NP urban architecture

[Doug Millison]

Re our discussion some time back of architecture in GR, I thought 
some of you might be interested in this article, "Ecology and the 
Fractal Mind
in the New Architecture: a Conversation" by Victor Padron and Nikos 
A. Salingaros on the Web at
http://rudi.herts.ac.uk/rudiments/ecology/index.html

I haven't read it yet, so I don't know if it might explain those 
buildings in Pynchon's fiction that are so much bigger on the inside 
than they are on the outside.

excerpt:
"For the past few years, I have been applying the analytic thinking 
of a scientist to find basic laws for architecture and urbanism, 
following the lead of my friend, the brilliant architectural theorist 
Christopher Alexander. The results derived so far show that a 
building, or city, is subject to the same organizational laws as a 
biological organism and a complex computer program. The New 
Architecture depends upon scientific rules rather than stylistic 
dictates. Using these rules, we can create new buildings that 
duplicate the intensely positive, nourishing feelings of the greatest 
historical buildings, without copying neither their form nor their 
style. Great buildings of the past, and the vernacular (folk) 
architectures from all around the world, have essential mathematical 
similarities. One of them is a fractal structure: there is some 
observable structure at every level of magnification, and the 
different levels of scale are very tightly linked by the design. In 
contradistinction, modernist buildings have no fractal qualities; 
i.e., not only are there very few scales, but different scales are 
not linked in any  way. Indeed, one can see an unwritten design rule 
in the avoidance of organized fractal scales. "
-- 

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