GRGR: Pynchon's urban architecture

[Doug Millison]

I had a chance to read that article I mentioned the other day,
"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 know we have some architects in our midst, and I'd like to say up 
front I know very little about that discipline. I also know we have 
at least one Pynchon scholar who has written about Pynchon's cities 
(at least I hope Vaska is still out there). Those caveats aside, 
reading this article (it's in the form of a dialogue between Padron 
and Salingaros) stimulated a few preliminary, tentative, fragmentary 
thoughts (I'm not writing a PhD dissertation, after all) about how 
what they're discussing might relate to some images of urban 
architecture in GR.  Certainly some of you whiz kids out there will 
be able to tie this up in a neater package, or deconstruct what I've 
put together here, or what Salingaros and Padron have said in their 
article.  I'm just putting it out there with the hope that it might 
interest somebody else; your mileage may vary.  Oh, yeah, right, I 
also firmly believe this PAP (Pynchonian Architecture Pony) will lead 
me to fortune, fame, glory.

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."

"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 [...]"

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. "

"[...] a City of the Future [....] Travel here gets complicated -- a 
system of buildings that move, by right angles, along the grooves of 
the Raketen-Stadt's street-grid." (674)

Elsewhere, however, the Raketen-Stadt might _appear_ to resemble the 
fractal structures Padron and Salingaros discuss:

"Strangely, these are not the symmetries were were programmed to 
expect [....] No, this Rocket-City, so whitely lit against the calm 
dimness of space, is set up deliberately To Avoid Symmetry, Allow 
Complexity, Introduce Terror (from the Preamble to the Articles of 
Immachination) -- but tourists have to connect the look of it back to 
things they remember from their times and planet -- back to the wine 
bottle smashed in the basin, the bristlecone pines outracing Death 
for millennia, concrete roads abandoned years ago, hairdos of the 
late 1930s, indole molecules, especially _polymerized_ indoles, as in 
Imipolex G--" (2970

Might Pynchon or his narrator be saying that Their architectures have 
evolved beyond Modernism to manipulate and alienate mere humans with 
the appearance of the fractal structures in which humans have 
evolved?  I don't know, I'm just asking.  That would seem to be a 
paranoid view, fer sure.

Recall Pynchon's discussion of Herero village architecture, the Dodo, 
and trees:

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. [....] 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."

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."

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. [....] After decades of 
education that conditions us to worship 'alien' forms, and destroy 
natural ones, most of us are taught to side with the developers of 
dead suburbs and inhuman downtown megatowers."





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