A Primer on Christopher Alexander

Author of The Timeless Way of Building and A Pattern Language

Since I began reading The Timeless Way of Building last year, I've found myself continually returning to a rabbit hole of the author, Christopher Alexander's ideas.

On January 1, I began diving into his opus, A Pattern Language. It was intimidating to read the whole book (1,100+ pages) while learning and remembering the 253 patterns he describes. To help me dig in piece by piece, I started a new project via Twitter where I post one pattern each day at 11:11 am CT.

Each section is short and by holding myself to posting just one Pattern each day (in public) I've created a realistic constraint (summarizing each pattern in 280 characters or less) that builds a process of learning them one by one. Turns out there are more fans of Alexander's patterns out there, as the account has gained 200+ followers already.

If you are intrigued by building design, architecture, urban design, or planning in general you can learn alongside me at @apatterntolearn.

I've started collecting thoughts from both these books along with two of his essays, Making the Garden and A City is Not a Tree. This primer will be ongoing for a few weeks as I continue to learn and think about these ideas. For now, here's my beginning...

*This will be updated on an ongoing basis this year.

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Christopher Alexander is an architecture professor and philosopher who writes about a specific Quality. By Quality he is referring to a feeling of warmth and aliveness versus cold and staleness. This feeling can be felt all around us from within our home and yard to observing a piece of art. It applies to most people, places, and things.

Alexander mainly speaks about this feeling in regards to architecture and urban design. However, because it can be applied so broadly his writing is helpful to readers in any industry. He has already found a cult-like following from software developers.

This Quality feeling cannot be described fully. It's something that is real, objective, and felt but ultimately you can't explain why it exists in a moment or item if it does. Go ahead and try to explain the feeling you have while sitting near a crackling fireplace with a warm drink in hand and accompanied by your favorite people in life. We are aware that it feels amazing, but beyond that it's impossible to define.

"It is impossible to name because it is unerringly precise"

To get this feeling right, Alexander explains, is to be free from contradictions internally or externally. This freedom that we seek is complex yet subtle. We have to work through tensions in every situation that are mainly felt unconsciously.

An example of these tensions is when we find ourselves in a living room with great windows letting in natural light. We are drawn to the specific spot in that room to simultaneously enjoy the light, the view outside the window, while feeling comfortable enough to relax. Now, if the cozy chair in this room is placed too far away from this window to enjoy the light and the view all at once, an internal tension arises as you are unable to serve each of these 3 instincts. You'll have a slight "off" feeling in that room until the structure changes.

Beyond buildings and towns, the Quality applies to people, art, and experiences.

"for many people, the effort to become true to themselves is the central problem of life. When you meet a person who is true to himself, you feel at once that he is "more real" than other people are."

I have been reading Alexander's ideas from both the lens of an event director by trade and a closet student of architectural drawings. Originally, I found his ideas while exploring how to create gatherings and structuring event spaces that have this feeling of aliveness.

I'm sure most of us have been to events or retreats that fall flat. They drain energy instead of filling you up. The planned are expected which makes them unmemorable.

On the flip side, these shared experiences can be incredibly impactful and energizing. If you gather with good people, interact slightly outside of your comfort zone, feel comfortable in the space and witness something unexpected you are left with a very memorable experience. These memories ripen over time and leave you feeling further connected to the people and brands that were a part of it.

I want to understand why this is and know if there's a way to recreate it on demand. I'm interested in finding and applying the principles behind Alexander's design philosophy. I see a lot of overlap between Alexander’s vision for design betters spaces that feel alive and planning events and memorable experiences.

Define what a Pattern is.

"Those of us who are concerned with buildings tend to forget too easily that all the life and soul of a place, all of our experiences there, depend not simply on the physical environment, but on the patterns of events which we experience there."

How do we recognize Patterns around us?

Why are these Patterns likely NOT to be found in towns and buildings today?

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Resources I’m using:

Books:

  • The Timeless Way of Building

  • A Pattern Language ( ongoing)

  • Notes on the Synthesis of Form

  • Nature of Order series

Essays:

UC-Berkeley - https://ced.berkeley.edu/ced/faculty-staff/christopher-alexander

patternlanguage. com - http://www.patternlanguage.com/

wiki page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander

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Notes to explore in public.

Notes from Making the Garden: [essay]

I have come to the view that the sacredness of the physical world—and the potential of the physical world for sacredness—provides a powerful and surprising path towards understanding the existence of God, whatever God may be, as a necessary part of the reality of the universe. If we approach certain empirical questions about architecture in a proper manner, we will come to see God.

trying to define the nature of architecture from first principles.

my studies were based on the most ordinary, miniscule observations about usefulness and the effect of buildings on the people who lived in them, always keeping the observations modest, ­reliable, and detailed—small enough and solid enough that I could be sure that they were true.

At first I included very small particulars of functional effect of any kind that made a practical difference to daily life . . . a shelf beside the door where one could put a packet down while searching for one’s keys, for instance, or the possibility of a sunbeam coming into a room and falling on the floor.

I soon realized that some of these details were very much more significant than others. Those like the first (the shelf) tended to be pedestrian, even though useful; while those like the second (the sunbeam) were more uplifting, and clearly mattered more in some obvious but profound sense.

Gradually, then, I was able to see how buildings support human ­well-being—not so much mechanical or material well-­being, but rather the emotional well-being that makes a person feel comfortable in himself. And as I studied these small effects carefully, gradually I was led to a conception of the wholeness and wellness that might, under ideal circumstances, arise between buildings and human beings.

I hoped to replace this faceless thing [modern architecture] with an idea and practice of architecture that would help us sustain the sanctity of life, both in our hearts and in society.

I found it more and more difficult to fit together a well-defined scientific or intellectual model of what was going on in a way that could encompass these simple matters. And yet it was also clear to me that the empirical reality of these simple matters could not be denied, and certainly could not be abandoned. [ sounds like Phadeus in Zen...]

This was the beginning of a very new way of thinking about architecture, which viewed the environment and its structure as an instrument interacting with human beings in such a way that people could heal themselves. In short, it was the beginning of a practical theory of healing environments—still far from the subject of God—but now perhaps beginning, subtly, to point in that direction.

life appears, twinkling, in each entity, and the cooperation of these twinkling entities creates further life. You may view this phenomenon as ordinary. Or you may think of it as the Buddhists of the Hua-Yen canon did, when they viewed it as the constantly changing God-like tapestry that is God, and from which life comes.

there are two approaches to the reality of God. One is faith; the other is reason. Faith works easily when it is present, but it is luck, or one’s early history in family life, or a blinding insight of some kind, that determines whether one has faith. Reason is much harder. One cannot easily approach the reality of God by means of reason. Yet in twentieth- and twenty-first-century discourse, reason is almost the only way we have of explaining a difficult thing so that another can participate.

It is reason—the language of science, and its appeal to shareable, empirical observation and reasoning—that has given our modern era its strength. Yet one is unlikely to encounter God on the basis of reason. There can, however, be a persuasive logic that deals with the whole, and with the deeply enigmatic problems that the concept of the whole opens.

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.

I was always dimly aware that I did maintain an inner knowing that the best way to produce good architecture must somehow be linked to God—indeed, that valuable architecture was always about God, and that this was the source of any strength I had in being able to identify the real thing. But in the early days these stirrings were very much private, interior to me, and subdued.

Earth—our physical Earth and its inhabitants—sand, water, rocks, birds, animals, and trees—this is the garden in which we live. We must choose to be gardeners. We must choose to make the garden beautiful. Understanding this will give us intellectual insight into the nature of God, and also give us faith in God as something immense yet also as something modest, something which lies under the surface of all matter, and which comes to life and shines forth when we treat the garden properly.

The most urgent, and I think the most inspiring, way we can think about our buildings is to recognize that each small action we take in placing a step, or planting a flower, or shaping a front door of a building is a form of worship—an action in which we give ourselves up, and lay what we have in our hearts at the door of that fiery furnace within all things, which we may call God.

There is available to us a form of transformation that, each time it is applied, extends and enhances the wholeness of the land, whether rural or urban. The act of transformation also puts us in touch with ourselves by making the land of the Earth become more and more deeply connected to our selves. An environment, when made in this way, may even be regarded as a vision of our inner selves.

That new vision can become a new source of inspiration and motivation. I call it new not because it is at root genuinely new. Of course it is not—it is ancient. But it is entirely new in our era to take such a thing with full seriousness, and to be able to derive from it well-fashioned, scientifically endowed conceptions of what is needed to heal a given place. It will not be governed by money or profit; it will not be governed by social politics; it will be governed simply by the desire and firm intention to make beauty (which is to say, true life) around us.

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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Clayton DorgeComment