Some Notes on Christopher Alexander (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Some Notes on Christopher Alexander (2008)

zeta.math.utsa.edu

49 pointsics18 comments

This page seems to omit it, but there was a third book in the Pattern Language series where he applies the ideas to a small complex in a city in Oregon. Sadly, I read somewhere that this got tangled in local politics and was ultimately crushed.

The ideas of anyone as truly gifted as Alexander are doomed to failure, at least within their lifetimes. One look at our current celebrated architecture fills me with mourning for what could have been.

He also published The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth after this page was made (apologies if I overlooked the reference.) It’s about a more successful project, a Japanese college campus. The difficulties he faced were very interesting, especially from bureaucratic insistence on going over budget (Alexander advocates realistic cost discipline as necessary to humane design.)

Where did you read that? The book you are thinking of is "The Oregon Experiment" [0], the "small complex" is the University of Oregon [1], and the project was broadly successful. To quote WP:

> In the late 1960s and early 1970s, students and faculty at the University of Oregon protested against log trucks driving through campus; against the destruction of a 19th-century cemetery; against the military draft and the invasions and occupations in Southeast Asia; and against the idea that the University was acting in place of students' parents.[4] On top of this, buildings created since the end of World War II included Brutalist architecture, which was aesthetically polarizing.

I grew up in Eugene and can confirm all of this. Following the restructuring of Franklin Boulevard, there are no longer any logging or gravel trucks driving through the Ferry Street, downtown, or university areas. The cemetery grounds across from McArthur Court [2] are preserved and maintained. Many of Alexander's buildings and courtyards are still there, along with some of the older brutalist buildings as well as some of the newer buildings built with donor money [3][4].

I would say that the University is tangled not with local politics, but with multinational money. Nike has had a strong grasp on the University's spending habits for many decades, and their influence twists and distorts everything in the area. Despite Nike's attempts to stop it, though, the University still has an excellent architecture program to this day, and the campus is beautiful and walkable. I would say that the experiment succeeded beyond expectations.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Experiment

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oregon

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McArthur_Court

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatfield-Dowlin_Complex

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Knight_Arena

I was mostly going by this article, which seems factual.

http://www.rainmagazine.com/archive/1994/alexander-visits-th...

Just to reaffirm my prior comment, I think Alexander is a genius. Having walked through the UO campus, it doesn't particularly remind me of his ethos. (The cemetery, of course, is quite nice, but not part of the campus.)

I don't see any indication that Alexander was involved with Hatfield-Dowlin or the Matthew Knight Arena. Is there a source on that?

As for the quality of the architecture program, the campus speaks for itself. I particularly liked that quote about "Science losing faith in the Arch". Ouch.

I suppose I wasn't very clear. Alexander not only was not involved with those donated buildings, but he would presumably not have liked what they did to the landscape. The Arena, in particular, is bad for traffic.

I am saying that the University both takes input from qualified architectural plans, and also takes cash from folks at Nike. This article is very interesting and provides great historical context, but pales in comparison to the millions of dollars that Phil Knight and friends have poured onto campus, and the corresponding shift in power. Knight has demanded changes to University staff and faculty, and gotten them, multiple times over the decades. He's also managed to keep his influence well-hidden; "Nike" barely appears at all in this magazine article, for example, despite already being a powerful donor on-campus by the 90s.

Agreed.

To concentrate on the positive for a moment, if you ever get there, don't miss the Dracula hall (Deady?) and there's the most beautiful ancient and massive lounge inside Gerlinger (?). Johnson Hall (from Animal House) is attractive. And Streisinger (?) evokes Escher in a pleasing way.

All of these are quite old, but I'm almost as.

I'd recommend Thriving System Theory by Leslie J. Waguespack that integrates Alexander's Ideas across the development of systems. - https://amzn.to/3bdoSxA

I also wrote a book where I took a number of Alexander's ideas and applied them to creating a crypto based economic system. - https://amzn.to/2RGhfIf - Probably not interesting unless you are really into crypto or really into pattern languages.

I was in Berkeley a couple of years ago and went on a bit of a pilgrimage up the hill to find some of the house that he designed. I ended up running into some of his family and felt like an ass for invading their privacy(I had no idea they still lived in one of the houses), but was able to speak with one of his daughters and he was apparently not doing so well back then. Every time I see his stuff come up on here I worry that it is bad news.

Recently I had to think about Alexander when I saw the empty streets of New York. Without people you will notice much more how the buildings overwhelm and cast shadow everywhere.

This is exactly what Alexander was fighting against: building structures that go against human nature.

I read a couple of his books and saw some of his talks. It sometimes makes me a little sad to see through his eyes how we are building today.

Shadows aren't bad. They're the best thing that can happen during summer. Well... Them and the wind.

Alexander’s books have been on my bucket list for a while. He is one of the few thinkers bridging between traditional and modern, and designing lived experience. It is no accident his work extends beyond building design and into human user experience and software architecture.

Don't wait. The timeless way of building can be finished in an afternoon and is worth your time.

Thanks for the encouragement.

I was also eying his other books because I realized that the principles of those design also extends to society, community, and governance. Meaning, with the right living architecture, we can have permissionless community, a lot of similarities to the "Te" chapters of the Tao Te Ching.

I know one of the things that keep coming up is how can one balance between global and local concerns. Our society is coming apart at the seams with a culture war, and the pandemic highlights that tension between global and local. Everything I have read about Alexander's work suggests that he cracked open a way to pull that off.

I just read A City is not a Tree, linked somewhere here (http://www.patternlanguage.com/archives/alexander1.htm) and found it quite interesting.

Santa Fe Institute has a podcast on complex systems. There's a chapter on cities that might be interesting if you liked 'A City is not a Tree': https://complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/4 .

He missed that Notes on the Synthesis of Form inspired the software design perspectives of coupling and cohesion

source?

They may be referring to the mention on C2.

----- (https://wiki.c2.com/?NotesOnTheSynthesisOfForm)

I'm struck by the resemblance between the rule of CouplingAndCohesion and Alexander's formal treatment of the "main" problem of design - hierarchical decomposition of the set M of misfit variables (the "things which might possibly break") into subsets which

    maximize the connections between their components (high cohesion) but also
    are minimally connected with each other (low coupling)

In other words, the issue of CouplingAndCohesion isn't just central to software design - it is central to all design, if Alexander is to be believed.

An article in Ieee's Software taht included a reflection by Constantine on where he was inspired (by reading Notes on...)

I appear to have thrown the article away. But it was 2012+/-5 years.

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