Christopher Alexander: Finding patterns, and God, in urban design
From the BatesLine Bookshelf, a very occasional feature on authors and books that have influenced me:
Christopher Alexander was an architect, but he might more appropriately have been called a philosopher of the built environment. He spent his career trying to describe and name the qualities that make a place -- a city, a neighborhood, a public square, a home, a room -- feel alive or dead.
Alexander influenced urban planning, but he thought central planning was useless, counterproductive. He believed in generative patterns that, if followed by individuals at a small scale, will produce living places at a large scale. He believed that these patterns flow out of the nature of order. Ultimately, that nature of order flows from God.
Beginning in the 1970s, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues the Center for Environmental Structure at the University of California at Berkeley identified patterns of design at every scale from regions to cities to neighborhoods to homes that they believed to be universal in generating lively places.
Eight books were published by the Center for Environmental Structure over a 20 year period from 1975 to 1995. Book 1, The Timeless Way of Building, explains the theory and application of patterns and how it relates to human nature. Book 2, A Pattern Language, identifies 253 specific patterns -- e.g., Promenade, Arcade, Small Public Square, Four-Story Limit, City-Country Fingers, 9% Parking -- shows examples, and discusses their interrelationships. The book was converted to hypertext, allowing easy navigation from one pattern to related patterns, and is available in that form to members of the PatternLanguage.com website. The website has a great deal of free content discussing Christopher Alexander's work, including a list and summary of the 253 patterns.
I wrote about Alexander's pattern language and the timeless way of design in a 2008 Urban Tulsa Weekly column:
Every building, neighborhood, town, and city is constructed from a collection of patterns. Alexander observed that some patterns are living and some are dead. The ones that are living are those that connect in some way with human nature--they attract people, making them feel at home and alive.Dead patterns repel people, making them feel ill at ease and restless. A place shaped by dead patterns becomes neglected and uncared for and attracts trash, decay, and crime.
Most of the remaining books in that CES series get into specific examples of the application of this approach. I have not yet read A New Theory of Urban Design, but it looks interesting. All of these volumes are available for free hourly checkout on the Internet Archive, by following the link on each title.
- The Timeless Way of Building
- A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction
- The Oregon Experiment: Applying a new planning paradigm for the University of Oregon campus.
- The Linz Cafe: The design of a single building in Linz, Austria.
- The Production of Houses: Building of a group of houses built in northern Mexico, seven principles which apply to any system of production.
- A New Theory of Urban Design
- A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Colour and Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets
- The Mary Rose Museum: A museum in Portsmouth, England, devoted to Henry VIII's ship
From the publisher's blurb for A Pattern Language:
At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people.At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a formal system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment.
"Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.
In The Timeless Way of Building, in chapter 2, "The Quality without a Name", Alexander describes the challenges of making a place come alive. It applies to people as well as blackbirds. It makes me think of the plazas that urban planners designed in the 1960s and 1970s, with artist's renderings that showed the plazas thronged with people; the reality is that the plazas were unpleasant and uncomfortable and became hangouts only for those who had nowhere else to be.
Suppose that I am trying to make a table for the blackbirds in my garden. In winter, when the snow is on the ground, and the blackbirds are short of food, I will put food out for them on the table. So I build the table; and dream about the clusters of blackbirds which will come flocking to the table in the snow.But it is not so easy to build a table that will really work. The birds follow their own laws; and if I don't understand them, they just won't come. If I put the table too low, the birds won't fly down to it, because they don't like to swoop too close to the ground. If it is too high in the air, or too exposed, the wind won't let them settle on it. If it is near a laundry line, blowing in the wind, they will be frightened by the moving line. Most of the places where I put the table actually don't work.
I slowly learn that blackbirds have a million subtle forces guiding them in their behavior. If I don't understand these forces, there is simply nothing I can do to make the table come to life. So long as the placing of the table is inexact, my image of the blackbirds flocked around the table eating, is just wishful thinking. To make the table live, I must take these forces seriously, and place the table in a position which is perfectly exact.
In the 1990s, his ideas about patterns captured the imagination of computer scientists. I first saw his books for sale (to my surprise) at the 1996 OOPSLA (Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications) conference in San Jose, where he was the keynote speaker. You can watch his talk here and read it here. His work inspired popular software engineering textbooks like Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software and AntiPatterns: Refactoring Software, Architectures, and Projects in Crisis.
In later life, with the benefit of experience, Alexander wrote a four-book series called The Nature of Order.
- The Phenomenon of Life
- The Process of Creating Life
- A Vision of a Living World
- The Luminous Ground
From A New Theory of Urban Design:
The venerable cities of the past, such as Venice or Amsterdam, convey feeling of wholeness, an organic unity that surfaces in every detail, large and small, in restaurants, shops, public gardens, even in balconies and ornaments. But this sense of wholeness is lacking in modern urban design, indeed, with architects absorbed in problems of individual structures, and city planners preoccupied with local ordinances, it is almost impossible to achieve....When we look at the most beautiful towns and cities of the past, we are always impressed by a feeling that they are somehow organic. This feeling of "organicness," is not a vague feeling of relationship with biological forms. It is not an analogy. It is instead, an accurate vision of a specific structural quality which these old towns had . . . and have. Namely: Each of these towns grew as a whole, under its own laws of wholeness . . . and we can feel this wholeness, not only at the largest scale, but in every detail: in the restaurants, in the sidewalks, in the houses, shops, markets, roads, parks, gardens and walls. Even in the balconies and ornaments.
This quality does not exist in towns being built today. And indeed, this quality could not exist, at present, because there isn't any discipline which actively sets out to create it. Neither architecture, nor urban design, nor city planning take the creation of this kind of wholeness as their task. So of course it doesn't exist. It does not exist, because it is not being attempted.
Alexander's final published work is The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World-Systems. This conflict is described in the context of his work designing a campus for Eishin School in Japan in the 1980s. He calls the two conflicting systems A and B:
These two kinds of places, then, A and B, are typically generated in two different ways. We may therefore call these two different generating systems A and B. 'The first system, A, whether large or small, is fresh in imagination, generated by an infinite horn of plenty. It leaves you fresh; you have the feeling that it can go on forever, without running out of ideas. That is what we call system-A. 'The second system, B, is oppressive. It does not go on forever -- on the contrary, it seems closed in thought and scope. It leaves you tired. The light is flat. You need to sit down, because it exhausts you just to be there. The system that generates this tiredness-inducing structure, we call system-B.To find a way of implementing the production system that we call system-A, is a subtle task. But perhaps more startling, is the fact that to implement system-A in the world, it will also be necessary to reduce the influence of system-B, since system-B at present, actively prevents system-A from bearing fruit....
System-A is concerned with the well-being of the land, its integrity, the well-being of the people and plants and animals who inhabit the land. As we shall see throughout this book, this has very much to do with the integral nature of plants, animals, water resources, and with the tailoring of each part of every part to its immediate context, with the result that the larger wholes, also, become harmonious and integral in their nature.
System-B is concerned with efficiency, with money, with power and control. Although these qualities are less attractive, and less noble than the concerns of system-A, they are nevertheless important. They cannot be ignored. If we are travelling in an airplane, or a high-speed train, we shall often be very glad that this system is constructed under the guidance of some version of system-B.
System-A places emphasis on subtleties, finesse, on the structure of adaptation that makes each tiny part fit into the larger context. System-B places emphasis on more gross aspects of size, speed, profit, efficiency, and numerical productivity.
However, during the last hundred and fifty years, because of choices that nations and states have made in modern times, system-B has become the dominant production system for the environment (for land and towns and regions), largely to the exclusion of system-A. This has harmed modern society greatly....
System-A is a system of production in which local adaptation is primary. Its processes are governed by methods that make each building, and each part of each building, unique and uniquely crafted to its context.
System-B is, on the contrary, dedicated to an overwhelmingly machinelike philosophy. The components and products are without individual identity and most often alienating in their psychological effect.
The pressure to use such a system of production comes mainly from the desire to make profit, and from the desire to do it at the highest possible speed.
The term "battle" is not used in a merely metaphorical way. There is a chapter in the book in which the Big Five construction companies in Japan attempt to bribe the headmaster of the school to end Alexander's involvement and the System-A approach to building, and when that doesn't work, they reveal that they have been tracking the whereabouts of his wife and two daughters for several weeks. Then they have thugs beat up the headmaster. Ultimately, one of the Big Five companies is paid what looks like protection money and the work was able to continue.
LivingNeighborhoods.org has a page about the Eishin College project and about other projects undertaken under Alexander's leadership.
Christopher Alexander died in 2022 at the age of 85. You can read his obituary here.
MORE: In the blog entry linking to my 2008 column linking Thomas Kinkade and Christopher Alexander, I have several more links relating to A Pattern Language
In 2016, Alexander, a Catholic Christian, wrote in First Things of his spiritual and philosophical journey, and how architecture ultimately led him and can lead others back to God.
Up until that time, I had accepted the academic, positivistic, scientific philosophy and practice of my youth. I had been trained in physics and mathematics, and assumed, virtually as part of my educational birthright, that these scientific disciplines could be relied on, and that I should not step outside the intellectual framework that they provided. But to solve the practical and conceptual problems in architecture, I now embarked on a study of a series of concepts that, though formulated more or less within scientific norms, nevertheless opened ways of thinking that were highly challenging to the academic establishment:
- Wholeness
- Value, as an objective concept
- Unfolding wholeness
- Connection with the inner self
- Centers
- Structure-preserving transformations
- Degrees of life
I introduced these concepts and a few others only because I found them essential to the task of thinking clearly about the life of buildings. Yet they were almost undefinable within the terms of contemporary scientific thinking. This was true to such a degree that even raising these topics as matters for discussion in professional architectural circles caused raised eyebrows, obstructive reactions, and little sincere effort to get to the bottom of the issues....
My life began with childlike faith. After then going through the dark forests of positivistic science, to which I gladly gave myself for so many years, I was finally able, through contemplation of the whole, to emerge into the light of day with a view of things that is both visionary and empirical.
It is a view that has roots in faith, and from it builds bridges of scientific coherence towards a new kind of visionary faith rooted in scientific understanding. This new kind of faith and understanding is based on a new form of observation. It depends for its success on our belief (as human beings) that our feelings are legitimate. Indeed, my experiments have shown that in the form I have cast them, feelings are more legitimate and reliable, perhaps, than many kinds of experimental procedure.
It is in this way that I was led from architecture to the intellectual knowledge of God. It was my love of architecture and building from which I slowly formed an edifice of thought that shows us the existence of God as a necessary, real phenomenon as surely as we have previously known the world as made of space and matter....
The capacity to make each brick, each path, each baluster, each windowsill a reflection of God lies in the heart of every man and every woman. It is stark in its simplicity. A world so shaped will lead us back to a sense of right and wrong and a feeling of well-being. This vision of the world--a real, solid physical world--will restore a vision of God. Future generations will be grateful to us if we do this work properly.
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