Christopher Alexander
Alexander lays out a system for designing complex forms, taking into account that just the human brain is completely incapable of such a task.
His system is a graph of design considerations organized hierarchically to minimize interference between individual subsets of the graph. When subsets are sufficiently decoupled, they will come to functional equilibrium independently of the entire system, allowing the form being designed to be created and fulfill it’s requirements quickly.
Alexander lays out two traditions of design: the unselfconscious, and the selfconscious. The unselfconscious builder acts within a complete system of design, taught to him by means of example and by hand. The selfconscious is today’s architect – taught in school and putting his reputation on the line, trying to be new and different, with each project undertaken.
The Mousgoum cannot afford, as we do, to regard maintenance as a nuisance which is best forgotten until it is time to call the local plumber. It is in the same hands as the building operation itself, and its exigencies are as likely to shape the form as those of the initial construction. 31
I shall call a culture unselfconscious if its form-making is learned informally, through imitation and correction. And I shall call a culture selfconscious if its form-making is taught academically, according to explicit rules. 36
On the unconscious:
No complex adaptive system will succeed in adapting in a reasonable amount of time unless the adaptation can proceed subsystem by subsystem, each subsystem relatively independent of the others. 41
Closely associated with this immediacy is the fact that the owner is his own builder, that the form-maker not only makes the form but lives in it. Indeed, not only is the man who lives in the form the one who made it, but there is a special closeness of contact between man and form which leads to constant rearrangement of unsatisfactory detail, constant improvement. The man, already responsible for the original shaping of the form, is also alive to its demands while he inhabits it. And anything which needs to be changed is changed at once. 49
This is the second crucial feature of the unselfconscious system’s form-production. Failure and correction go side by side. There is no deliberation in between the recognition of a failure and the reaction to it. 50
Rigid tradition and immediate action may seem contradictory. But it is the very contrast between these two which makes the process self-adjusting. 52
The forms produced in such a system are not the work of individuals, and their success does not depend on ant one man’s artistry, but only on the artist’s place within the process. 59
On the conscious:
With the invention of a teachable discipline called “architecture,” the old process of making form was adulterated and its chances of success destroyed. 58
To achieve in a few hours at the drawing board what once took centuries of adaptation and development, to invent a form suddenly which clearly fits its context – the extent of the invention necessary is beyond the average designer. 59
It isn’t that the designer sucks, it’s that he pretends not to suck. Which makes him suck all the more.
Language gets in the way of our reckoning with a design problem:
But once these concrete influence are represented symbolically in verbal terms, and these symbolic representations or names subsumed under larger and still more abstract categories to make them amenable to thought, they begin seriously impair out ability to see beyond them. 69
Caught in a net of language of our own invention, we overestimate the language’s impartiality. Each concept, at the time of its invention no more then a concise way of grasping many issues, quickly becomes a precept. We take the step from description to criterion too easily, so that what is at first a useful tool becomes a bigoted preoccupation. 70
In this fashion the selfconscious individual’s grasp of problems is constantly misled. His concepts and categories, besides being arbitrary and unsuitable, are self-perpetuating. Under the influence of concepts, he not only does things from a biased point of view, but sees them biasedly as well. The concepts control his conception of fit and misfit – until in the end he sees nothing but deviations from his conceptual dogmas, and loses not only the urge but even the mental opportunity to frame his problems more appropriately. 70
We can’t get out from under ourselves, we’re completely self absorbed by nature. We’re so good, who would even want to deviate from his conceptual dogmas. So?
The dilemma is simple. As time goes on the designer gets more and more control over the process of design. But as he does so, his efforts to deal with the increasing cognitive burden actually make it harder and harder for the real casual structure of the problem to express itself in the process 73
If theory cannot be expected to invent form, how is it likely to be useful to a designer? 75
Alexander introduces his program as a layer in between the subjective selfconscious interpretation of a design problem and it’s application to a form. The creation of an interrelated set of specifications (graph theory) reduced to it’s simplest and least coupled form (a tree), can mediate our bias toward a problem and lead to the best solution.
Form and requirement diagrams: form diagram represents what an object will look like, a requirement diagram represents how it will work. Separate the two aren’t of any help to designing the solution to a problem.
The solution of a design problem is really only another effort to find a unified description. The search for realization through constructive diagrams is an effort to understand the required form so fully that there is no longer a rift between its functional specification and the shape it takes. 90
The unified description is the merger of form and requirement, representing all the information pertinent to solving the problem at hand.
In all these cases, the invention is based in a hunch which actually makes it easier to understand the problem. Like such a hunch, a constructive diagram will often precede the precise knowledge which could prescribe its shape on rational grounds. 91
And Alexander is already on his way to getting at the idea of a pattern langauge:
Every component has this twofold nature: it is first a unit, and second a pattern, both a pattern and a unit. Its nature as a unit makes it an entity distinct from its surroundings. Its nature as a pattern specifies the arrangement of its own component units. It is the culmination of the designer’s task to make every diagram both a pattern and a unit. As a unit it will fir into the hierarchy of larger components that fall above it; as a pattern it will specify the hierarchy of smaller components which it itself is made of. 131