GRGR: Pynchon's urban architecture

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy

--- Doug Millison <millison at online-journalist.com> wrote:

> I know we have some architects in our midst, and I'd like to say up 
> front I know very little about that discipline.

OK, I'll bite.

> Salingaros:
> "Cities -- at least the most pleasant ones -- are fractal. 
> Everything, from the paths and  streets, to the shape of facades and 
> the placing of trees, is fractal in the great cities such as Paris, 
> Venice, and London. This has been   measured mathematically by people
> like Michael Batty and Pierre Frankhauser. [....]  Colonnades, 
> arcades, rows of narrow buildings with cross-paths all correspond to 
> a permeable membrane with holes to allow interchange -- this is one 
> type of  fractal. When an urban interface is not permeable, it is 
> convoluted,  like a crinkly meandering river or folded curtain. A 
> building edge  couples by interweaving with its adjoining space, 
> creating another type  of fractal. This folding arises spontaneously 
> as a natural consequence  of urban forces; for example, portions of 
> buildings that grow outwards  onto the pavement."

This is perhaps true but certainly trivial.  It is just the sort of
reductionist model of architecture and urbanism that originally led to
the corporate "Modernist" nightmare that Salingaros bemoans. Due to
architects' envy of the sciences since the enlightenment (see
Perez-Gomez "Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science"), every
generation a new reductionist metaphor of the city arises. Salingaros'
hero Chris Alexander is a good example of this tendency.  Fear of the
"softness" of his chosen art (architecture) drove him to concoct a
dissertation published in the mid 60's in book form as "Notes on the
Synthesis of Form", in which he made a case for a sofisticated
procedure which would, through the application of a series of rules,
allow an organic generation of architectural form in an imitation of
the un-selfconcious vernacular activity of primitive building and town
planning.  I think it may be this early work that Salingaros believes
supports his position.  But Chris Alexander, within a very few years,
repudiated the brave thesis of his own dissertation as "a
misunderstanding".  He has since embarked on a series of theoretical
projects and buildings based on a different procedure that he calls
"pattern language", by which aid architect can free himself from the
burden of making value judgements (beyond, of course, the value
judgement implicit in the conversion to "Pattern Language" method). 
Even in his very beautiful Pattern Language work of the 1980's (a
school in Japan, the Mary Rose museum in England) Alexander seeks
shelter within a pseudo-scientific design methodology, dressed up in a
reassuring populist rhetoric.  Note that I called his work beautiful. 
I do admire his results. He is a true humanist and an architect with a
good eye, who works his will through or inspite of his methodolgies.

Architects who envy the sciences have labored mightily to invent
methodologies to give their work the apparent sanction of mathematics. 
In the 60's and 70's the hope was that architects could free themselves
from responsibility for their choices by feeding "problem statements"
into a computer, which would be programmed somehow to return an
"optimal solution" to a "design problem".  One corporate firm (Caudill
Rowlet & Scott of Houston) went so far as to have a room full of fancy
mainframes with whirring discs and attendants in white labcoats
separated from their reception lobby by a glass wall.  Nothing of value
was ever produced by these machines, and their work was
indistinguishable, in its essentials, from the general run of corporate
modernist product of the time.  As a marketing strategy it helped them
deal with the business community, for awhile at least.


> "No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive _knotting 
> into_ -- they go in under archways, secret entrances of rotted 
> concrete that only looked like loops of an underpass [...] The road, 
> which ought to be opening out into a broader highway instead has been
> getting narrower, more broken, cornering tighter and tighter [...]"

In this passage, as I read it, P is describing a system reordered by
the violence of the war much as, later in GR, the refinery near Hamburg
is reordered by violent disruption.  I also hear in this a dream of the
labyrinth of the Minotaur, with sacrificial death at its center.

> Salingaros:
> "One of the stated aims of modernism was to eliminate any 
> architectural interface with fractal dimension. These were replaced 
> by long, straight roads, and reinforced with the strict alignment of 
> buildings. The  reason given was to clean up the perceived messiness 
> of older cities; yet that messiness was really the organized 
> complexity that made them  alive. "

This passage may indicate a misunderstanding on Salingaros' part of
what a fractal is.  The classic fractals we've all seen illustrated
since the 70's, such as the Mandelbrot Set, are smooth and bumpy except
at cusp points.  Someone (a mathematician, please) correct me if I'm
wrong, but other fractal patterns can be built exclusively from
straight lines.  Further, a fractal pattern is not disorder at all, it
is a complex order as rigid and unbending as any ever conceived by the
mind of man.  Any order that can be expressed as an equation of a few
terms is mighty rigid indeed.
 
> Salingaros:
> "Modernism teaches us to eliminate fractal structures and to replace 
> them with non-fractal built structures. This philosophy does not 
> respect a tree or an older building. As soon as we realize that we 
> connect only to fractal structures, we will reverse our priorities, 
> and appreciate a tree more than a modernist glass cube. [....]

Surely we can all recognize that this is enthusiastic bullshit at the
undergraduate level.  Need I go into it?

 There 
> exist regions of the world today, which have older, coherent 
> buildings and spaces. These include buildings as well as pieces of 
> walls and architectural ornament that we connect to. They are in 
> danger of becoming lost, because people don't realize their value to 
> our civilization. People with newly-found wealth want to replace 
> their heritage, and anything that looks old, because it reminds them 
> of the past. The situation is entirely analogous to animal species 
> becoming extinct because the last representatives are killed off. We 
> cannot reconstruct a Dodo from a photograph; neither can we build 
> living cities from photographs."

And the cultural heritage of humanity is somehow valuable because it is
 FRACTAL? This man is a savage.

> There's danger in taking fractal structures and blowing them out of 
> human scale in architecture, however, according to Salingaros and 
> Padron.  This might help to illuminate in some way Pynchon's 
> depictions of and allusions to Nazi architecture in GR.
> 
> Salingaros:
> "Another point is the scale on which the fractal dimension is 
> measured: great urban environments use fractals on the human scale, 
> whereas dead environments deliberately remove them. For example, a 
> colonnade is useful when the intercolumn spaces are roughly between 
> 1m and 3m, i.e., comparable to the human scale of movement. Monstrous
> spaces of more than 5m between columns alienate the user. For this 
> reason, flat, smooth buildings that are aligned and spaced 20m apart 
> may resemble a fractal line on paper, but they so far exceed the 
> human scale as to be totally alienating. They are not fractal on the 
> human scale, which is what is important."

I think that the speciousness of Salingaros' argument can be
demonstrated by the following operation: replace the word FRACTAL with
the word BUMPY throughout his article, and it nothing essential to his
argument is lost.
 
> In past posts, I've wondered what Pynchon's specific beef with real 
> estate developers might be -- he or his narrators dis them in 
> Vineland and in Mason & Dixon if I recall correctly. And isn't it in 
> COL49 where he or his narrators compare a city to an integrated 
> circuit design?
> 
> Salingaros:
> " The simplistic modernist ideology has destroyed our cities, by 
> removing urban complexity. That is analogous to trying to simplify an
> organism by removing pieces of its body that you don't understand -- 
> you will be left only with its skeleton. 

This is true, but hardly an original observation, nor one that is
illuminated in any way by all Salingaros' empty gassing about fractals.

Mark

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