Christopher Alexander

I’m not a scholarly man and I have no vision to come up with any new theories, what I hope is to get a glimpse of the understanding of the world held by many greater thinkers. But why is it so important for me to get this understanding when I’m just a simple man? It started a few years ago when I wanted to build a nest for myself and my beloved wife. Unfortunately, what should have become an expression of our lives and our unification with the universe, became like being sucked into a black hole, losing all energy and trust in society.

The developer would of course say that it was something wrong with me; as would the people of the bureaucracy. But could it be a problem somewhere else? Could it be that what happened with me was a healthy reaction against sick structures in society? After I came to know Christopher Alexander I see this as a possibility:

The mechanistic idea of order can be traced to Descartes, around 1640. His idea was: if you want to know how something works, you can find it out by pretending that it is a machine. You completely isolate the thing you are interested in – the rolling of a ball, the falling of an apple, the flowing of the blood in the human body – from everything else, and you invent a mechanical model, a mental toy, which obeys certain rules, and which will then replicate the behavior of the thing. It was because of this kind of Cartesian thought that one was able to find out how things work in a modern sense.

However, the crucial thing which Descartes understood very well, but which we most often forget, is that this process is only a method. This business of isolating things, breaking them into fragments, and of making machinelike pictures (or models) of how things work, is not how reality actually is. It is a convenient mental exercise, something we do to reality, in order to understand it.

Descartes himself clearly understood his procedure as a mental trick. He was a religious person who would have been terrified to find out that people in the 20th century began to think that reality itself is actually like this. But in the years since Descartes lived, as his idea gathered momentum, and people found out that you really could find out how the bloodstream works, or how the stars are born, by seeing them as machines – and after people had used the idea to find out almost everything mechanical about the world from the 17th century to the 20th century, people shifted into a new mental state that began treating reality as if this mechanical picture really were the nature of things, as if everything really were a machine.

For the purpose of discussion, in what follows, I shall refer to this as the 20th century mechanistic viewpoint. The appearance of this 20th century mechanistic view had tremendous consequences, both devastating for artists. The first was that the “I” went out of world picture. The picture of the world as a machine doesn’t have an “I” in it. The “I”, what it means to be a person, the inner experience of being a person, just isn’t part of this picture. Of course it is still there in our experience. But it isn’t part of the picture we have of how things are. So what happens? How can you make something which have no “I” in it, when the whole process of making anything comes from the “I”? The process of trying to be an artist in a world which has no sensible notion of “I” and no natural way that the personal inner life can be part of the picture of things – leaves the art of building as a vacuum. You just cannot make sense of it.

The second devastating thing that happened with the onset of the 20th century mechanistic world-picture was that clear understanding of value went out of the world. The picture of the world we have from physics, because it is built only out of mental machines, no longer has any definite feeling of value in it: value has become sidelined as a matter of opinion, not intrinsic to the nature of the world at all.

And with these two developments, the idea of order fell apart. The mechanistic idea tells us very little about the deep order we feel intuitively to be in the world. Yet it is this deep order which is our main concern. – The Phenomenon of Life, by Christopher Alexander, page 16

I should like to say; the whole goal is to make the world whole. The ancient Greek word hamartia is rooted in the notion of missing the mark, and is in our culture better known as the word ‘sin’. The whole goal with our existence, our time on the Earth, is to make the world whole, a living whole. I cannot imagine a greater sin than not making the world whole, because not doing so we completely miss the mark, the goal, and doing this we lose ourselves as well. To see the world as fragmented, as parts – machinelike, according to the mechanistic idea of order – we are creating the framework for the biggest sin ever committed by mankind. This is why we should now enter the post-Cartesian era!

The huge difficulties in architecture were reflected in the ugliness and soul-destroying chaos of the cities and environments we were building during the 20th century – and in the mixed feelings of dismay caused by these developments at one time or another in nearly every thinking person, indeed – I would guess – in a very large fraction of all people on Earth . – New Concepts in Complexity Theory (PDF), Christopher Alexander

But how is it possible to make something whole? Isn’t such a big task better left to God? No, this could not be more wrong! It is our mechanistic idea of order that robs us from what is natural for us to do. And worst of all, this false idea of order has now become so massively pervasive and organised in our society that even if you want to and know how to make something whole, you will be opposed and oppressed by the system. The system doesn’t allow you to become whole, by making your world whole. Our current systems are not whole, not at all.

What is then needed to make something whole? According to my still very small and limited understanding of Alexander’s work I see four key points:

1. It reflects the beauty of the universe, which means it’s bound together by the fifteen structure-preserving properties you find in nature.
2. Always create centers, which together help create stronger centers, to make a coherent and living whole.
   “At the root of these fifteen properties, there appears to be a recursive structure based on repeated appearances of a single type of entity — the primitive element of all wholeness. These entities are what I call “centers”. All wholeness is built from centers, and centers are recursively defined in terms of other centers. Centers have life, or not, in different degree, according to the degree that the centers are built from other centers using the fifteen geometric relationships which I have identified.” (source)
3. It must be generated; it means it must be made up by small steps that at every step adapt to forces or structures in its surroundings.
4. It has its origin in a pattern language. This pattern language should always seek to be in harmony with forces in and between humans and nature, by making meaningful connections between everything, animate and inanimate.

To be honest, the entrepreneurs that built my house were doing the opposite of all this in every way. The only interests they had were, in the following priority: to make money (use the simplest materials implemented in the simplest way), to follow the drawings (a drawing or design made a long time ago by a person far away, used a hundred times at very different places) and to follow the laws (doing the minimum that the building laws require). I cannot see that this entrepreneur, a huge entrepreneur, had any interests for the whole at all.

And this way there could not be any “I” in what they were making for me and my wife, because they didn’t give a damn about me or my wife. A thing, a house, a place, can only be whole if there is an “I” in it, if you feel to be one with the world and the universe when you see it, or live in it.

Another devastating introduction in the early phases of industrial society was the “the invisible hand”, by Adam Smith.

But, by contrast, in the early phases of industrial society which we have experienced recently, the pattern languages die. Instead of being widely shared, the pattern languages which determine how a town gets made become specialized and private. Roads are built by highway engineers; buildings by architects; parks by planners; hospitals by hospital consultants; schools by educational specialists; gardens by gardeners; tract housing by developers.

The people of the town themselves know hardly any of the languages which these specialists use. And if they want to find out what these languages contain, they can’t, because it is considered professional expertise. The professionals guard their language jealously to make themselves indispensable.

Even within any profession, professional jealousy keeps people from sharing their pattern languages. Architects, like chefs, jealously guard their recipes, so that they can maintain a unique style to sell.

The languages start out being specialized and hidden from the people; and then within the specialties, the languages become more private still, and hidden from another, and fragmented. – The Timeless Way of Building, by Christopher Alexander, page 231 – 232

This is the work of “the invisible hand”; this is what happens when cooperation is replaced with competition, the beautiful pattern languages of our communities die.

To believe in “the invisible hand” is like believing in the emperor’s new clothes; it makes no sense. What we should do is dress up with real clothes decorated with beautiful patterns of eternal truth.

What we need now is to replace “the invisible hand” with “the visible hand”. But where is this visible hand? Actually, it could be your hand, because a true pattern language is generated by the actions made by the hands of millions.

Still, the most visible hand I see in the world today carries the name permaculture, and this hand holds a big pencil, a pencil which creates the most beautiful patterns upon the surface of our Earth – a beautiful pattern language.

How can we know that something is whole? What would it feel like if our world were whole? In a timeless world, with a timeless way of living!

When we are as ordinary as that, with nothing left in any of our actions, except what is required – then we can make towns and buildings which are as infinitely various, and peaceful, and as wild and living, as the fields of windblown grass.

Almost everybody feels at peace with nature: listening to the ocean waves against the shore, by a still lake, in a field of grass, on a windblown heath. One day, when we have learned the timeless way again, we shall feel the same about our towns, and we shall feel as much at peace in them, as we do today walking by the ocean, or stretched out in the long grass of a meadow. – The Timeless Way of Building, by Christopher Alexander, page 549

Republished in celebration of the 40-years anniversary of “A Pattern Language“. Original post here.

The post Let’s Make Our World Whole! appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Please, people of Hurdal in Norway, make sure you make your new urban village an all including process of architecture, filling it with spaces for the soul. The best possible start for your project would be a “Pattern Language”-conference.

– A Pattern Language Conference in the Sustainable Valley of Hurdal in 2017?

And DAMN THE MASTERS’ PLAN! (VIDEO)

The post Architecture as a Process & Spaces for the Soul – A documentary about Christopher Alexander appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The elements of a generative code are “unfoldings”. Whether in the evolution of a neighborhood or in the evolution of a building, each unfolding is an operation which gets you from one stage or moment of development (whether conceptual or physical), to the next moment of development. The full sequence of unfoldings gets you all the way from the first stages of conception when a project is no more than a gleam in somebody’s eye, all the way to the final stages of physical, built completion and use.

Unfoldings slightly resemble patterns, in that they are nuggets of information, which help you shape some part or aspect of the environment. However, unfoldings are vastly different from patterns in the way they work, and it is these differences which give them their power and effectiveness.

Each unfolding has three key features which define its operation and its effect.

1. Unlike a pattern, which is a static configuration, an unfolding is dynamic. It acts to generate form.
2. Unlike a pattern, an unfolding arises from the whole, is shaped by the whole, and acts upon the whole
3. An unfolding is by its nature personal, and requires human input and human feeling from the people doing the work, as an essential part of its contribution to the formation of the environment.

1. Unlike a pattern, which is a static configuration that merely serves as a model, an unfolding is dynamic. It acts to generate form.

1.1 An unfolding is a process which gets you from one stage or moment of development to the next moment of development, in the evolution of a neighborhood or in the evolution of a building.

1.2 It is helpful to compare such unfoldings with similar phenomena in plant morphogenesis and embryology. Both in the angiosperm shown below, and in the embryo shown beneath it, you can picture each unfolding as a limited and brief process which in the first one gradually shapes the seed, and in the second, takes the blur that is the beginning of a hand in the embryo, to the next stage of development where the hand gets its first outline fingers.

Diagram of a typical angiosperm (flowering plant) unfolding

Photographs of a human embryo unfolding

Two photographs, three days apart, of a mouse foot unfolding

1.3 An unfolding is a process that operates on the whole. But unfoldings may be very short in duration, or longer. In the angiosperm example, the unfolding that happens between one frame and the next is relatively short in duration, and accomplishes a modest task. The entire sequence of seven pictures for the angiosperm may also be viewed as one unfolding packet, composed of the seven smaller unfoldings happening in a coordinated sequence.

1.4 An unfolding is a process that operates on the whole. But unfoldings may be very short in duration, or longer. In the angiosperm example, the unfolding that happens between one frame and the next is relatively short in duration, and accomplishes a modest task. The entire sequence of seven pictures for the angiosperm may also be viewed as one unfolding packet, composed of the seven smaller unfoldings happening in a coordinated sequence.

1.5 Such unfoldings are the key process elements of every generative code. Only unfoldings can gradually, and one by one, cause the creation of a living neighborhood. Their attention to the whole, and their capacity to generate minute and careful adaptation, step by step, results in the infinite variety and beautiful fitness that we see throughout nature, and in the work of countless thousands of traditional builders in different cultures.

1.6 In providing this first sketch of a library on this website, we are doing our best to pass on, and make public, a first cache of the source material from which a neighborhood can actually be made living: and above all, in a form that can be generated by the neighborhood people themselves, if given the proper framework.

1.7 Pattern Languages. For those who have studied pattern languages, it may be useful to make a brief comparison of patterns and unfoldings.

Originally, the patterns in A Pattern Language were thought of as unfoldings. The languages of traditional society did work like that — by unfolding building designs. Pattern languages were intended to be similar. However, as my colleagues and I worked on the pattern language throughout the sixties and early seventies, the functional content of the patterns, though humane and sensible, was at that time profoundly inconsistent with the modern way of looking at architecture that was then fashionable: in short, modern architecture, for all its talk about functionalism, was not focused on function at all. Indeed modern architecture was studiously avoiding it. In order to make the (then) radical nature of the true functionalism of the pattern language as persuasive as possible, and in order to communicate with people who had lost sight of real function, we spent more and more of our energy writing functional background, to make it clear that these functional things and their spatial correlates raised in the patterns really were true.

As a result, the crucial and central importance of unfolding as the main attribute of patterns became less visible, was obscured, and even our own work on that aspect had temporarily to slow down.

So, it is not surprising that the unfoldings presented here do, in terms of functional content and their overall network relations to one another, resemble the patterns in a pattern language. But the inner content of the unfoldings is different, and it goes back to the intention that originally inspired the pattern language in the first place.

1.8 The actual content of an unfolding, is entirely different from the content of a pattern.

A pattern describes a static configuration that should be made present in a neighborhood, and gives no information, really, about how to make this pattern appear within an ongoing process of design or construction. As a result the design process, which dominates the result of any neighborhood and architectural planning, has little power to be profoundly affected by the pattern.

An unfolding is primarily dynamic. It describes “how to get there from here”, how and when a particular emerging morphology is to be injected into an emerging design, and what actions must be taken to make the appearance succeed geometrically. Thus an unfolding is a hugely different thing from a pattern, and a most important step forward.

In addition, the unfolding (as the very word itself suggests) unfolds the currently existing whole — eg. a building in its environment, a neighborhood in a city. It is focused on the whole at all times, and shows how this whole unfolds, to give birth to new form and new differentiations. This explicit reference to the whole and its unfolding, provides us with a new conception of architecture as that which is being born from the pre-existing whole, and continuing it, thus always helping to give continuity to the city and the earth.

The concept of an unfolding provides an entirely different vision of the nature of architecture and planning, one which is, in principle, at last capable of helping living structure to come into being.

2. Unlike a pattern, an unfolding arises from the particular whole in which it is forming. It is shaped by the whole, and acts upon the whole, and causes the rebirth of the whole.

 2.1 An unfolding, is a glimpse of wholeness, a small microcosm of “the” whole, the whole seen within a small portion of the universe, the world in a grain of sand.

2.2 Imagine the universe as a fountain. It is composed of quarks, electrons, fields, light, and motion. But all this apparatus — the apparatus shown to us by modern physics — has one purpose only. It is as if the purpose of this apparatus, were to create a fountain, which can give forth unending novelty and harmony. It isa fountain in which the drops may be whole worlds or galaxies; and in which the supply of newness that comes from this fountain, is dazzling and inexhaustible.

And the newness comes forth from unfolding. This means, literally, that what comes forth, is always, and continuously, coming from what is there already. In fact, it depends on what is there already to suggest its form.

You know how flake pastry is made. You roll it, and then fold it; roll it and then fold it. What comes out is always the same and always different. That is what this fountain of plenty does.

2.3 Consider a simple unfolding: the process by which house fronts are to be placed in such a way as to create positive space between them. This is not merely an arrangement of house fronts, nor an arrangement of houses. It is a kind of stirring of space, in which house fronts are to be imagined, and placed, in such a way that beautiful space is formed between them. This stirring of space, animates space — creates feeling there. It cannot be imagined by placing prefabricated objects.

2.4 It used to be thought that an electron was a very small object, moving around the atomic nucleus. But the insight of quantum mechanics says something different. In order to see what sort of thing is going on, we have to imagine that the electron is a waveform, extending in the vicinity of the nucleus as a kind of cloud that is, say, the size of an apple. It is a shadowy entity, interpenetrating others, but large, ghostly, and present (as far as atomic dimensions are concerned) everywhere. When we recognize that a small dust particle contains millions of atoms, and millions of electrons — and we begin to see that each one of all these millions is the size of an apple — we begin to see what a hugely different picture this gives us of reality.

Each unfolding is like the apple-size electron. It reaches out, and it is part of the greater whole. It is not a fragment, like a matchbox. It embraces a considerable part of the world beyond itself. It embraces reality, and is reality.

2.5 Consider a relatively simple pattern, like Light on Two Sides of Every Room. This pattern, appears as #159 in A Pattern Language. The problem is stated as follows:

When they have a choice, people will always gravitate to those rooms which have light on two sides, and leave the rooms which are lit only from one side unused and empty.

 

The solution is then given as follows:

 

Locate each room so that it has outdoor space outside it on at least two sides, and then place windows in these outdoor walls so that natural light falls into every room from more than one direction.

This pattern gives us powerful insight about one of the conditions that makes a room pleasant. But it is still abstract, and it is up to us to make use of it, by holding it up as a target of some design process.

What does it mean to say that it is “abstract”? It focuses attention on the end state that is desired: but it does not tell us how to get there. Indeed, producing this pattern in a building, is quite difficult, because it will only come about by some decisions having to do with the volume of the building, by making sure that the building has, at least in some degree, wings of light which are narrow and not too thick, and placing of rooms on the corners of these wings. There is no one moment in the unfolding of the design, in your mind, or on paper, when you can undertake all these acts together — so it is difficult to visualize the action as a real process. It does not fit, in a commonsense way, into the real time when you are making these decisions.

So, you understand what is desired, but you do not have a concrete, and practical picture of how to get there.

2.6 Now imagine an unfolding which tells us that in an important room, we must begin to reshape the exterior walls of the room, its position in the house, the container like quality that is created by the windows bringing light from both sides to the place where we are standing.

First, this unfolding is plainly dynamic, it tells us to do something. It does not merely give us something as a target. This reflects the dynamic quality of every unfolding. But it also mobilizes our emotional energy and emotional engagement, in an entirely different way. If we imagine standing in the place, and are then (in our minds) made comfortable by the sun shining in on us, by the beauty of the light, at the same time coming from another direction, this tells us in a new way — in an entirely new way — the emotional impact which this unfolding has, and ought to have on our actions, and on our results.

The final result of this engagement is that the room, its exterior, its interior, its windows, the relative placement of the windows as they stand around us — all these are mobilized, and the whole, THE WHOLE, is now being transformed and modified in a profound kind act of awakening.

The pattern gives us very useful information. But the unfolding ignites a new sensation that is much deeper than mere information, and that has a much deeper effect on the building which is being formed, and on the mentality and feeling of those who are doing it.

Unfoldings, which are dynamic in nature embrace feeling, and show us the world unfolding and becoming, through the advent of feeling.

3. An unfolding is by its nature personal, and requires human input and human feeling from the people doing the work, as an essential part of its contribution to the formation of the environment.

3.1 Unfoldings are written in common language. They describe what happens as one moves around in space, sees, feels, and takes an action. They involve the feeling and participation of the doer, so that a person acting to undertake an unfolding, is fully engaged, can visualize both the feeling, and the necessity, and then the simplicity of the thing that is taking place, and the simple, but beautiful field which then takes form before our eyes.

I believe these unfoldings, for this reason, come finally, very much closer to the framework of engagement with people which first set me on this architectural path, almost fifty years ago. I believe that at last, I may have found a way — the simplest of all — of engaging people’s feelings — all people’s feelings — in the process of building, in such a way as to undo the results of mechanical, and mechanical-mental oppression — which we have all suffered, through nobody’s fault, during this last age of the two hundred years from 1800 to 2000.

The post WHAT IS AN UNFOLDING? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A generative code is a system of unfolding steps that enable people in a community to create a wholesome and healthy neighborhood. The steps are governed by rules of unfolding that are not rigid, but depend on context, and on what came before. The rules work in a way that is similar to the rules that nature follows to unfold an organism or a natural landscape, much as genetic codes unfold embryos. But these rules unfold a neighborhood and its buildings from the whole, and lead to a unique result for each particular place.The rules tell you how to take specific steps, in a certain way that allows unfolding to proceed.

• Like patterns (identified in A Pattern Language, 1975), the rules cover a great range of scales — all of the major features of the neighborhood, down to the finer details, including open spaces, buildings, connecting paths, rooms, window sills, etc.
• The rules are ordered – sequenced – to unfold each part of the environment being created, smoothly and coherently.
• Also, in the generative code, each rule is specifically tied to a certain group of individuals, whose job it is to undertake that part of the unfolding together.
• Finally, in order to make the process succeed, the overall operation of the unfolding, which goes forward step by step, is accompanied by a general set of practical specifications for the conditions governing land tenure, cash flow, and human organization, and the community in which the process is being carried out.

When a generative code is used, the order in which things are done plays a decisive role in proper execution of the unfolding process.

For example:

• Diagnosis of the site is an essential early step.
• Roads and driveways must be located and built after the pedestrian structure, not before.
• Roads must be located and built after the houses, not before.
• Sewers must be located and laid after public space is created, not before.
• When houses are designed, the garden must be placed (located) before the house volume is located, not after.
• Construction work must begin long before final drawings are ready, and the drawings develop, in parallel with the construction process.
• Windows must be placed, designed, and measured and built, after the walls or wall framing has begun, so that they reflect the real situations in the room, its light, and view.
• According to contract, changes of design which have no effect on quantity of units built, must not be viewed as change orders, but as part of the builders obligation, provided they stay within parameters of quantity and price.

In an unfolding sequence, these things occur in this unusual order, not in the order we might expect from conventional contemporary building methods. This is because each activity is unfolding from the wholeness of the place. The changes of sequence are not whimsical, but necessary, to make sure that each thing can be adapted to the whole, in a successful fashion. They are necessary, in order to allow a coherent unfolding, of the neighborhood, where the right things come first, and the lesser ones take their place in the context provided by the major things. The “right” things, are the ones which have the biggest impact on the environment from a human and emotional point of view, which is capable of making people healthy because their deepest feelings are respected.

The post Generative Codes have Evolved from Pattern Languages, but are Much More Sophisticated Generating Systems appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Almost every building mass visible in this picture, from the town of Trondheim, is a rectangle in plan.

THE BASIC SHAPE OF BUILDINGS

It is true that there are round igloos in the arctic, round wigwams among the plains, rounded mud huts in the Cameroons. Nevertheless, the vast majority of all good buildings, all over the world, for millennia, have been either:

• rectangular, or
• near rectangular, or
• compositions in which rectangles form coherent groups so that one rectangle leans off the next.
• shaped by the shape of the boundary or nearby public way, even when it is curved or acute-angled.

The recent fashion for oddly shaped buildings has come about, for three main reasons:

• First, because people have wanted to separate themselves from the sterile architecture of the 20th century, and somehow, by using more complex shapes, they think they will “do better”.
• Second, it happens simply because of lack of mental discipline. When someone who does not understand the nature of buildings or the nature of built space, or if they do not understand the principles of structural stability, there is a tendency to draw a rounded or odd-shaped polygonal diagram, and then try to make an actual building on the basis of that plan.
• Third, it comes about because people do not understand the nature of the positive space next to the building. A rounded building or an angular building can only very rarely form positive space next to it.

SUMMARY OF TASKS FOR THIS UNFOLDING:

When the rudimentary placing of buildings first occurs, before the individual buildings are designed in detail, create credible and useful rough compositions in which each building is made of any one of the following:

• Make the building mass a simple rectangle in plan — in later elaborations the plan may take on many small helpful details which differentiate its shape and envelope.
• Make the building mass a rough rectangle which may have slight deviations from the perfect right angles in one or two corners, to accommodate the building to an existing context which requires such deviations.
• Make the building a hierarchical arrangement of several rectangles, in which the smaller rectangles “lean up against” the larger ones.
• In cases where the building is close to a road or boundary, shape it to maintain positive space in the public realm, and thus let it be shaped by the shape of the boundary or nearby public way, even when they are curved or acute-angled.

The post Building Shape appeared first on P2P Foundation.

By Christopher Alexander. Original text here.

One of the best ways to see clearly, or to find out what your vision is, is to close your eyes, and imagine that you have just arrived in the place. What do you see? What is most wonderful about the place you see?

WHAT DO YOU SEE WHEN YOU CLOSE YOUR EYES?

It is also very possible to do the closed-eyes process with your friends. Just sit around, all close your eyes together, and talk about what you see.

Write down what you see, in your workbook. It is sometimes elusive, and if you don’t write it down the memory can fade.

WHO ARE YOUR PARTNERS?

What we mean by “partners” are any of the people who are likely to do this project together. They may be lay people, neighbors, professionals, city people, and anyone who has an important part to play, to get the project done. It will take a while to identify these people as a group. Allowing it to form gradually will help the process.

Sometimes you just do not know the people who are likely to live and work in a new neighborhood, because it is too early, or too hard, to identify them. Even in this case, it is helpful — almost necessary — to involve people who are living and working nearby, and treat them as a source of information, and inspiration, so that what you are doing becomes as real as possible, even in the temporary absence of some of your future occupants.

DO YOU ALREADY HAVE YOUR LAND, OR IS IT NOT YET CHOSEN?

Two different scenarios:

(a) A piece of land is already identified. People have a piece of land and have an idea of what they want to do there. Walk the land together. Spend time on the land where you imagine this project can be done. Visit the place fairly often. Involve your partners in continuing conversation about the place and its value. Make sure that you gradually achieve cohesion as a group by being on the land together, and continuing to talk.

(b) A piece of land is not yet identified. People have an idea of what they want to do but haven’t yet found a piece of land where they feel it’s appropriate to do what they have in mind. Even then you can begin thinking about the ingredients of the community, and what will be unique to this place.

WHAT MIX OF INGREDIENTS WILL DEFINE THE NEIGHBORHOOD?

Given the piece of land, what are some of the ingredients you are thinking about putting there?
Is it a conventional group of houses?
Can it contain businesses and workplaces?
How much park and green space would you like to see?
How much in the way of gardens?
Would you like something communal — church, town hall, association? This last is very important — but it needs an inventive attitude and time to think of a communal building that will really work.

The overall mix of things should be inventive, and particular to you. How they fit together may not be immediately obvious and may be hard to talk about, but it is important to do so. How will it work economically? How will it work socially? Given your choices of the above ingredients, you also need to answer the key question How much of each is going to be happening there?

Later these ingredients, may be refined to become patterns, and then steps of the generative code.

A MORE VISIONARY MIX OF INGREDIENTS

The list in the last paragraph may seem a bit bureaucratic or unexciting. That’s because it isn’t yet your list, it is ours. Do you and your friends see a more vivid picture, one with very particular emotional colors, activities, buildings, and businesses? If this vividness is real — then give that reality voice. Your neighborhood will be a more lively place, in the long run people are likely to love it more. And there is probably more chance of it helping to make the world a better place.

If you have an idea for this that you would like to sketch, or if you want to make sketches of some of the elements of your vision, that’s a very good idea. Keep your sketches in your workbook and share them with others.

SUMMARY OF TASKS FOR THIS UNFOLDING:

• Write down a description of the vision you have gained.

• Share it with your colleagues, and edit it until it is more or less shared among all of you.

• It should be written in as much detail as you feel you know, and kept in your workbook.

• It’s to be hoped that this vision is largely shared, but if there are points of disagreement or opinion, not settled yet, then write those down as well.

The post THE NEIGHBORHOOD YOU IMAGINE BUILDING: HERE’S WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO TO START IMAGINING IT appeared first on P2P Foundation.

By Christopher Alexander. Original text here.

GO OUT AND THINK ABOUT THINGS BY YOURSELF

To start with, it’s a good idea to go to the place where you think the neighborhood may be built, just stand there, look around, try to imagine what might happen there, try to draw in whatever inspiration you get from the land. Ask yourself how this idea may work with other people, your friends, your clients, families who may want to live there, small businesses that might like to bring their business to this place.

SIT WITH A FRIEND AND TALK IT THROUGH

You cannot do this alone, you can’t even think successfully about it when you are alone.

Innumerable cups of coffee, many meals together, are the ways to get it moving in your minds collectively. Encourage others who are involved to do this as often possible. They will get excited. So will you.

WALK THE LAND TOGETHER

If you go on the land, just for a walk, taking in what is there, getting a feeling for the place, when gradually your group will have a feeling for the land, together. At this stage a communal quality will already be present, because sharing the land, and the feeling for the land, will tend to focus your thoughts in a common direction, without your even making an effort to try and get this to happen.

AS MORE PEOPLE GATHER HAVE MORE DISCUSSION

If the group of you has meetings around a table, gradually fruitful discussion will emerge, just from your common knowledge of the land, and a slow sense of common ideals that will emerge, in relation to the land. Look at the animated picture of a group of families working with us in Nagoya, Japan.

LOOK CAREFULLY AT THE LAND TOGETHER, AGAIN

As you can see, in this picture people are just resting together, taking it all in, developing their communal feeling for the place, getting to know it, perhaps getting to know the bushes, or the flowers, or the insects and birds.

It doesnt sound like much, but it makes a big difference.

WORK TOGETHER AND WRITE SOME THINGS DOWN IN YOUR WORKBOOK ABOUT YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD, SO THEY CAN BE BETTER SHARED

SUMMARY OF TASKS FOR THIS UNFOLDING:

• Think about things yourself.
• Talk through with a friend.
• Walk the land.
• Look carefully at the land again.
• Write it down!

Looking

Thinking together

Walking the land

Listening

Looking at the land together

Working together

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Consider a neighborhood, or neighborhood-to-be, which is now receiving your attention for the first time. Let us assume that a rough boundary of the area has been established. The area may be part of an existing city, in need of new life or refurbishing. It might equally well be a green field site near a town, or on the edge of an existing town or village.

Rule 1. Let us ask ourselves which place in the area dedicated to the neighborhood most inspires us by its life or potential for life, and also has the greatest capacity for becoming the spiritual and emotional center of the new neighborhood?

In order to do this, we need to walk around the place many times, with others, and alone, asking ourselves which place has the natural magnetism to pull us to go there, which makes us want to stay there, which has the power (potentially) to give us life merely from being there.

On a green field site, where a neighborhood does not exist, this feeling will most likely be generated by a view, by the form of the land which has a natural protected area, a declivity, or by a high spot which looks out. Great trees, are also capable of giving us such a place, naturally occurring water, the edge of a forest, the bottom of a cliff. It is impossible to predict with any general principles, what feature of a particular piece of land will have this character. Each piece of land is different, and will tell you, in its own way, what unique feature, on that land, is best suited to become the spiritual center of a future neighborhood built there.

On a site that is part of an existing neighborhood, or part of an existing town, the procedure is not very different, though it may turn out to be more complicated. ….

Rule 2. Let us now ask ourselves how the place we have chosen as the most natural center, may be enhanced and made profound. What we are asking here, is what kind of actions will support the essence of the place, make it convenient and natural for people to come to it, protect it from surrounding influences, so that it can have its own peacefulness and life.

Rule 3. Let us now ask ourselves how this place, which has been activated (in principle) by our response to Rule 2, may also be made beautiful and tranquil, as a work of architecture.

The way to achieve this is to spend time, gazing on the land, at the place where the building is to be, or at the space itself, as a place and as a beautiful entity in itself. Ask yourself — standing there, and closing your eyes — how high it is, what line will enhance the place, where you would most expect to find the front edge of the building, if it is a peaceful and gentle place.

It will not be out of place, either, to ask childish things, of your inner eye. What color is it? When you close your eyes, what color do you see? What kind of windows does it have? When you close your eyes, what shape are the windows, what figure gives them inspiration, and makes the place worth being in?

Conclusion

As you see, these three rules are not rules in quite the usual sense. The rule does not tell us, magisterially, Do this! Do that!

Instead it is a rule, but the rule says to you, Ask yourself this, and this and this — and it works this way, because the rule knows that if you follow it, the vision of your own heart will answer the question correctly, and know what to do. And it knows, too, that when several of you, do the same — that is, do what this rule tells you, in the way of asking yourselves these questions — then , for the most part, you will find yourselves in agreement with your fellows.

And that is where a lasting sense of unity and harmony within the neighborhood can come from: the results are not arbitrary, but found in the deepest place in your heart. It will last.

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Here is another example of the way feeling must be the clue to wholeness, when we seek to make something alive. I once had an interesting discussion with Sim Can der Ryn. He was arguing that feeling is not enough. In his view it was too vague, too emotional. For instance, he said: “In making a sustainable fishpond which works, you just have to concentrate on the facts about fish life, water, plants, and so on, ecological facts about a healthy pond.“

I told him: “It is true that these ecological facts are a necessary part of our knowledge, our understanding of how to make a pond. And it is true that many of us know too little about what it requires to make the world sustainable, harmonious in its biological and chemical detail, and so on. But suppose, indeed, that we are trying to build a fishpond. The facts about the ecology of the pond – no matter how detailed by themselves – will not tell us how to make that pond good. Even if we have theories and facts about sustainability, edge plants, fish, breeding, water temperature, types of weed, types of insect, and so on – even with all of this we will not succeed in making the pond have life unless we also have a clear inner feeling – a subliminal perception, and awareness, and anticipation – of what life in that pond will be like.” That means we must have a dim awareness within us, of what a pond with life is like, as a whole and in its feeling.

If we do have that feeling of life clear (for the fishpond), we can then use it to guide us. It will help us move towards a pond which does have life. But if we do not have such a feeling clear in us, no amount of knowledge about ecology and sustainability will get us to a pond that has life in the sense I am discussing.

We shall just be left scrambling mentally, churning about, marshaling our facts, making experiments perhaps – but still not clarified by an inner vision which tells us what to do. Building the pond, stocking it, putting weeds in it, placing bushes around it, we need to be guided by an inner vision of good life in this pond. We must have a feeling, in us, which will reliably tell us when we are going in the right direction, and when we are going in the wrong direction.

It is ultimately this inner feeling, this inner vision of feeling, which is our reliable (and necessary) guide. In short, we must be able to imagine the pond – not as a copy of another pond, or with detailed factual vision about dimension, depth, plants. We must be able to summon up, inside us, an inner sensation of the feeling of a healthy pond, which makes us remember or create the kind of feeling which a good fishpond has: the slow movement of the fish, the edge, the light on the water, the kind of things that may be present at the edge – all this, not in biological or architectural detail – but as a morphological feeling which allows me, in my inner eye, with my eyes closed, to remember, breathe, the kind of soft and subtle feeling of life which such a fishpond requires. It is that vision of feeling which, above all, must guide me. – The Process of Creating Life, by Christopher Alexander, page 375-376

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A note from Christopher Alexander

Human relationship. There are two fundamentally different ways of understanding the word “relationship,” when it comes to human beings.

Image: Øyvind Holmstad / Wikimedia Commons

• One of these ways is conventional: this can describe the relationships you have with a shopkeeper, or a policeman, or a banker, or, in very sad cases, with a parent, a spouse, a son or daughter. These relationships are instrumental relationships; they are typically defined by convention – by the rules of behavior as set out by custom or by society.

 * * *

Oddly enough, there is a connection between the process of unfolding, the use of generative codes, and the character of the human relationships you choose.

• If you carefully build relationship, in the second, truer sense, one by one, step by step, with each person you encounter, then gradually the process and understanding of unfolding, will emerge, almost by itself.

• I know this to be true, just from experience. Somehow the deep understanding of how things in the world unfold, emerges from each person in a group, naturally, when there relationships are real.

• It is, I think, because when relationship is real, each person feels able to express what is going on without fear. There is no inhibition from mental constraint; the notion of what must happen in a process of development is not clutched, fearful or uptight, but rather what seems right and natural can flow from the situation.

• That is, of course, what happens as things unfold.

• It arises from acceptance of reality, without imposing mental structures.

In any case I do know from experience that when people are in this kind of relationship, understanding of unfolding then slowly pervades the situation, and the more beautiful and natural structures are allowed to appear in the land. On the other hand, if the relationships that are present are formal, or institutional, relationships then acceptance of what is real is not allowed to exist, and the resulting mesh of mental constraint is so rigid, sometimes even slightly nasty, the most ordinary things are not allowed to appear.

* * *

Unfolding of life then appears of its own accord, almost automatically. Generative codes, and the unfolding which proceeds from them, then appear of their own accord, almost automatically, simply as a direct result of the personal relationships which govern people’s minds.

This is a very beautiful result.

And, sadly, vice versa. In institutional settings, governmental settings, many business settings, the reverse is true. Since the setting guarantees that people cannot feel for each in a way that allows true things to be felt and said, then the result, so often – far, far too often – is a scrambled mess. Intellect cannot solve it. Living environments can hardly ever be born.

This is a very sad result, but true.

* * *

As I get older, what has astonished me, lately, is the dramatic speed of the effect. One beats one’s head against the wall, for years, within the institutional and business context, and never quite manages to loosen it sufficiently, in human terms, to get the desired results. But if you start, without worrying about the results so much, and focus attention only on the building of these true and personal relationships, one by one, then, as if a lever in a mountain stream had unleashed a cascade of water, the process of natural and harmonious unfolding is loosened and happens as if by a miracle.

This is so strong, it is worth taking very seriously indeed, and worth putting it first.

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