Wonderful essay on Takimag today praising, from a traditionalist conservative point of view, the writer Christopher Alexander, whose "A Pattern Language" explained why certain architecture "works," and other architecture -- especially modern and postmodern buildings -- does not. Excerpt:
Alexander therefore bases his analysis of architecture on his analysis of life. He presents life as a matter of wholeness made up of "centers" that contribute to each other as part of an interlocking hierarchy. A tree, for example, is a whole made up of roots, trunk, branches, leaves and so on, each made in turn of smaller components. All the components contribute to each other, and while they're separately identifiable, it can be a bit artificial to say exactly where one ends and the next begins. Further, a tree is itself a center within larger wholes such as a forest.More particularly, he identifies 15 features that make the various centers what they are and enable them to work as part of a living whole. The first three are:
• Levels of scale. A building looks better if it includes smaller structures a third or quarter its size, which in turn include structures that are similarly scaled-down, and so on.
• Strong centers. An object is more compelling if its components point toward some central region or structure that integrates it as a whole.
• Boundaries. Something is more noticeable if it's framed, and the whole of which it's part is more integrated if something connects one component to another. Well-articulated boundary regions serve both purposes.
And so on. The importance of his analysis of living form is that it connects the aesthetically valuable to the natural, functional and demonstrable, and so makes it harder to shrug it off as a matter of personal preference, social convention, or ideology. It also aligns traditional design with the results of immediate aesthetic perception and the modern and mathematical idea of recursion. Good design is attained, he believes, by noticing what looks good, and by imaginative trial and error to find how what's valuable can be secured and extended.
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Thanks for posting this, Rod, but Patterns for Living sounds like the title of a Chuck Swindoll book. Alexander wrote A Pattern Language.
I first came across Alexander's work 12 years ago at an object-oriented programming conference. OO software designers had adapted his idea of a pattern language to their work, and they invited him to be the keynote speaker.
Many great writers about cities and urban design have begun as careful observers of what is there and how it works, then finding patterns in those observations, rather than trying to fit everything into a tidy, all-encompassing system.
Alexander's is a conservative way of understanding the world. He doesn't discard a traditional way of building homes or cities because it doesn't "make sense," but he expects to find deep wisdom within that tradition, even if its practitioners can't provide a rationale for the tradition.
Although I love tidy, all-encompassing systems as much as the next engineer, I'm inclined to prefer the leadership of those with strong instinctive roots in the best traditions of Western civilization, even if they can't articulate its value, to the sort of leader who may be able to wow David Brooks by discussing Niebuhr but whose attachments are to those who regard Western civilization as something to be overthrown.
[From Rod: Thanks for the correction, Michael; I've made it now in the original post. What a stupid mistake. I chalk it up to trying to hurry up and get a couple of posts up before leaving the office for the weekend. I'm responding to you here because I see that Bnet has redesigned the site, and my blog is down this morning. I can work it from this end, but can't post (or read) normally. -- RD.]
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