdued by the TechnoEgyptians Evil's Empire and.. how to show that, not considering the "story" itself of my TR-A? Exactly with the representation of "lacerations" in constantly textured walls like that Libeskind's museum. But In JTS those lacerations are NEW, are opened, not healed by time. A symbolic meaning taken from a symbolic museum built with a symbolic inspiration, dedicated to (I already know any man is unworthy to a so hard city to represent) Jerusalem. But Jerusalem is not only WAR, you got it? We don't have to think only at a "war" when we think to Jerusalem. It is much more. That must not be remembered only for "war" when we name it.

The level got, I think, near to be one of my "own" masterpiece, most of all because I "felt" the theme, I "felt" the story I was writing. Probably next levels are even better than this. More colorful, more various, funnier to play, more clearly designed. But I feel "my heart" belong to this one (JTS), most of all for the huge message of peace (symbolic) I did put inside of it.