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Christopher Alexander has died

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Re: Christopher Alexander has died

#131

Post by dr_dshiv »

motohagiography wrote: post #119
dr_dshiv wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alexander hated modern architecture, which he felt was all about ego and not about human needs. Probably why architects conveniently forgot him.

Curiously, the Prince of Wales was a big supporter of Alexander's ideas, and wrote a book about related themes. He's on the talking circuit these days, and it might be interesting for someone to ask him his thoughts on Alexander.

His book on “Harmony” is highly recommended. I only knew him through tabloids. But based on his book, I have a ton of respect. Where is he on a talking circuit?

Re: Christopher Alexander has died

#132

Post by refset »

seumars wrote: post #117
jalfresi wrote: post #89

Very early in my software development career, i was frustrated and sad that i wasnt able to progress due to a lack of comprehension of how software is structured from smaller sub systems. I didnt have any kind of mentor available to me, and I seriously considered changing careers. I naively assumed that good software was written by naturally talented people, and because I was having problems growing I was obviously n…

My intro to Alexander was also through Notes on the Synthesis of Form, though personally I found it to be really antiquated. Shortly after I found out he distanced himself from a lot of the design methodology work he did in the 60s: >‘There is so little in what is called ‘design methods’that has anything useful to say about how to design buildings that I never evenread the literature anymore [...] I would say forget…

He described this distancing from the methodology, and consequently what he considered the salient message, in a preface for a later printing of the book [0]:

> Today, almost ten years after I wrote this book, one idea stands out clearly for me as the most important in the book: the idea of the diagrams. [...] I reject the whole idea of design methods as a subject of study, since I think it is absurd to separate the study of designing from the practice of design. [...] No one will become a better designer by blindly following this method, or indeed by following any method blindly. [...] In the process of trying to create such diagrams or patterns for yourself, you will reach the central idea which this book is all about.

I think this explains why Inkscape is my favourite piece of software :)

[0] https://monoskop.org/images/f/ff/Alexander_Christopher_Notes...

Re: Christopher Alexander has died

#133

Post by motohagiography »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #131
motohagiography wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curiously, the Prince of Wales was a big supporter of Alexander's ideas, and wrote a book about related themes. He's on the talking circuit these days, and it might be interesting for someone to ask him his thoughts on Alexander.

His book on “Harmony” is highly recommended. I only knew him through tabloids. But based on his book, I have a ton of respect. Where is he on a talking circuit?

I think I misinterpreted an invitation to a munk debate as being a dialogue with him, when in fact it was about him. However, his book Harmony is sitting in my pile, as I am very interested in his views on conservation, architecture, cities, and the environment.

Re: Christopher Alexander has died

#134

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

crabmusket wrote: post #122
fsloth wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO Alexander's design pattern concept is intelligently superior to the terms trivialization in the atrociously highly rated GoF book. GoF enumerates the tedious patches one needs to use on cumbersome languages like Java or C++ due to the languages primitive nature. The main advantage of GoF that now when you say "Factory pattern" everyone knows sort of concept they are speaking of. However. In the scope of Alexander…

You immediately see the difference when you open A Pattern Language and the very first pattern is: > Wherever possible, work toward the evolution of independent regions in the worId; each with a population between 2 and 10 million; each with its own natural and geographic boundaries; each with its own economy; each one autonomous and self-governing; each with a seat in a world government, without the intervening powe…

I think he was kind of a hippie. I remember reading The Timeless Way of Building, and wanting to live in the world he described.

Re: Christopher Alexander has died

#135

Post by citizenpaul »

lukasb wrote: post #5

Saw him speak at Berkeley around the time his book on the Eshin project was released. Talked in very strong terms about the importance of working in a holistic, caring way. A SWE in the audience spoke up, saying basically "look, we want to follow that approach, but it's hard, we have a lot of stakeholders to satisfy in order for a project to happen." Alexander was unyielding. "Once you've worked with love, you won't…

>"Once you've worked with love, you won't want to work in any other way."

Interesting quote. It really makes me think about the great resignation and WFH movement. I think lots of people truly were asleep to how bad their job and consequently life had become due to working with all the negative corporate aspects of America. This is a succinct way to describe the trend.

I wonder if we will see drops in pharmaceutical and alcohol sales in the coming years.

Re: Christopher Alexander has died

#136

Post by rwmj »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #114
rwmj wrote: post #11

He turns up in Stewart Brand's excellent TV programme How Buildings Learn , which is also on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/brandst

Original music by Brian Eno! I’m not sure which episode Alexander shows up in, but it isn’t 5. Still, highly recommended.

It's a really good series, and the accompanying book is also recommended (I read the book first, not aware that it was a book-of-a-TV-series). Christopher Alexander is in Episode 1 from about 20'50". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maTkAcDbrEY

Re: Christopher Alexander has died

#137

Post by dumpsterlid »

While Christopher Alexander will be mainly remembered for A Pattern Language, I do think he was onto some really interesting philosophical ideas in his attempt to define life as an analog (as in, not binary) value of structure. He didn't have the words or precise knowledge to do it in The Nature Of Order series, but you can see him scratching at it.

Life is defined currently in a nebulous way that is primarily an internal property of an entity. When determining if an individual entity is alive we look inside it and dissect it into its components to determine whether they are organic.

I think what Alexander was trying to get at was that life is a presence of certain patterns. He identified these patterns through an architectural lens as 15 patterns. He is clear that there are less than 15, he just found it easier to teach these patterns to architectural students as 15 different patterns. These patterns are things like deep interlock between patterns (think of a complex carpet) strong borders and a diversity of scale in elements. Crucially these patterns are not an inherent property of some element, but rather a property that arises out of relationship with other elements.

I see a lot of truth in these ideas in that I think it makes far more sense to see life as an arrangement of matter into certain shapes that give rise to self-perpetuating and mutually reinforcing patterns. Christopher Alexander came at this idea from trying to articulate what exactly is so suffocating about modern architecture (and why it feels so anxiety inducing and alienating) but I think the implications are for Christopher Alexander characteristically broad.

I hope people like Nikos Salingaros continue going down this road.

Re: Christopher Alexander has died

#138

Post by dumpsterlid »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #19

He 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 “wh…

The main thrust of Nature Of Order is that these 15 elements of wholeness are itself a quantifiable measure of life, of literally how alive a system is. Christopher believed you didn't design and build a structure and then fill it with life/humans, rather he believed the process of architecture was itself about literally increasing the life of a space. An architect's job was to recognize life-creating patterns and imbue structures with them.

He believed that a meadow with a river bend, an old willow tree and a rock to sit on below it was not a scene composed of living and non-living entities, but rather the arrangement of these entities (both internally alive and not) gave rise to a wholistic quantity of life in that space. Depending on where the rock was placed the space itself was more or less alive.

It sounds like a far out, "new agey" idea but I think he argued quite rationally that this framing of life makes far more sense than a binary determination based upon near arbitrary delineations such as sex, reproduction and consumption of resources.

I think he really was onto something personally.

Re: Christopher Alexander has died

#139

Post by Khelavaster »

pmoriarty wrote: post #46
xLaszlo wrote: post #6

This video of him from 1996 is amazing with hindsight. A must watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-_zfA RIP Christopher Alexander

This is very interesting, but his main concerns (the creation of what he calls "living structures", "nurturing structures", and things that make people "feel whole") seem to be completely and utterly divorced from what people in the computer field are interested in.

These structures are akin to residual neural net motifs. "Fine-grained control at every level" is the name of the game. Pattern Languages are languages which obey the roughly same algebras as residual neural nets in context of transfer learning. Looks more closely at what Christopher Alexander says!!
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