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I think that Christopher Alexander (the architect that coined the term 'Design Patterns' which the software industry adopted) solved this issue half a century a
by javier123454321 3y ago
I think that Christopher Alexander (the architect that coined the term 'Design Patterns' which the software industry adopted) solved this issue half a century ago. Buildings used to have a 'pattern language' that made sense in the cultural context and with the technology available of the place where it was built. But in modernism, we developed a machine like approach to building and there was a battle to strip buildings of ALL tradition in order to make way for efficiency, mostly in construction costs. However, many of these inefficiencies in what Christopher Alexander calls 'living' architecture, had developed through generations of knowledge passed down from skilled laborers, and we severed that tie in the last century. To fix this, we have to reignite the focus on craft by the people designing and building, and to adopt the learnings of traditions, which Alexander spent a lifetime documenting. We already have the answers, and while not perfect, it certainly is at least a much better starting point than every building being a complete blank canvas for an artist to paint based solely on their imagination, and judged on how new it is.
Design school claims to have moved past the 1930s mentality, but in my experience, it was mostly about proving to each other who is the smartest person in the room rather than how the architecture produced encourages life.
- itigtohft 3y agoChristopher Alexander thinks he is the messiah of building. The buildings he has built are not good, though, and not all of the other architects in the world are as stupid as you might want to believe. "A Pattern Language" just isn't the great gift to humanity that some people, eager for prescriptions, want it to be.
- keiferski 3y agoWell, he died last year, so presumably he isn’t thinking any more. But if you’re going to criticize his work (or anyone’s work, for that matter) you’ll need to put in a little more effort. Why are his buildings not good?
- itigtohft 3y agoI trained as an architectural historian, and let me tell you, architectural quality can't be put into words. Architects and arch. historians have intuitive opinions. There is no science of architectural criticism. Alexander was the kind of person who thought such a science was possible. The most important clues to the mediocrity of his buildings are the facts that a) they aren't widely imitated and b) they don't usually appear in fine books about architecture, trad or otherwise. Alexander was more of a mathematician than an architect. It's a long time since any one person did both of those things well.
- keiferski 3y agoIf it can’t be put into words, how can you call it not good? The fact that something isn’t imitated or featured in books has almost nothing to do with whether it is “good” or not, merely that it’s not in line with the wants and needs of builders and publishers. I’m not a huge fan of Alexander and in fact I don’t actually know much of his work, but these aren’t very good criticisms.
- itigtohft 3y agoWell, tough. This is how art works: a consensus emerges among practitioners that some things are better than other things, even though nobody can articulate in words just what makes the good things so good, or the bad things bad. The discipline of aesthetics is kind of irrelevant to art and architecture: it doesn't have much useful content, and it's not helpful in judging work. Most artists/architects don't use it in any way. It's just windy philosophizing. The taste of food is similar. If I'm a restaurant critic and I tell you that a certain restaurant is good, you need to have a way of assessing that opinion which doesn't involve requiring it to be written in some kind of positivistic, quantified, apodictic form.
- keiferski 3y agoNo, that isn’t how art works at all. The actual practitioners often have very little influence on art criticism. This clearly isn’t a serious discussion and you don’t seem interested in (or capable of) justifying any opinions you have, so I think I’ll end it here.