The Phenomenon of Life by Christopher W. Alexander

The patterns in A Pattern Language all intend to help its users recognize the human forces that interplay with built structure, to make healthy decisions in the building process that will draw out this Quality. It is here that we first see the idea of a positive, objective quality we can use to judge the success of building projects a quality that’s evident in the type of places where people can feel comfortable, can feel at ease with themselves, can feel somehow more alive – the Quality Without a Name. These books are framed in much more of a social and political context than Notes. The latter created a new method for transmitting the type of information anyone would need to build healthy environments. The former discusses the philosophical drive that created the beautiful cities of old and some of the reasons we’ve lost the ability to do that. Published about 15 years later, in development from around 1965 onwards, this answer comes in two major parts, as The Timeless Way of Building (the theory) and A Pattern Language (the practice). (Later, Alexander recants some of the rigorously mathematical thinking, both in the introduction to “Notes,” and in the paper “ A City is Not a Tree”. He does not yet define positive, extrinsic criteria for quality. Here, Alexander works within a classical scientific and mathematical framework – the answer is that we do not have a good fit between form and context we are not appropriately accounting for all of the various forces and needs at play, understanding their dependencies and relationships, and creating goodness-of-fit. The First Answer – “ Notes on the Synthesis of Form”Īlexander wrote Notes in 1964, about the same time that Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which dealt with the same issues.

It’s all responding to a core line of questioning: “Why does the modern environment fail? Why don’t we – why can’t we – make places that feel beautiful and alive anymore? How do we do it?” We can see Alexander’s work as three major attempts to answer these questions. (A recount of Building Beauty Program Director Yodan Rofè's introduction to the The Nature of Order reading seminar)īeneath all of Christopher Alexander’s work is a characterization of architecture and the built environment as a complex whole the need for anything we create to be as free as possible from internal conflict, tension, contradiction.

The Phenomenon of Life by Christopher W. Alexander