I first stumbled on A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, and Construction when visiting a friend. I was dealing with some creative roadblocks and the book stirred in me a new passion. It contains 253 “patterns,” design solutions that work together to help people create homes and neighborhoods that feel good and function well.
While I’m not a builder or a designer I found the book enormously helpful when my wife and I were shopping for a condo. We found a place with LIGHT ON TWO SIDES OF EVERY ROOM, ALCOVES, ACCESSIBLE GREENS and so forth. While it’s not the big, stand-alone dream house that we always thought we’d “step up” to, it has a good feel, and remains a comfortable place to live some 30 years later.
I read that Christopher Alexander passed away this week, on March 17, 2022 after a long period of illness. His ideas, I hope, will continue to inspire others.
Alexander’s idea about a Process for Creating Life are, I believe, only going to become more important, and essential for any prospect of a living world, as our society spins headlong toward a future shaped by artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
His work has had an influence outside the field of architecture, notably in the world of software design in the form of software pattern languages and object oriented programming.
I recently finished reading Robert Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, in which Pirsig asserts that Quality is the prime mover behind what we experience. This strikes me as so similar to Alexander’s “Quality without a Name” that it makes me wonder if Alexander could have been influenced by Pirsig. But Zen was published in 1974 and Alexander’s The Oregon Experiment in 1975 so it is unlikely.
However, Alexander does acknowledge the similarity to Pirsig’s thinking in a footnote to his massive essay The Nature of Order:
The idea that every center has its life make the ‘life’ of the centers the ultimate primitive of this theory. This is perhaps comparable to Robert Pirsig’s idea that Quality, not Substance, is the ultimate primitive. As Pirsig puts it, ‘Quality is supposed to be just a vague fringe word that tells what we think about objects … The idea that quality can create objects seems very wrong … but the idea that values create objects gets less and less weird as you get used to it.’ … I am saying something similar about that which animates the living centers.
I hope there are others who pick up Alexander’s banner of creating a world that has life and a presence of Spirit. The alternative is to face a future of ever increasing “structure destroying transformations” that extinguish the feeling of life.
