What do fans of atmospheric post-punk music have in common with ancient barbarians?
Not much.
So why are both known as goths?
Is it a weird coincidence or a deeper connection stretching across the centuries?
The story begins in Ancient Rome.
As the Roman Empire expanded, it faced raids and invasions from the semi-nomadic populations along its borders.
Among the most powerful were a Germanic people known as Goths who were composed of two tribal groups, the Visigoths and Ostrogoths.
While some of the Germanic tribes remained Rome's enemies, the Empire incorporated others into the imperial army.
As the Roman Empire split in two, these tribal armies played larger roles in its defense and internal power struggles.
In the 5th century, a mercenary revolt lead by a soldier named Odoacer captured Rome and deposed the Western Emperor.
Odoacer and his Ostrogoth successor Theoderic technically remained under the Eastern Emperor's authority and maintained Roman traditions.
But the Western Empire would never be united again.
Its dominions fragmented into kingdoms ruled by Goths and other Germanic tribes who assimilated into local cultures, though many of their names still mark the map.
This was the end of the Classical Period and the beginning of what many call the Dark Ages.
Although Roman culture was never fully lost, its influence declined and new art styles arose focused on religious symbolism and allegory rather than proportion and realism.
This shift extended to architecture with the construction of the Abbey of Saint Denis in France in 1137.
Pointed arches, flying buttresses, and large windows made the structure more skeletal and ornate.
That emphasized its open, luminous interior rather than the sturdy walls and columns of Classical buildings.
Over the next few centuries, this became a model for Cathedrals throughout Europe.
But fashions change.
With the Italian Renaissance's renewed admiration for Ancient Greece and Rome, the more recent style began to seem crude and inferior in comparison.
Writing in his 1550 book, "Lives of the Artists," Giorgio Vasari was the first to describe it as Gothic, a derogatory reference to the Barbarians thought to have destroyed Classical civilization.
The name stuck, and soon came to describe the Medieval period overall, with its associations of darkness, superstition, and simplicity.
But time marched on, as did what was considered fashionable.
In the 1700s, a period called the Enlightenment came about, which valued scientific reason above all else.
Reacting against that, Romantic authors like Goethe and Byron sought idealized visions of a past of natural landscapes and mysterious spiritual forces.
Here, the word Gothic was repurposed again to describe a literary genre that emerged as a darker strain of Romanticism.
The term was first applied by Horace Walpole to his own 1764 novel, "The Castle of Otranto" as a reference to the plot and general atmosphere.
Many of the novel's elements became genre staples inspiring classics and the countless movies they spawned.
The gothic label belonged to literature and film until the 1970s when a new musical scene emerged.
Taking cues from artists like The Doors and The Velvet Underground, British post-punk groups, like Joy Division, Bauhaus, and The Cure, combined gloomy lyrics and punk dissonance with imagery inspired by the Victorian era, classic horror, and androgynous glam fashion.
By the early 1980s, similar bands were consistently described as Gothic rock by the music press, and the stye's popularity brought it out of dimly lit clubs to major labels and MTV.
And today, despite occasional negative media attention and stereotypes, Gothic music and fashion continue as a strong underground phenomenon.
They've also branched into sub-genres, such as cybergoth, gothabilly, gothic metal, and even steampunk.
The history of the word gothic is embedded in thousands of years worth of countercultural movements, from invading outsiders becoming kings to towering spires replacing solid columns to artists finding beauty in darkness.
Each step has seen a revolution of sorts and a tendency for civilization to reach into its past to reshape its present.
Why grow homes?
Because we can.
Right now, America is in an unremitting state of trauma.
And there's a cause for that, all right.
We've got McPeople, McCars, McHouses.
As an architect, I have to confront something like this.
So what's a technology that will allow us to make ginormous houses?
Well, it's been around for 2,500 years.
It's called pleaching, or grafting trees together, or grafting inosculate matter into one contiguous, vascular system.
And we do something different than what we did in the past; we add kind of a modicum of intelligence to that.
We use CNC to make scaffolding to train semi-epithetic matter, plants, into a specific geometry that makes a home that we call a Fab Tree Hab.
It fits into the environment.
It is the environment.
It is the landscape, right?
And you can have a hundred million of these homes, and it's great because they suck carbon.
They're perfect.
You can have 100 million families, or take things out of the suburbs, because these are homes that are a part of the environment.
Imagine pre-growing a village -- it takes about seven to 10 years -- and everything is green.
So not only do we do the veggie house, we also do the in-vitro meat habitat, or homes that we're doing research on now in Brooklyn, where, as an architecture office, we're for the first of its kind to put in a molecular cell biology lab and start experimenting with regenerative medicine and tissue engineering and start thinking about what the future would be if architecture and biology became one.
So we've been doing this for a couple of years, and that's our lab.
And what we do is we grow extracellular matrix from pigs.
We use a modified inkjet printer, and we print geometry.
We print geometry where we can make industrial design objects like, you know, shoes, leather belts, handbags, etc., where no sentient creature is harmed.
It's victimless.
It's meat from a test tube.
So our theory is that eventually we should be doing this with homes.
So here is a typical stud wall, an architectural construction, and this is a section of our proposal for a meat house, where you can see we use fatty cells as insulation, cilia for dealing with wind loads and sphincter muscles for the doors and windows.
(Laughter) And we know it's incredibly ugly.
It could have been an English Tudor or Spanish Colonial, but we kind of chose this shape.
And there it is kind of grown, at least one particular section of it.
We had a big show in Prague, and we decided to put it in front of the cathedral so religion can confront the house of meat.
That's why we grow homes.
Thanks very much.
(Applause)