The first book in a series of three, Timeless sets the framework to a pattern language, establishing first that the best possible way to go about building a building is the way that people have done it for ages, simply and naturally. The qualities of almost all buildings most appreciated today come from this timeless way.
Alexander goes on to show how this ageless and living architecture is accomplished by establishing a language built of patterns which are all benchmarks of excellence in design, that is, they all have this quality which cannot be named about them. They instill energy and life into anyone able to experience them, and therefore are truly alive themselves.
One this language has been established, it becomes painless to apply it to building efficient and beautiful buildings. It takes time, and a building built along the lines of the timeless way won’t be flawless it it’s first incarnation, but over the years it will evolve and change to the point of so many flawless old world buildings which are admired the world over today.
And as the way is practiced and ingrained into the lives of all people, it will cease to be such a defined language, and instead it will be practicable by all intuitively. This language which has been established will fade, having already unlocked the divine ability within all humans to intuitively design and maintain structures beautiful and timeless, lake nature itself.
...it turns out, in the end, that what this method does is simply free us from all method. 13
Alexander through the course of the book makes everything about this method seem so simple, he alludes that with a copy of whatever pattern language, provided it’s a good one, all it will take to create something masterfully is a truly open mind with no preconceived images of what is to be created. The language will do the rest, completely, working to help a designer or builder realize everything he knows in his gut which would make the site marvelous.
For if we live in a world where work is separated from family life, or where courtyards turn us away, or where windows are merely holes in the wall, we experience the stress of these inner and conflicting forces constantly. We can never come to rest. We are living then, in a world so made, so patterned, that we cannot by any stratagem, defeat the tension, solve the problem, or resolve the conflict. In this kind of world the conflicts do not go away. They stay within us, naggingm tense … The build-up of stress, however minor, stays within us. We live in a state of heightened alertness, higher stress, more adrenalin, all the time. 114
And so the “bad” patterns – the window which doesn’t work, the dead courtyard, the badly located workplace – these stress us, undermine us, affect us continuously. Indeed, in this fashion, each bad pattern in our environment constantly reduces us, cuts us down, reduces our capacity to live, and helps make us dead… 115
Stress is no fun, and why have to deal with it? Doesn’t everyone want to live in the best possible place? What I can’t quite determine by reading his book is whether this language is truly able to create spaces which are tolerable by all – but the formula is quite vague and doesn’t prescribe much, the actual adaptation of the codes in a language leaves plenty of wiggle room to account for different cultures, societies. But will everyone truly love living in even the best space created by this world? Wil everyone react positively too it?
Each pattern helps to sustain other patterns.
The quality without a name occurs, but when an entire system of patterns, interdependent, at many levels, is all stable and alive. 131
...a building which is whole must always have the character of nature 149
The fact is that Chartres [Notre Dame de, French Cathedral], no less then the simple farmhouse, was built by a group of men, acting within a common pattern language, deeply steeped in it of course. It was not made by “design” at the drawing board. 217
In fact, the opposite is true: the most mystical, most religious, most wonderful – these are not less ordinary than most things – they are more ordinary than more things.
It is because they are so ordinary, indeed, that they strike to the core. 219
Your language generates the buildings which you make, and the buildings live or not, according to the life your language has.
pattern languages are the source of beauty and of ugliness. They are the source of all creative power: nothing is made without a pattern language in the maker’s mind; and what that thing becomes, its depth, or its banality, comes also from the pattern language in the builders mind. 224
When the language is shared, the individual patterns in the language are profound. The patterns are always simple. Nothing which is not simple and direct can survive the slow transmission from person to person. There is nothing in these languages so complex that someone cannot understand it.
I like how this language Alexander preaches is so simple. I’ve read the second book in this series, A Pattern Language which is a collection of 253(?) or so patterns realized by Alexander and a team from University California Berkeley. It’s meant to be taken to use not by architects, but by those who want to build themselves homes, gardens, and once its exercised by the population at large it takes true hold and begins to radically transform the built environment. But it really is simple!
Most people believe themselves incompetent to design anything and believe that it can onlt be done properly by architects and planners. 232 People lose touch with their most elementary intuitions. ?233?
So long as I build for myself, the patterns I use will be simple, and human, and full of feeling, because I understand my situation. But as soon as a few people begin to build for the “many,” their patterns about what is needed become abstract; no matter ho well meaning they are, their ideas gradually get out of touch with reality, because they are not faced daily with the living examples of what the patterns say. 236
...it is inevitable that as the work of building passes into the hands of specialists the patterns which they use become more and more banal, more willful, and less anchored in reality. 236
The time when a pattern language was a song, in which people could sing the whole of life, is gone. The pattern languages in society are dead. They are ashes and fragments in the peoples hands. 237
Heres a wopper:
In the past, each act of planning or design was thought of as a self contained, and original, response to the demands of a local situation. Architects and planners assumed, implicitly, that the structure of the town is generated by the accumulation of these self contained acts.
The picture which our arguments have led us to is radically different. According to this view, there are underlying languages which already contain most of the structure that will appear in the environment. The acts of design which have been thought of as central are acts which use the structure already present in these underlying languages to generate the structure of specific buildings. In this view, it is the structure of the underlying language which is doing most of the hard work. If you want to influence the structure of your town, you must help to change the underlying languages. It is useless to be innovative in an individual building, or an individual plan, if this innovation does not become part of a living pattern language which everyone can use.
And we may conclude, even more strongly, that the central task of “architecture” is the creation of a single, shared, evolving pattern language, which everyone contributes to, and everyone can use. 241
Each pattern is a three part rule, which expresses a relation between a certain context, a problem, and a solution. 247
Patterns are sort of a hard concept to grok, easily the hardest thing in the book. Try and create one! So here it is again:
context