Architecture and the Irreversible Neomania

Architecture and Irreversible Neomania

There is some evolutionary warfare between architects producing a compounded form of neomania. The problem with modernistic—and functional—architecture is that it is not fragile enough to break physically, so these buildings stick out just to torture our consciousness—you cannot exercise your prophetic powers by leaning on their fragility.

Urban planning, incidentally, demonstrates the central property of the so-called top-down effect: top-down is usually irreversible, so mistakes tend to stick, whereas bottom-up is gradual and incremental, with creation and destruction along the way, though presumably with a positive slope.

Further, things that grow in a natural way, whether cities or individual houses, have a fractal quality to them. Organisms and structures such as trees and lungs can develop branching patterns through growth. What is fractal? Recall Mandelbrot’s insight in Chapter 3: “fractal” entails both jaggedness and a form of self-similarity in things (Mandelbrot preferred “self-affinity”), such as trees spreading into branches that look like small trees, and smaller and smaller branches that look like a slightly modified, but recognizable, version of the whole. These fractals induce a certain wealth of detail based on a small number of rules of repetition of nested patterns. The fractal requires some jaggedness, but one that has some method to its madness. Many natural structures have fractal-like detail over a range of scales, though that does not describe everything in nature. The smooth, by comparison, belongs to the class of Euclidian geometry we study in school, simplified shapes that lose this layer of wealth.

Alas, contemporary architecture is smooth, even when it tries to look whimsical. What is top-down is generally unwrinkled (that is, unfractal) and feels dead.

Sometimes modernism can take a naturalistic turn, then stop in its tracks. Gaudi’s buildings in Barcelona, from around the turn of the twentieth century, are inspired by nature and rich architecture (Baroque and Moorish). I managed to visit a rent-controlled apartment there: it felt like an improved cavern with rich, jagged details. I was convinced that I had been there in a previous life. Wealth of details, ironically, leads to inner peace. Yet Gaudi’s idea went nowhere, except in promoting modernism in its unnatural and naive versions: later modernistic structures are smooth and completely stripped of fractal jaggedness.

I also enjoy writing facing trees, and, if possible, wild untamed gardens with ferns. But white walls with sharp corners and Euclidian angles and crisp shapes strain me. And once they are built, there is no way to get rid of them. Almost everything built since World War II has an unnatural smoothness to it.

For some, these buildings cause even more than aesthetic harm—many Romanians are bitter about the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s destruction of traditional villages replaced by modern high-rises. Neomania and dictatorship are an explosive combination. In France, some blame the modernistic architecture of housing projects for the immigrant riots. As the journalist Christopher Caldwell wrote about the unnatural living conditions: “Le Corbusier called houses ‘machines for living.’ France’s housing projects, as we now know, became machines for alienation.”

Jane Jacobs, the New York urban activist, took a heroic stance as a political-style resistant against neomania in architecture and urban planning, as the modernistic dream was carried by Robert Moses, who wanted to improve New York by razing tenements and installing large roads and highways, committing a greater crime against natural order than Haussmann, who, as we saw in Chapter 7, removed during the nineteenth century entire neighborhoods of Paris to make room for the “Grand Boulevards.” Jacobs stood against tall buildings as they deform the experience of urban living, which is conducted at street level. Further, her bone with Robert Moses concerns the highway, as these engines for travel suck life out of the city—to her a city should be devoted to pedestrians. Again, we have the machine-organism dichotomy: to her the city is an organism, for Moses it is a machine to be improved upon. Indeed, Moses had plans to raze the West Village; it is thanks to her petitions and unremitting resistance that the neighborhood—the prettiest in Manhattan—has survived nearly intact. One might want to give Moses some credit, for not all his projects turned out to be nefarious—some might have been beneficial, such as the parks and beaches now accessible to the middle class thanks to the highways.

Recall the discussion of municipal properties—they don’t translate into something larger because problems become more abstract as they scale up, and the abstract is not something human nature can manage properly. The same principle needs to apply to urban life: neighborhoods are villages, and need to remain villages.

I was once stuck in a traffic jam in London where, one hears, the speed of traveling is equal to what it was a century and a half ago, if not slower. It took me almost two hours to cross London from one end to the other. As I was depleting the topics of conversation with the (Polish) driver, I wondered whether Haussmann was not right, and whether London would be better off if it had its Haussmann razing neighborhoods and plowing wide arteries to facilitate circulation. Until it hit me that, in fact, if there was so much traffic in London, as compared to other cities, it was because people wanted to be there, and being there for them exceeded the costs. More than a third of the residents in London are foreign-born, and, in addition to immigrants, most high net worth individuals on the planet get their starter pied-à-terre in Central London. It could be that the absence of these large avenues and absence of a dominating state is part of its appeal. I cannot imagine choosing a pied-à-terre in Brasilia, a city planned from scratch on a map.

I also checked and saw that the most expensive neighborhoods in Paris at the time (such as the Sixth Arrondissement or Île Saint-Louis) were the ones that had been left alone by the nineteenth-century renovators.

Finally, the best argument against teleological design is as follows. Even after they are built, buildings keep incurring mutations as if they needed to slowly evolve and be taken over by the dynamical environment: they change colors, shapes, windows—and character. In his book How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand shows in pictures how buildings change through time, as if they needed to metamorphose into unrecognizable shapes—strangely buildings, when erected, do not account for the optionality of future alterations.