I believe Christopher Alexander's architectural approach could also be considered a failure in terms of mainstream adoption and impact on urban architecture. T

I believe Christopher Alexander's architectural approach could also be considered a failure in terms of mainstream adoption and impact on urban architecture. The vision of a "timeless way of building" based on participatory design and traditional yet evolving harmonious patterns at every level of scale is beautiful but kind of steamrolled by technical capitalism, division of labor, economies of scale, CAD, etc. It's still something to admire and advocate, I think. I feel the same way about computers. In fact computers could be considered an aspect of the general Alexandrian project of harmonious life. They exist in our pockets and homes just like wallets and kitchen sinks. And computing environments are themselves architectural. Patterns of user interfaces, of social network design, of data representation, generally patterns of how the digital world is constructed—this seems like a more authentically Alexandrian field than patterns of low-level software engineering. Alexander writes about lived environments, worlds for humans to inhabit, social processes of inhabitation, and how to make sure our worlds are humane, human-scaled, and beautiful. He's not a theorist of technical construction. That's why he asks, in the foreword he was asked to write for Richard P. Gabriel's Patterns of Software, about programs written using "design patterns": > Do people actually feel more alive when using them? Is what is accomplished by these programs, and by the people who run these programs and by the people who are affected by them, better, more elevated, more insightful, better by ordinary spiritual standards? Describing the change of perspective that comes from his way of thinking: > Two things emanate from this changed standard. First, the work becomes more fun. It is deeper, it never gets tiresome or boring, because one can never really attain this standard. One’s work becomes a lifelong work, and one keeps trying and trying. So it becomes very fulfilling, to live in the light of a goal like this. > But secondly, it does change what people are trying to do. It takes away from them the everyday, lower-level aspiration that is purely technical in nature, (and which we have come to accept) and replaces it with something deep, which will make a real difference to all of us that inhabit the earth. Yet: > But at once I run into a problem. For a programmer, what is a comparable goal? What is the Chartres of programming? What task is at a high enough level to inspire people writing programs, to reach for the stars? Can you write a computer program on the same level as Fermat's last theorem? Can you write a program which has the enabling power of Dr. Johnson’s dictionary? Can you write a program which has the productive power of Watt’s steam engine? Can you write a program which overcomes the gulf between the technical culture of our civilization, and which inserts itself into our human life as deeply as Eliot’s poems of the wasteland or Virginia Woolf’s The Waves? Just contrast this with the movement that thinks abstract factory is an example of a design pattern. I believe you could summarize Christopher Alexander's philosophy as opposition to abstract factories.