The second and last part of our interview.

Q2: Here’s the next question, and I’d like to play advocate of the devil for a while. I hear your charge that modernists build inhuman cities and spaces, but I wonder if they were not just reacting to tradition, which was already gone in the 1920s and perhaps more against industrial dehumanization itself? I’m just assuming that there was a emancipatory charge to the work of many, but that the law of unintended consequences did not allow them to foresee all the results of their ideas and plans. Similarly concerning tradition, it is steeped not just in positive and communal ways of living, but also in authoritarian social structures. My question is therefore, if you look at tradition, by what method can you distinguish the wheat from chaff, what is the operating procedure or methodology you can use to do this kind of selection. Is it related to the patterning approach by Christopher Alexander? Tell us a little more about the latter, as not all of our readers may be familiar with that important work. In addition to him, who else has been of major inspiration to you and your colleages. An additional question: how do you react to the fact that the new moderns in East Asia, seem hell bent on repeating the mistakes that you describe, on perhaps an even grander scale?

NS: Every generation has reacted in some form (positive or negative) to tradition, and different social classes react in different ways. It is wrong to conclude that only the oppressed react negatively to tradition, since we have seen ideas that destroyed a society emerge from those who were well off — they did it for the fun of it, as an intellectual exercise, because those persons were psychopaths, or just to “be different”. While changes after World War I might be attributed to a reaction against industrial dehumanization, they actually drove the world into a more complete industrial dehumanization, so I don’t know if this is ironic or tragic. Here we move from design into the minefield of politics.

There is a very simple criterion for how to judge the positive qualities of tradition, or specific pieces of tradition: if it empowers the individual to lead a healthier, more fulfilling life. Not necessarily happier, or more just, since all the right conditions in the world cannot guarantee that, but a full life without affecting other human beings negatively. Rather than utopian promises that can only be fulfilled by a state revolution — and which invariably turn around an oppressive system into another oppressive system — I see the value of peer-to-peer ideas of a personal validation of human beings. By contrast, reaction to oppression channelled into a mass movement is often commandeered by another elite to construct its own power structure.

Clearly, one can write down a set of patterns that have been used successfully to manipulate or oppress people, so we must include a value system in evaluating patterns. In computer science, it’s straightforward: patterns are those solutions that help a program run better, while anti-patterns are those recurring pseudo-solutions that keep making things worse. I have classified patterns that manipulate the majority of people for the benefit of a small group, as “anti-patterns”. Most of what we see as architecture and urbanism today, as taught in schools and shown in the media, consists of anti-patterns. I do not ascribe “oppressive” intention to them, however, since in many cases they were actually developed with the best of intentions, and are often linked tightly to an attractive ideology of political emanicipation. Their result is oppressive despite all the good intentions. Both cynical and naive practitioners just apply them for fun and profit, and like to re-use the original claims of “liberation”.

Christopher Alexander gave the Pattern Language to the world, and if people had read it, it would have liberated every individual from the tyrranical dictates of an architectural and urban machine (in the sense of an oppressive system). The patterns in that book are a true liberation, establishing people’s own deep feelings about the built environment as sound and valid. The reason this is so important is that architecture schools, the media, and most architects have been implementing the very opposite for close to a century. And they have been justifying their inhuman product by a massive advertising campaign, exactly like soft drinks and junk food replacing genuinely nutritious food, because some people make a lot of money promoting them, and those same persons would make a lot less money selling and distributing wholesome foodstuff. We now have a significant percentage of the world’s economy driven by the soft drinks and junk food industry, just as we have another major percentage of it driven by the construction of glass and steel skyscrapers and dehumanizing concrete buildings. The architectural/urban situation is “soft” oppression, where a vast power system geared to promoting an unhealthy and dehumanizing built environment is driven by subconscious suggestion. In only a few instances is brute power used, as in monofunctional zoning, and bulldozing owner-built houses so that someone can make a profit by building concrete high-rise blocks.

The situation with the new Asian states awakening from their competitive slumber is absolutely tragic. They are swallowing all the deceptions that originally sold city-destroying, soul-destroying, and culture-destroying architectural and urban typologies to the West. If this were the 1950s, then OK, we might excuse this error as a lack of experience. But we have several decades of mistakes, endlessly documented, endlessly discussed and debated. Why are the new Asian states copying the worst that the West did to their own people and to their own cities? Probably, the reason is that the West itself is still promoting the same destructive typologies — only a minority of us are condemning them, whereas the system is still stuck in a heroic city-destroying mode. We have a bunch of western “experts” that have advised the new Asian states to do precisely what they are doing now. And those experts are making huge fortunes from the ensuing devastation… many people are profiting financially from all this construction, and it churns the country’s economy. But the product is toxic. Incidentally, many people don’t see this in this way; all they see is exciting new buildings and highways going up in the East. The devastating realization will occur when the energy costs are added up, and people realize that they have destroyed their own society.

Some additional explanation of the pattern concept:

Identifying any type of pattern follows the same criteria in architecture as in hardware or software.

1. A repeating solution to the same or similar set of problems, discovered by independent researchers and users at different times.

2. More or less universal solution across distinct topical applications, rather than being heavily dependent upon local and specific conditions.

3. That makes a pattern a simple general statement that addresses only one of many aspects of a complex system. Part of the pattern methodology is to isolate factors of complex situations so as to solve each one in an independent manner if possible.

4. A pattern may be discovered or “mined” by “excavating” successful practices developed by trial-and-error already in use, but which are not consciously treated as a pattern by those who use it. A successful pattern is already in use somewhere, perhaps not everywhere, but it does not represent a utopian or untried situation. Nor does it represent someone’s opinion of what “should” occur.

5. A pattern must have a higher level of abstraction that makes it useful on a more general level, otherwise we are overwhelmed with solutions that are too specific, and thus useless for any other situation. A pattern will have an essential area of vagueness that guarantees its universality.