by Joel Garreau
The evidence suggests the answer is—probably yes. But there is one man who does not think so. His name is Christopher Alexander.
Depending on whom you listen to, Alexander is the most innovative thinker of the last hundred years on the way we design and build our lives; or he is a dangerous radical who threatens the fabric of the building, banking, real estate, and architecture industries; or he is a delusional flake. Or some combination of the above.
He thinks we can build all of our buildings, all of our Edge Cities, with “life.” That is to say, he thinks we can fix our world.
The views of this fifty-three-year-old professor at the University of California at Berkeley are the focus of deep respect and thorough disdain. This is why: Alexander, for the last twenty years, has been laying out a foundation for a new way of thinking about what we build. It is so sweeping, and so at odds with the existing order, that it is important to understand why he thinks its adoption inevitable.
Alexander believes that the way we have been designing buildings and cities, and our very lives, is so screwed up that the whole rickety system is soon going to collapse of its own weight. Even England’s Prince Charles has taken up the cudgel. He has denounced Britain’s architects as worse than the Nazis: “You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble,” Charles said. “We did that.”
Even the architects who are designing our world know there’s something very wrong, Alexander would argue. Otherwise, why do they desperately tart up their Bauhaus skyscrapers with Postmodern neon lights along the edges, and Chippendale curves along the top? Even that last resort of bad architecture—ivy—is newly popular, cascading in every Edge City direction, shielding office buildings so harsh and disturbing that they are specifically built to be covered with the stuff.
Little wonder Alexander thinks he sees evidence in all directions that our current means of doing things—from the neighborhood-destroying skyscrapers of downtown San Francisco to the sprawling office parks of I-680—cannot hold. The collapse of this structure, Alexander figures, will occur as surely as did the collapse of the Iron Curtain.
When that happens, Alexander wants to be there with a declaration of independence. It starts by holding this truth to be self-evident. When people walk around a village that was built two or three centuries ago—whether that village be in Virginia or France—they feel better than they do on an asphalt strip of gas stations and fast-food outlets. Similarly, there are great cathedrals and mosques in which we feel an awe or a peace that is not present when we stand in the atrium of a new insurance company tower.
“Everyone knows that there is something special there … something which does not appear, almost at all, in our own time—something palpable and definite,” he writes.
He calls this something “life.”
And, he says, the idea that some buildings and neighborhoods have it, and others do not, is a fact.
Not an opinion. A fact. As incontrovertible as the idea that, with a tape measure, you can discover whether a door is wide enough to get a refrigerator through.
If you buy the idea, as a fact, that some places have wholeness and others do not, then, he maintains, you have set yourself up to buy his idea that a lot of twentieth-century architects’ and developers’ mumbo-jumbo is headed for a fall.
Alexander and his Berkeley associates are attempting, in the most empirical way they can, to discover patterns in the ways some buildings and cities and nooks and crannies in our world have life, and others are sterile and dead—and shunned.
This led, in 1977, to the publication by the Oxford University Press of A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. It was the second of what are now six books Oxford has published in Alexander’s search for a “timeless way of building.”
In A Pattern Language are no fewer than 253 rules of thumb that Alexander’s team believes capture what it is that environments with life have in common, no matter in what century the environment was built or by which culture. What’s more, the book outlines ways in which laymen can build more places of a satisfying nature, despite the burdens of our modern age.
For example, pattern number 159 is “Light on Two Sides of Every Room.” As with all the other patterns, it starts by stating a proposition: “When they have a choice, people will always gravitate to those rooms which have light on two sides, and leave the rooms which are lit only from one side unused and empty.”
A discussion of the logic of the pattern follows: “Please try these observations yourself. Examine all the buildings you come across in your daily life. We believe that you will find, as we have done, that those rooms you intuitively recognize as pleasant, friendly rooms have the pattern; and those you intuitively reject as unfriendly, unpleasant, are the ones which do not have the pattern.”
An explanation is proffered: “Rooms lit on two sides, with natural light, create less glare around people and objects; this lets us see things more intricately; and most important, it allows us to read in detail the minute expressions that flash across people’s faces, the motion of their hands … and thereby understand, more clearly, the meaning they are after. The light on two sides allows people to understand each other.”
The narrative then takes a shot at one of the Great White Gods whose architectural dicta have produced the slabs that make our world what it is today: “A supreme example of the complete neglect of this pattern is Le Corbusier’s Marseilles Block apartments.”
A Pattern Language discusses how to handle the pattern practically. In this case, it suggests that it pays to get as many corners into a building as possible—“wrinkling” the exterior design of the building.
(Digression: The ultimate symbol of a promotion in our culture is that we get moved to “the corner office.” That has replaced “getting a key to the executive John.” That is, if we do well, we are rewarded with an office that has light on two sides. Not coincidentally, developers have responded by building office centers with as many crinkles and jukes on the outside as possible, thus creating the largest possible number of corner offices, for which they can charge high rent. Remember Bishop Ranch 8? Its brochure brags ten “executive corner” office locations per floor, not four. How? Twenty-eight right-angle exte rior corners and wrinkles per building. Whether inadvertent or not, this produces as many offices as possible with “light on two sides.”)
The patterns are meant to identify the ideas that underlie pleasing places all over the world. At the same time, the book encourages the expression of this order in as many million different ways as individual imaginations can conjure up.
The patterns progress from the largest scale to the smallest. Number 1 is “Independent Regions.” My personal favorite is Pattern 90, “Beer Hall,” which asks that screamingly important question, not often addressed in theoretical works, “Where can people sing, and drink, and shout and drink, and let go of their sorrows?”
Being relentlessly practical, the patterns also address such unromantic issues as 213, “How should the spacing of the secondary columns which stiffen the walls, vary with ceiling height, number of stories, and the size of rooms?”
A Pattern Language thus shows people how to design and build to great and beautiful effect themselves, demystifying the priesthood of a lot of the professions—none more than those of architects and planners.
Although Alexander’s ideas have rattled the teacups in more than one intellectual cupboard, some design professions have come to recognize the book as a benchmark. You can barely pick up a shelter magazine like Fine Homebuilding without finding yet another person who has worked out his new house or restoration on the precepts of A Pattern Language. The American Institute of Architects published a 1974 survey in which the pattern language ranked number one among methodologies considered essential for architects to know. More than a decade after it was published, as many as ten thousand copies are snapped up each year, at the daunting price
of $50 a copy.
Alexander’s critics, however, sniff that his output of actual buildings is modest. Even Alexander has expressed reservations about some of those. One project, he said, came out “still a bit more funky than I would have liked.” Indeed, Reynar Banham in the Times Literary Supplement succinctly stated what can be described as the Establishment position on Alexander: “ ‘Arts and Crafts’ seems an appropriate description of Alexander’s activity.” This deftly suggested both that Alexander was about as important as macramé and was merely derivative of the nineteenth-century design movement of that name.
Those who consider him a threat, meanwhile, agree with Progressive Architecture, the bible of the trendy in the profession, which wrote, “What really irks many people about Alexander is his rejection of basic precepts of the architectural and building professions involving the allocation of money, timetables, levels of finish and tolerances, etc., that are now deeply engrained in the system.” MIT’s Technology Review observed, “Like Thoreau, Alexander marches to a different drummer with a kind of open-shirted, holy-man persona that can be irritating.”
This is because Alexander couldn’t let go of the idea that “thousands of people came to the conclusion that the statements in the pattern language are not statements of opinion but are in some sense true,” as he later wrote. “To these people … the patterns represent a triumph of common sense.”
This triumph of common sense was not trivial, he perceived. In fact, it attacked the logical foundations of the building of cities as we know it. Indeed, it attacked the Western world’s view of science and logic. The key thing to understand about Alexander is just how basic his ideas are. He dates what he views as our current inability to build with common sense to the early twentieth century. But the origins of that, he says, go right back to the 1600s, the foundation of our modern world—the generation, not coincidentally, in which the Cavaliers first landed in Virginia, and the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock.
It was in those decades that the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes forged a revolution in the way we in the Western world think. Descartes’s idea was essentially that if you want to know how something works, you can find out by pretending that it’s a machine.
Suppose, for example, you want to understand how your arm works. The essence of Cartesian thought was to stop worrying about the hocus-pocus of the Middle Ages and to try to imagine the arm as an isolated mechanism. Can you invent in your mind a system of pulleys and levers that does this and this and this, and has certain rules, and will match the behavior of your arm?
If so, you have now got a model of reality with which you can beat back the superstitions of the previous thousand years’ long dark night of the human mind. You can break down that model into its constituent parts and adhere to strict principles of observation. Examine your arm. Does the way it works match your mental model of it as a machine? If not, you must reject your model as false. Strive to view your arm more purely as a complex mechanism; completely remove your self and your emotions from the equation. Seek a higher, better, and more detailed understanding of how this thing works when you imagine it as made up of rubber and steel, not flesh and blood.
This method of Cartesian thought is the foundation of the Industrial Age. It has power almost beyond belief. It led our civilization to fragment the atom and stand on the stark, dusty plains of the moon. It has made us the world we have today.
According to Alexander, there is one hitch:
The crucial thing, which Descartes understood very well but which we most often forget, is that this process is only a method. This business of isolating things into fragments, and of making little machinelike pictures (or models) of how things work, is not how reality actually is. It is a convenient mental thing we do to reality in order to understand it.
Descartes himself clearly understood his procedure as a mental trick. He was a religious person who would have been horrified to find out that we in the twentieth century have begun to think that reality itself is actually like this. But in the years since Descartes lived … after people had used the idea to find out almost everything mechanical about the world during the seventeenth to twentieth centuries—then, some time in the twentieth century, people shifted into a new mental state that began treating reality as if this mechanical picture really was the nature of things: as if everything really was a machine.
This, Alexander feels, has had a devastating impact on our lives. It limits our discernment of what is true or false to those aspects of life which can be thought of as like a machine.
Somewhere, Alexander says, we got to the point where any concern that did not fit into the machine model was tossed aside as not relevant. If it was not quantifiable in that fashion, it was not real. Even those who studied human behavior, such as psychologists and sociologists, felt compelled to ape the methods of physics, attempting to reduce the realities they observed to equations. Considerations that could not be so rendered came to be viewed as ephemeral, tangential, unimportant—even embarrassing. At best, they were relegated to the realm of the “artsy.” Let those wild and crazy creative types whom we toler ate as adornments to our civilization deal with it. Whether a building has “life” is certainly not of central importance to serious people as they routinely and soberly make important decisions about business and high finance.
Alexander wants nothing less than to bring that world view to its knees.
He thinks it’s going to happen.
Alexander thinks that this mechanistic world view is beginning to collapse of its own weight and contradictions. If you really believe, like Louis Sullivan, that “form ever follows function,” you can get some splendidly functional shiny new gas-and-go marts. But does anyone find them a comforting addition to the neighborhood, like an old stable? Or even like an old gas station? If you really think, like Le Coirbusier, that “a house is a machine for living in,” you may be able to mass-produce apartment slabs, but are they even as interesting as the engine block of a V-8?
This mechanistic view of the buildings with which we surround ourselves, Alexander feels, is imploding in a fashion not dissimilar to that of world communism, and for identical reasons. It is just not describing reality very well. It is producing lousy results.
If and when we come to the collapse of this belief—that if it can’t be thought of as like a machine, it isn’t factual—Alexander intends to be there with a more commonsense, functional model of reality. He intends no less than to define, systematically and empirically, what brings life into buildings, and to develop a how-to system that will integrate those elements into everything from our garages to our office parks. If he were to succeed, it would change how we build everything.
Alexander wants to come up with an empirical system producing replicable results that will allow people to view as a matter of fact whether a design is good or bad, true or false.
In the current understanding of the Cartesian method, that idea is preposterous. But that is one of the gravest flaws of the current method, Alexander feels. It goes a long way toward explaining why we have been building cities in the twentieth century that do not feel as good as the ones we left behind.
If facts—notions that can be logically demonstrated to be true or false—are thought to be exclusively mechanistic ones, con sider the implications. If you were trying to figure out what kind of a door to put into a room, you could establish the mechanistic fact that a given one was tall enough to walk through. But any ideas about what kind of door would work best in terms of making the room feel right—whether it should be wood, or glass, or steel—could be expressed only as an opinion.
Here’s the problem with that. If it is sheerly a matter of opinion that one kind of door works better than another in terms of how it makes the room feel, then it is in principle impossible to discuss the matter. You’ve got as much right to your opinion as I to mine. If you think it’s one thing, and I think it’s another: end of discussion. How do we measure who is closer t
o the truth?
The corollary is, if you think that a strip shopping center is ugly, and the guy who built it did not, that’s your problem. He’s got his opinion, you’ve got yours. How can there be an appeal to higher reason?
Here’s what’s so potent about the direction Alexander is taking. He thinks it is possible to establish that one kind of place will be a good place, and another a sterile, inhumane one, as a matter of fact.
He thinks it is possible to re-establish qualitative comparisons on a basis of yes or no, good or bad, beautiful or ugly—beyond opinion. True or false. What color the door should be can be determined as definitively as how wide it should be.
Like all grand theories, Alexander’s can lead to some very strange places. His principle, though, is simple.
He describes different aspects of a place by calling them centers. To pick a tiny example—a doorknob. To discuss how big it should be, of what materials, what shape, what color—that is a discussion of one center.
Alexander then establishes that there are orders of magnitude to centers. If the doorknob is one center, then the door itself is one order greater. The room in which the door is placed, in turn, is one order greater than that.
Thus, the whole of any given place can be described as the sum of many different centers, and they of different magnitudes.
Alexander then says, simply, that every design decision will be valid as long as the following three principles are observed:
• That whatever is picked for each center is that which feels most comfortable and whole to you.
• Plus it must help the center that is one order higher feel most comfortable and whole to you.
• Plus it must also be supported by the wholeness of the centers below it.
That is to say, if the doorknob feels right and it helps the door feel right, it is right. If the door works and it helps the room work right, it is right.
This can be reliably established, he says, by an application of common sense that is so representative of the works of earlier ages as to make one wonder how we ever got into our modern fix.