He turns up in Stewart Brand's excellent TV programme How Buildings Learn, which is also on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/brandst
Christopher Alexander has died
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Re: Christopher Alexander has died
#12Massive PDF of A Pattern Language: https://arl.human.cornell.edu/linked%20docs/Alexander_A_Patt... But I recommend owning and reading it in print. Great book to dip in and out of at whim.
I don't remember which volume it was from, but doing any general maintenance I always remember this suggestion of his: Work on the most neglected area first -- e.g., work on the most neglected outdoor area of a property first. I don't recall his specific reasoning, but in my mind the essence was: Otherwise you will be acting on displacement anxiety and When an eyesore is taken care of first, your perspective on poten…
This is the most efficient way (IMHO) to raise the average quality of an installation / system, not to strive for a 1% improvement in the top end (while expending 10x the effort in doing so for said 1%, rather than the inverse).
This is one of those rare delights; an approach which is as powerful as it is simple.
Re: Christopher Alexander has died
#13> In 1965, Alexander wrote a much-cited essay, A City Is Not a Tree, one of the earliest and most trenchant critiques of the dendritic, sprawl pattern of city planning and development.
On the other hand, all dense old-world cities (London, Paris, Rome, even Tokyo, say) are... "dendritic". There's nothing wrong with that, and it has everything to do with the history of the ownership of all the bits of property on the city.
Sprawl is a problem, but sprawl is a new world problem that has to do with its very short history.
We've got about 500 years of old world folk moving to the new world, but the old world has thousands of years of history. Besides new world cities starting from much lower population density overall than the old world already had four to five centuries ago, there's also the fact that the last 100+ years of that history has had personal motor vehicles in it -- that's 1/4th to 1/5th of all the Americas' post-Columbus era, while it's more like less than 1/20th of the old world's history.
You can critique things like this all you like, but trying to do away with the "dendritism" that arises naturally is... unnatural, and requires a great deal of market distortion or use of force. Is that really something we want?
EDIT: Yeah, I probably read too much into that sentence!
Re: Christopher Alexander has died
#14He turns up in Stewart Brand's excellent TV programme How Buildings Learn , which is also on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/brandst
Truly an excellent and thought provoking series.
Re: Christopher Alexander has died
#15What a sad day. Never met him personally. But from what I heard this man’s influence has reached from architecture all the way to Wikipedia and Tesla. Unthinkable how different our world today would be if it hadn’t been for his work. May he rest in peace. And may his ideas continue to live, and mingle, and add color to our world.
He was where the concept of Design Patterns came from.
In the early days of Design Patterns (GoF, et al), he was often quoted.
I purchased a couple of his books: A Pattern Language[0], and The Timeless Way of Building[1]. These books were very readable.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Timeless_Way_of_Building
Re: Christopher Alexander has died
#16> In 1965, Alexander wrote a much-cited essay, A City Is Not a Tree, one of the earliest and most trenchant critiques of the dendritic, sprawl pattern of city planning and development. On the other hand, all dense old-world cities (London, Paris, Rome, even Tokyo, say) are... "dendritic". There's nothing wrong with that, and it has everything to do with the history of the ownership of all the bits of property on the…
Don't forget that the market was heavily distorted in favor of sprawl.
Massive federal investments (subsidies) in:
* interstates and highways that made sprawl development possible.
* oil infrastructure and automobiles.
* suburban housing development designed to specifically exclude people of color, driving disinvestment from and leading to the collapse of cities.
None of these are natural new-world problems nor are they market driven, these are policy choices made. Pre vs Post WWII cities are structured and shaped completely differently as a result of these policies.
Re: Christopher Alexander has died
#17What a sad day. Never met him personally. But from what I heard this man’s influence has reached from architecture all the way to Wikipedia and Tesla. Unthinkable how different our world today would be if it hadn’t been for his work. May he rest in peace. And may his ideas continue to live, and mingle, and add color to our world.
He was where the concept of Design Patterns came from. In the early days of Design Patterns (GoF, et al ), he was often quoted. I purchased a couple of his books: A Pattern Language [0], and The Timeless Way of Building [1]. These books were very readable. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Timeless_Way_of_Building
Before APL, There was Notes on the Synthesis of Form in 1964.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_on_the_Synthesis_of_Form
Re: Christopher Alexander has died
#18> In 1965, Alexander wrote a much-cited essay, A City Is Not a Tree, one of the earliest and most trenchant critiques of the dendritic, sprawl pattern of city planning and development. On the other hand, all dense old-world cities (London, Paris, Rome, even Tokyo, say) are... "dendritic". There's nothing wrong with that, and it has everything to do with the history of the ownership of all the bits of property on the…
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Re: Christopher Alexander has died
#19He had really interesting computational ideas about harmony. From The Nature of Order (2002) “As architects, builders, and artists, we are called upon constantly—every moment of the working day—to make judgments about relative harmony. We are constantly trying to make decisions about what is better and what is worse…”
Following this, he published a paper on “harmony-seeking computation” as an approach to optimize “wholeness.” He identified 15 elements of wholeness in designs that might be measured, like the presence of coherent centers, strong boundaries, local symmetries or roughness/imperfection. He proposes that “the harmony that is sought in these computations is indeed what we otherwise call ‘beauty’. But the result of harmony-seeking computations are not merely pretty or artistic. In most cases, they are also better functionally and technically.”
Alexander, Christopher "Harmony-Seeking Computations." International Journal of Unconventional Computing 4 (2008).
Re: Christopher Alexander has died
#20Wow :( Precisely yesterday I was reading some reviews on some of his books on architecture... does anyone care to recommend one?