(2019-07-11) Let Christopher Alexander Design Your Life

Let Christopher Alexander design your life. I received my copy of 'A Pattern Language' as a high school graduation gift. I had already declared my intention to be an architect, so my aunt and uncle bought me the design equivalent of the Bible

I barely opened it. The architecture library was filled with books with lovely glossy pictures.

turns out to be an ideal place candidate for a re-read. A pattern is the way physical design responds to human relationships. I didn't need it as a teenager, but I turned to it after I got married, and then again after I had kids.

If I have learned any lessons since high school, it is that teachers seemed unwilling to tip you off when Very Important Works are also hilarious. (See: Charles Dickens's Bleak House, which is chockablock with devastating satire and tenterhooks romance, written with incredible flair and stylistic flexibility.)

Alexander isn't being funny on purpose. There's a vegetarian-stew earnestness about his enterprise that has put off modernists for decades ' but sometimes you need to be earnest. Over time, especially in contrast to most architecture theory, plain speech can ripen into something subversive and amusing.

'A Pattern Language' is not about architecture, but about how specific design choices can help us build better relationships

1. Design isn't about looks; it's about relationships.

The first daunting thing about 'A Pattern Language' is the sheer number of patterns:

People 'have replaced their natural instinctive decorations with the things which they believe will please and impress their visitors,' Alexander writes.

2. Put the sofa in the kitchen.

I desperately wanted to choose tile, but my husband (a licensed architect) knew that was the last step. First we had to figure out how we wanted to live, first as a couple and then with the two kids I had down on my mental planner. The decisions we made in 2007 still affect our family life in 2019, starting with the kitchen.

My husband refers to Pattern 139, Farmhouse Kitchen, as one of his design ideals.

Even if it is the room in which residents spend the most waking hours ' and most studies say that it is ' the kitchen isn't necessarily furnished so that everyone can be comfortable. The ever-expanding terrain of the kitchen island separates cook from eaters.

Alexander's solution is to re-orient the room, pushing the counter to the edge and putting a round, standard-height table in the middle. A sofa sits in front of the window, rather than in some separate family room. At the table, games can be played, homework can be completed, and food prep can be made communal. The cook(s) can relax and still keep an eye on the stove.

With the kitchen sorted, other patterns define areas just for the parents, just for the kids (Pattern 137, 'Children's Realm'), or just for the introvert

The book includes crude sketches of how these parts'his, hers, theirs, ours'might fit together. Plan from life, those sketches say, even if you don't know how to draw.

3. Foster the element of chance (serendipity)

A Pattern Language isn't a soothing hippie tome but a call to action.

The next time I read Alexander, I did have two kids and was thinking about families on a larger scale. There are a series of housing projects from the 1970s that I'd always associated with the book: brown and terraced, arranged around courtyards and accessed via picturesque, hedge-lined passages, such housing combines the sweeping geometry of late modernism with the quirky planning of the Italian hill town.

The pattern that united them was Pattern 68, 'Connected Play.' 'Children need other children. Some findings suggest that they need other children even more than they need their own mothers,' Alexander writes.

Alexander has this covered: 'A typical suburban subdivision with private lots opening off streets almost confines children to their houses. Parents, afraid of traffic or of their neighbors, keep their small children indoors or in their own gardens: so the children never have enough chance meetings with other children of their own age to form the groups

A key word here is chance. In the age of activities, even casual interactions between children often get scheduled, but the dream for parents and children is to be able to step outside and play ... wherever, with whomever. (free-range kids)

It isn't just children and parents who would benefit from this common space. One of the most romantic things about romantic comedies is the fantasy that your Get-A-Grip-Friend can just pop over at any time

4. The car ruins everything.

the chief takeaway from his 1965 essay, 'The City is Not A Tree,' which is his second-most-quoted work. He talks about how the historical, organic city is not a bounded entity that grows in a predictable way. Leaders may set patterns for it, but those patterns change over time in reaction to cultural, physical and environmental change. The tree encounters other trees. Branching happens in three dimensions, rather than on a linear and two-dimensional flow chart.

Alexander stacks the deck with three patterns, grouped together, that provide a rough sketch of a livable city: Pattern 9, 'Scattered Work'; Pattern 10, 'Magic of the City'; and Pattern 11, 'Local Transport Areas.' In an ideal city, people do not have to spend too much time in their cars.

5. People are the scoring system.

Molly Wright Steenson writes in her recent book 'Architectural Intelligence,' about architects of the 1960s and 1970s who were early adopters of interactive tools for design. His interdisciplinary work, from his doctoral studies on, included researching cognitive science, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence.

He wanted the computer to allow design to become more complex: the flat, dull, authoritarian planning trees were supposed to be overtaken by a more complex, three-dimensional and evolving organizational structure called the semi-lattice. As best as I have ever understood it (which is not as well as you or I might wish), the semi-lattice is a three-dimensional, branching structure that visualizes both the planned physical structures that make up a city AND the unplanned adjacencies

He writes, in a nice parallel to his thoughts on 'Things from Your Life': 'In simplicity of structure the tree is comparable to the compulsive desire for neatness and order that insists the candlesticks on a mantelpiece be perfectly straight and perfectly symmetrical about the centre. The semilattice, by comparison, is the structure of a complex fabric; it is the structure of living things, of great paintings and symphonies.'

Alexander inspired Will Wright, the creator of 'The Sims,' a game that is the most perfect (or at least the most popular) melding of code and architecture. Wright told Icon, 'He would say what is the human interaction I'm trying to facilitate with this structure, and so the Sims really started out as an architectural game ' you were designing a house and then the people were the scoring system.'

'People have asked me what kind of a process was involved in creating the architectural pattern language? One of the things we looked for was a profound impact on human life. We were able to judge patterns, and tried to judge them, according to the extent that when present in the environment we were confident that they really do make people more whole in themselves.' (whole-ness)