Contrarian: Christopher Alexander
Giving Muggles agency in the design of spaces.
You'll find context for this post, which is part of a short series, here. This is the last of the Contrarians, but not the end of said series.
Christopher Alexander, an architect and urban planner, spent his life studying life and beauty. CA really wanted to understand and communicate what causes some spaces to feel alive, generative, and inviting, and other spaces to feel the opposite. The spaces might be as small as a family room or as large as a village.
His ideas on beauty got a bit more abstract. For example, he was quite convinced that most people presented different items two at a time would agree on which of the two was more beautiful. I won't claim to understand his four-volume tome, The Nature of Order, in much depth, but I love his earlier work on Pattern Languages, and point to it often.
Distilled wisdom
Patterns are distilled wisdom. Pattern Languages are webs of related Patterns that point to and rely on one another. Together, they form a framework for expertise in some particular domain.
For example, you might imagine a Pattern Language for cooking that includes wisdom such as "timing is key," "let things caramelize," "clean as you cook," and "prep everything before you start cooking." (If you kept going, it might look like this.)
The best Patterns are memorable, and become a kind of shorthand between people working on a project. In debating where to place windows and doors in a room, you might say, "We could do that, but it would violate Light on Two Sides" (of Every Room). That short phrase carries nicely the general idea that inviting rooms have natural light from at least two walls. You'll notice this the next time you're in a long, narrow restaurant that only has windows to the street.
Kind people have left useful resources online to help us understand and apply the 253 Patterns that were in the original work, A Pattern Language (1977). For example, here's a useful summary of all the patterns, and here's a version on Github. But the full text of the Ur-Patterns, alas, appears to be locked in the book still.
An invitation of trust
What I loved immediately on learning about Pattern Languages was that they shifted the way clients could participate in the making of their dwelling. Today, when somebody says "we built a house," often what they mean is, "We chose one of four floor plans, then we got to choose what kind of knobs to put on the kitchen cabinets, which veneer went on the cabinets, and what carpets went into our place." Not a lot of design involved, right?
Distilled wisdom that is contextualized and memorable is really important in helping amateurs — who I like to refer to as Muggles — participate at much higher levels in sophisticated things like designing a home or neighborhood. Offering a Muggle access to a Pattern Language says to them, "If you level up a bit, we can trust you to be part of more difficult parts of the design process."
Now imagine there were Pattern Languages everywhere, as ways of helping us level up in any domain at all. Here's my incomplete list of existing Pattern Languages (some links may require a boost from the Wayback Machine). Send me yours to add!
Before we've become so reliant on AIs that we no longer need written Pattern Languages (because we've turned over all design and decision-making to those AIs), let's litter the world with them, then keep improving them together. In fact, the new AIs might be extremely useful in composing and structuring new Pattern Languages, and in pointing those out as resources when it's appropriate.
Shared wisdom is one of our paths forward in these topsy-turvy times.
As is unfortunately the case with many of my Contrarians, many (most?) architects and urban designers did not take kindly to CA's recommendations. Relinquishing full control over a design also means taking more of your ego out of it. That process might make the client happier, but limits your ego boost at pointing to your personal monument.
Here's how I described CA and his heresies at U22:
Next up: a Contrarian Overview.
As you'll see in this short series, Contrarians are masters of rethinking constraints. They are also the foundations of Design from Trust.
If you read this far, a treat: In my online Brain, you'll find all my Contrarians here, where you can see them in their greater context.
This article is cross-posted on Substack here, Medium here and LinkedIn here. It's also here in my Brain.