Bleeding Edge: "The Trade Center towers were religious too" (p. 338)

[malignd at aol.com]

I did not know that Yamasaki designed Pruitt-Igoe,  I guess everybody deserves a second chance, but gees ...



-----Original Message-----
From: kelber <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wed, Nov 20, 2013 10:38 am
Subject: Re: Bleeding Edge: "The Trade Center towers were religious too" (p. 338)


It was the head architect, Minoru Yamasaki, who decided to make it two buildings, though there doesn't seem to be any record of why (not that I've dug that deep. Anyone?). He was afraid of heights (thus, the narrow windows), and liked gothic embellishments. He'd presided over an architectural disaster in the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects, which were so poorly conceived that they were razed after only 20 years. His projects certainly have a whiff of bad karma, don't they?


http://nymag.com/news/9-11/10th-anniversary/minoru-yamasaki/


http://theboweryboys.blogspot.com/2008/09/minoru-yamasaki-man-who-made-twin.html


Laura





-----Original Message-----
From: David Morris 
Sent: Nov 19, 2013 11:10 PM
To: "kelber at mindspring.com" 
Cc: "pynchon-l at waste.org" 
Subject: Re: Bleeding Edge: "The Trade Center towers were religious too" (p. 338)

Human twins are a bit scary.  Magic incarnate.  Duality or polarity? Or both?  But that is about living twins.


Twin columns are female because of the space between them.  The Greeks knew this in making their temples: odd or even number of front columns. Male or female.


A duality is unstable.  It is spinning about itself. It seeks a third for stability.  A third part resembles unity, a stable oneness. A kind of center is achieved.


Twins are evil and good.  Unstable.  They are images that are unreliable, flip-able as coins. Which one is true, trustworthy, good?


The power of paired columns is the void they define.  A very female and dark power.


David Morris

On Tuesday, November 19, 2013,   wrote:

Homoerotic phalli, I still maintain. Replaced with a good ol' hetero one now.

Laura


-----Original Message-----
>From: Heikki Raudaskoski <hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi>
>Sent: Nov 19, 2013 3:33 PM
>To: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
>Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: Bleeding Edge: "The Trade Center towers were religious too"       (p. 338)
>
>
>Thanks for the well-deserved lesson David.
>
>Still, regardless of how they stood in relation to each other and
>their surroundings, I'm inclined to think that the twinness of the WTC
>buildings had something to do with their symbolic power. But I clearly
>will have to come up with something better.
>
>
>Heikki
>
>David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>:
>
>> So many things in this brief analysis of WTC towers is incorrect and
>> exposing his ignorance of architecture:
>>
>> 1.  The towers didn't turn their backs on anything.  They had no backs. All
>> their faces were identical.  And they were no more faceless than any other
>> of their contemporaries.  Most modernist towers of that era and before were
>> grids, by nature uniform and and faceless.
>>
>> 2. Neither did they face each other.  They were offset from each other on a
>> diagonal.  Thus they maximized the number of faces sent outward, not at
>> each other.  In other words they didn't block each other's views.
>>
>> 3.  He is correct to point out that they did all they could to stand out
>> and dominate.  That is one of the central features of early and later
>> (pre-Pomo) modernist architecture, which was notoriously anti-urban and
>> ant-street.  Modernism hated facades lining streets or plazas or squares,
>> all the devices of pre-modern architecture to define urban SPACE.  Pre
>> modern urban architecture worked in a collective manner to define public
>> spaces.  Modern architecture hated urbanism, seeking to demolish vast areas
>> of urban fabric in order to provide an open limitless field in which to
>> display mega objects.  The WTC did its best to do just that in lower
>> Manhattan.  This is just plain vanilla modern architecture at a scale that
>> allowed it to achieve standard modernist goals.
>>
>> BTW, most architects thought they were crappy architecture.
>>
>> David Morris
>>
>> On Monday, November 18, 2013, Heikki Raudaskoski wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I never appreciated Baudrillard much to begin with, and his writings on
>>> 9/11 made me appreciate him less, but some parts of his analysis may hold
>>> true, like the following points paraphrased by Margaret McNally:
>>>
>>> "The aesthetic twinness and symmetry of the Twin Towers, and their
>>> dominant height above other skyscrapers in the New York City skyline,
>>> signified that the WTC no longer represented competition of corporate
>>> capital among these modern symbols of capitalism in New York City or,
>>> indeed, the world. Rather, it represented western global capital
>>> dominance (Baudrillard, Spirit 38-39). The Towers' faceless facades stood
>>> isolated, turning their back on other skyscrapers, and facing one another
>>> in a playful, yet somewhat arrogant gesture that both defied modernism,
>>> and signified their self-contained supremacy of global power (40)."
>>>
>>>
>>> http://tinyurl.com/p9hghuz (Please note that clicking this link will
>>> prompt a download of a Word document to your computer.)
>>>
>>>
>>> Heikki
>>>
>>> On Mon, 18 Nov 2013, Paul Mackin wrote:
>>>
>>> > Also, it's the media--TV, radio, and print--that creates that "instant
>>> > history," telling us what we now think even before we think it, or
>>> > might never have thought it. It sells newspapers, as the saying goes.
>>> >
>>> > In a similar case, there's a story-he-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l



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