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This is an aside, but it's significant that Alexander's own architecture is fairly unsuccessful. His emphasis on loose formal structure and codification of prac

by theoh 10y ago

This is an aside, but it's significant that Alexander's own architecture is fairly unsuccessful. His emphasis on loose formal structure and codification of practices (e.g. built-in window seats, vestibules of whatever it is) is prescriptive and doesn't help with the real problems of architectural design, which is something profoundly intuitive, circumstantial and very subtle. Architectural education is a fascination of mine, partly because it seems to succeed so rarely. On a tangent, anyone in London is recommended to visit the end of year shows of student work at the architecture schools, coming up at the end of June. A lot of very intriguing and complex activity. (UCL Bartlett, Architectural Association, London Metropolitan (CASS) etc.) I can't speak for other cities.

1123581321 10y ago
This seems opposite to me. Most architecture is prescriptive and there is little tolerance for Alexander's circumstantial and use-based design. If the story he recounts in The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth is true, his preference to use simple materials and let the budget constrain the design makes him an enemy of building firms which use standards to justify cost overruns. What did you think about that book?
- theoh 10y ago
  I agree that much building is standardized and conventional. Architecture, for me, connotes a more ambitious attempt to build creatively and appropriately. When I say "prescriptive" I suppose I'm referring to the propositional nature of patterns, like an engineer's rules of thumb. The contrast is not so much with individual genius and variation as with the maintenance and passing on of tacit knowledge, which is a mysterious process involving multiple senses and observational learning. http://www.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/Research/facts/tacit.pdf http://www.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/Research/facts/tacit.pd... That attitude might sound very conservative, but it's based on my own experience and not any preference for a particular technology or style. Alexander is too reductive and abstract; he's not properly in touch with actual sensory knowledge or craft skills. Or with economical industrial tech, e.g. the work of Lacaton & Vassal which uses cheap industrial building systems to create generous spaces. I haven't read the book you mention. Informing myself about it now.
  - 1123581321 10y ago
    Let me know how you like it! (I get emailed when someone replies to an HN comment of mine.) I think Alexander's patterns rely on tacit knowledge. Many of them involve designing in a way that real usage can shape the building or land. For example, the way many colleges will not pave paths until they see the tracks real students leave between buildings is the sort of thing Alexander has written about. Thank you for the paper; looking forward to reading it.
    - theoh 10y ago
      I've read a brief summary of the World System A and B concept. It seems like what I have come to expect from Alexander: some reductive rhetoric and claims that he has rediscovered a true, virtuous way of being. I'm not keen on encouraging "them and us" thinking, or cultivating the idea of life as a state of war (the battle for x). I agree in principle that architecture usually gets imposed on users, when it should be made in a participatory way. Building "according to the dictates of the human heart" is all very well in theory, in practice it sounds like it would translate to an ideal of each family building their own home on a small lot. So where are we in relation to e.g. the left-right political axis? (It seems like Alexander is proposing a bottom-up approach to building and planning, in contrast to something imposed by the state or by corporations.) If there's one major point I'd make in response to his dualistic picture of the world, it's that there are potentially varying degrees of citizen participation in the design process. A pragmatic approach would be to work on improving participation where possible rather than demonizing the supposedly pure form of "World System B" in categorical terms. Here's a theoretical tool which presents a spectrum of participation: http://lithgow-schmidt.dk/sherry-arnstein/ladder-of-citizen-participation.html http://lithgow-schmidt.dk/sherry-arnstein/ladder-of-citizen-... If there's more, architecturally speaking, to what Alexander is proposing than just a theoretical opposition between "how things are", and a utopian and backward-looking idea of "how things should be", I think it's probably a potential revalorization of the art-historical categories of "linear" and "painterly". (For details of "linear" and "painterly" see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_W%C3%B6lfflin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_W%C3%B6lfflin ) In architecture these really correspond to a "structuralist" emphasis on modularity and interchangeable components on the "linear" side, and an expressive emphasis on overall form and image-making on the "painterly" side. To give an example of each in its pure form, Hermann Hertzberger is a linear, modular, structuralist guy, while Zaha Hadid would be on the painterly end of things. Alexander is not proposing Hertzberger-style buildings -- he wants to bring back traditional architecture -- but essentially I think his background is structuralist, emerging as he did from mathematics in the 60s. It's this flavour to his work that makes me feel strongly that he doesn't really care about tacit knowledge and the intangible, non-propositional aspects of architecture, the aspects that just cannot be put into words. Oppositions are hard to avoid in thinking about this kind of thing, but of course they need to be treated with care to avoid falling into simplistic thinking. Approaches to architecture are awash with irrational aesthetic decisions, even when they claim to be fully rational. There's a famous book from the 60s called "Architecture without Architects" by Bernard Rudofsky that might be of interest, as it documents the kind of qualities of traditional anonymous architecture (not the elaborate, royal or religious kind). A final thing that comes to mind is the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. They are French post-structuralists. Although, coming from that theoretical milieu, they come out against the binary "arborescent" nature of simplistic thinking based on oppositions, they do allow themselves to introduce a significant contrast: they compare the mode of existence of nomads with that of the state. They talk about the smooth space of nomads as the origin of the (improvised) war machine (essentially, of science), while the striated space of the state is the space of complex social structures and institutions (the university, for example). Their ideas are very rich and thought provoking, popular with architects but potentially still strange and radical at the same time. Their work is evidently a distillation of a huge amount of reading and contemplation. In my opinion Christopher Alexander's ideas look very tame and unimaginative in comparison, and the scope of his thinking appears just disappointingly limited. Here's a link to a summary which might whet your appetite for Deleuze and Guattari (their writing is also interesting and compelling, but this PDF document just gives the bones of one of their main ideas): http://www.protevi.com/john/DG/PDF/ATP14.pdf http://www.protevi.com/john/DG/PDF/ATP14.pdf
mbrock 10y ago
I'm currently stuck in Riga's airport, and from this perspective, the definition of success in architecture is an interesting question. There is a clear political vision in Alexander's work, one whose basis is participation and non-alienation. This is at odds with modern capitalism, which prevents its success. The free software movement, too, is in a sense unsuccessful, despite a loyal and tenacious following. Still, it's worth fighting for and preserving. Software has been in an acknowledged crisis for decades. Ordinary folks I know aren't thrilled about contemporary architecture. Also, Alexander emphasizes that his "prescriptive" works, such as A Pattern Language, are made as examples of how grassroots human knowledge can be conceptualized and presented in a certain composable form.
- icebraining 10y ago
  There is a clear political vision in Alexander's work, one whose basis is participation and non-alienation. This is at odds with modern capitalism, which prevents its success. In what way? I mean, in practice?
  - mbrock 10y ago
    For just a very basic example, you would never see an Alexandrian pattern language that recommends the horrendous environmental practices of modern capitalism, which are literally destroying the world.

by theoh 10y ago

1123581321 10y ago

This seems opposite to me. Most architecture is prescriptive and there is little tolerance for Alexander's circumstantial and use-based design. If the story he recounts in The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth is true, his preference to use simple materials and let the budget constrain the design makes him an enemy of building firms which use standards to justify cost overruns. What did you think about that book?

theoh 10y ago
I agree that much building is standardized and conventional. Architecture, for me, connotes a more ambitious attempt to build creatively and appropriately. When I say "prescriptive" I suppose I'm referring to the propositional nature of patterns, like an engineer's rules of thumb. The contrast is not so much with individual genius and variation as with the maintenance and passing on of tacit knowledge, which is a mysterious process involving multiple senses and observational learning. http://www.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/Research/facts/tacit.pdf http://www.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/Research/facts/tacit.pd... That attitude might sound very conservative, but it's based on my own experience and not any preference for a particular technology or style. Alexander is too reductive and abstract; he's not properly in touch with actual sensory knowledge or craft skills. Or with economical industrial tech, e.g. the work of Lacaton & Vassal which uses cheap industrial building systems to create generous spaces. I haven't read the book you mention. Informing myself about it now.
- 1123581321 10y ago
  Let me know how you like it! (I get emailed when someone replies to an HN comment of mine.) I think Alexander's patterns rely on tacit knowledge. Many of them involve designing in a way that real usage can shape the building or land. For example, the way many colleges will not pave paths until they see the tracks real students leave between buildings is the sort of thing Alexander has written about. Thank you for the paper; looking forward to reading it.
  - theoh 10y ago
    I've read a brief summary of the World System A and B concept. It seems like what I have come to expect from Alexander: some reductive rhetoric and claims that he has rediscovered a true, virtuous way of being. I'm not keen on encouraging "them and us" thinking, or cultivating the idea of life as a state of war (the battle for x). I agree in principle that architecture usually gets imposed on users, when it should be made in a participatory way. Building "according to the dictates of the human heart" is all very well in theory, in practice it sounds like it would translate to an ideal of each family building their own home on a small lot. So where are we in relation to e.g. the left-right political axis? (It seems like Alexander is proposing a bottom-up approach to building and planning, in contrast to something imposed by the state or by corporations.) If there's one major point I'd make in response to his dualistic picture of the world, it's that there are potentially varying degrees of citizen participation in the design process. A pragmatic approach would be to work on improving participation where possible rather than demonizing the supposedly pure form of "World System B" in categorical terms. Here's a theoretical tool which presents a spectrum of participation: http://lithgow-schmidt.dk/sherry-arnstein/ladder-of-citizen-participation.html http://lithgow-schmidt.dk/sherry-arnstein/ladder-of-citizen-... If there's more, architecturally speaking, to what Alexander is proposing than just a theoretical opposition between "how things are", and a utopian and backward-looking idea of "how things should be", I think it's probably a potential revalorization of the art-historical categories of "linear" and "painterly". (For details of "linear" and "painterly" see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_W%C3%B6lfflin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_W%C3%B6lfflin ) In architecture these really correspond to a "structuralist" emphasis on modularity and interchangeable components on the "linear" side, and an expressive emphasis on overall form and image-making on the "painterly" side. To give an example of each in its pure form, Hermann Hertzberger is a linear, modular, structuralist guy, while Zaha Hadid would be on the painterly end of things. Alexander is not proposing Hertzberger-style buildings -- he wants to bring back traditional architecture -- but essentially I think his background is structuralist, emerging as he did from mathematics in the 60s. It's this flavour to his work that makes me feel strongly that he doesn't really care about tacit knowledge and the intangible, non-propositional aspects of architecture, the aspects that just cannot be put into words. Oppositions are hard to avoid in thinking about this kind of thing, but of course they need to be treated with care to avoid falling into simplistic thinking. Approaches to architecture are awash with irrational aesthetic decisions, even when they claim to be fully rational. There's a famous book from the 60s called "Architecture without Architects" by Bernard Rudofsky that might be of interest, as it documents the kind of qualities of traditional anonymous architecture (not the elaborate, royal or religious kind). A final thing that comes to mind is the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. They are French post-structuralists. Although, coming from that theoretical milieu, they come out against the binary "arborescent" nature of simplistic thinking based on oppositions, they do allow themselves to introduce a significant contrast: they compare the mode of existence of nomads with that of the state. They talk about the smooth space of nomads as the origin of the (improvised) war machine (essentially, of science), while the striated space of the state is the space of complex social structures and institutions (the university, for example). Their ideas are very rich and thought provoking, popular with architects but potentially still strange and radical at the same time. Their work is evidently a distillation of a huge amount of reading and contemplation. In my opinion Christopher Alexander's ideas look very tame and unimaginative in comparison, and the scope of his thinking appears just disappointingly limited. Here's a link to a summary which might whet your appetite for Deleuze and Guattari (their writing is also interesting and compelling, but this PDF document just gives the bones of one of their main ideas): http://www.protevi.com/john/DG/PDF/ATP14.pdf http://www.protevi.com/john/DG/PDF/ATP14.pdf

mbrock 10y ago

I'm currently stuck in Riga's airport, and from this perspective, the definition of success in architecture is an interesting question. There is a clear political vision in Alexander's work, one whose basis is participation and non-alienation. This is at odds with modern capitalism, which prevents its success. The free software movement, too, is in a sense unsuccessful, despite a loyal and tenacious following. Still, it's worth fighting for and preserving. Software has been in an acknowledged crisis for decades. Ordinary folks I know aren't thrilled about contemporary architecture. Also, Alexander emphasizes that his "prescriptive" works, such as A Pattern Language, are made as examples of how grassroots human knowledge can be conceptualized and presented in a certain composable form.

icebraining 10y ago
There is a clear political vision in Alexander's work, one whose basis is participation and non-alienation. This is at odds with modern capitalism, which prevents its success. In what way? I mean, in practice?
- mbrock 10y ago
  For just a very basic example, you would never see an Alexandrian pattern language that recommends the horrendous environmental practices of modern capitalism, which are literally destroying the world.