General talk about software patterns

[Linda Rising <risingl AT acm.org>]

 Architecture's Irascible Reformer
July 12, 2003 By EMILY EAKIN 


ARUNDEL, England - Moss grows from the steep, pitched roof
of the West Dean Gardens visitors' center. Carefully
trained grape vines hug its walls. And the facade,
approached by a curving gravel path, is a pleasing tapestry
of flint, brick, concrete and Portland stone. 

Over all, the effect is quaint. The center, which houses a
gift shop and a cafeteria for the 35-acre gardens next
door, could have been plucked from the pages of a fairy
tale - a primmer English version of "Hansel and
Gretel." 

But to Christopher Alexander, the architect who designed
it, the center represents something much less whimsical: a
small social revolution. 

For nearly four decades, Mr. Alexander, 66, an emeritus
professor of architecture at the University of California
at Berkeley, has been waging a quixotic campaign of
messianic ambition: to heal the world by reforming the way
it builds. 

Humanity, he says, is ailing. And the built world is both
source and symptom of its disease. Where there should be
beautiful buildings in harmony with nature, he says, there
is mostly "architecture which is against life" instead,
"insane, image-ridden, hollow." 

By this, Mr. Alexander means not only strip malls, office
parks and tract homes, but also much of what is fawned over
these days by highbrow critics. In his view, the recent
spate of flashy confections by big-name stars - from Frank
Gehry's glittering Guggenheim Bilbao to Rem Koolhaas's
interactive Prada boutique in SoHo - is not just
pretentious and sterile. It is actually making us ill. 

"Architecture is a very strange field," Mr. Alexander said
over lunch here in the medieval town not far from West Dean
Gardens where he grew up and has lately been spending much
of his time. "It's almost as though they've induced a mass
psychosis in society by introducing a point of view that
has no common sense and no bearing on any deeper feeling." 

But Mr. Alexander, a bearlike, weather-beaten man with
doleful blue eyes and rumpled khakis, is no mere
curmudgeon. Having made his diagnosis years ago, he has
dedicated himself to propounding the cure: an architecture
based on what he calls an objective science of beauty. 

It's a mission that has put him starkly at odds with most
of his profession, where he is variously described as a
reactionary, a mystic or a Lear-like madman ranting on the
moors. It doesn't help matters that, like Shakespeare's
prickly king, Mr. Alexander is, as he apologetically put
it, "an excitable person": brilliant but conflict-prone. 

"He's a self-proclaimed outsider," said the architect Peter
Eisenman, who famously debated him at the Graduate School
of Design at Harvard in 1982. "I think Chris unfortunately
fell off the radar screen some time ago. He got off into
being cranky." 

But even his detractors concede him a grudging respect.
After all, Mr. Alexander's popular following is enormous. 

Better known for his writings than his buildings, he is the
principal author of "A Pattern Language" (Oxford University
Press, 1977), one of the best-selling architectural
treatises of all time, still selling 10,000 copies annually
more than 25 years after it first appeared. His devotees
range from amateur home builders and community activist
groups to the Prince of Wales, who invited him to serve as
a trustee of his Institute for Architecture in London and
helped recruit him to design the visitors' center at West
Dean Gardens. 

Among computer programmers, he has attained near-guru
status. Will Wright, the creator of "The Sims," the
nation's most popular computer game, routinely cites him as
a major influence. And he's an unlikely inspiration behind
a powerful movement in software design known as
object-oriented programming. 

Now Mr. Alexander's iconoclastic reputation is likely to
grow some more. This spring, he finally completed his
four-volume, 2,150-page magnum opus: "The Nature of Order:
An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the
Universe." After laboring over it for 27 years, Mr.
Alexander had a falling out with his editors at Oxford
University Press and is now publishing the work himself
through his Center for Environmental Structure, a nonprofit
organization in Berkeley dedicated to promoting his ideas.
(Sun Microsystems contributed money to help defray printing
costs.) 

Much more than a do-it-yourself construction manual (though
it is that, too), "The Nature of Order" is a grandiose,
polemical, sumptuously illustrated and utterly singular
inquiry into what Mr. Alexander calls "first principles":
the essence of life itself. Available since May for $75,
the first volume, "The Phenomenon of Life," has already
sold 4,000 copies. In it, he lays out his view that beauty
is a matter neither of taste nor opinion but rather an
inherent attribute of living things. But Mr. Alexander's
definition of life is hardly the standard one. 

"Life is not a limited mechanical concept which applies to
self-reproducing biological machines," he declares in the
introduction (which, like the rest of the volume, appears
to have been only lightly copy-edited). "It is a quality
which inheres in space itself, and applies to every brick,
every stone, every person, every physical structure of any
kind at all, that appears in space. Each thing has life." 

He describes 15 "structural features" fundamental
geometries of order - that signal vitality in plants,
animals and objects. If respected by architects and
developers, he argues, these features - which include
"strong centers," "alternating repetition" and "levels of
scale" - would result in a built world that is both
beautiful and alive. To the untrained eye, however, the
concepts are not necessarily intuitive. It may not be
obvious that - to take just a few of the book's hundreds of
examples - the Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia has
"strong centers," while a 1971 Minnesota house by Bruce
Goff does not. Or that a Shaker cabinet radiates "the most
beautiful inner calm," while a pair of carved wood Italian
chairs from the 1920's are "gross and utterly lacking in
inner calm." 

Reviewing a galley of "The Phenomenon of Life" in the
journal Architectural Record in May 2002, William S.
Saunders, the editor of The Harvard Design Magazine and an
admirer of Mr. Alexander's early work, called the book
"full of contradictions, foggy generalities and extreme and
unsupported assertions." He compared Mr. Alexander to
Casaubon, the deluded scholar in "Middlemarch" who devotes
fruitless years to compiling a grand synthesis of all the
world's myths. 

The architect Moshe Safdie, a close friend of Mr.
Alexander's for 40 years, worries that some readers may be
put off by the book's mystical tone. "This sense that there
are intrinsic qualities, difficult to explain, but which
you somehow feel when you are in the presence of great
beauty," he said. "He wants you to accept it, grasp it and
follow it almost as a religious teaching." 

Another stumbling block for architects is Mr. Alexander's
idiosyncratic building style, he continued, adding: "People
go from the ideas, which they could interpret freely, to
the solutions, which they see as somewhat anachronistic,
somewhat craft-related, stylistically somewhat Victorian.
They see him as a reactionary." 

It wasn't always this way. Mr. Alexander once ranked among
the profession's vanguard. Born Wolfgang Christian Johann
Alexander to Austrian parents who were archaeologists in
Vienna, he fled with his family to England during the
Anschluss. They eventually settled in Arundel, where his
mother and father taught high school. Mr. Alexander
graduated from Cambridge University with degrees in math
and architecture. 

Asked as part of one assignment to design a house, he
instead submitted a spoof of the formalist theory he had
been taught: a glass box slashed by giant brick walls. "A
completely abstract, pointless notion," he said. To his
amazement, the head of the department called him into his
office to congratulate him. "He said, `Christopher, my boy,
this is exactly what we want,' " Mr. Alexander recalled. "I
thought, Oh my God, I've walked into the nut house." 

In 1958, he left England for what he rightly guessed would
be the more open, experimental culture of Harvard. For his
Ph.D. dissertation in architecture, published in 1964 as
"Notes on the Synthesis of Form," he proposed a rigorous
and - for the decade - technologically precocious approach
to architectural design involving algorithms and computer
analysis. It earned him instant renown. 

He also spent time living in India. When the Indian
government asked him to help rebuild a village that had
been displaced by a dam, he reluctantly declined. 

"I knew that the village would be meaningless if it weren't
generated by the people in the village," he explained. "And
I didn't know how to harness the energy and thought of the
people to create their village. I thought: I've got to
figure out how that is done." 

His solution was "A Pattern Language," written over nearly
a decade with the help of five collaborators, colleagues
and students at Berkeley, where, in 1963, Mr. Alexander had
become a professor. Printed on nearly 1,200 pages of
wafer-thin paper, the book had the look, weight and
commanding moral tone of a Bible. 

Arguing that homes, neighborhoods and towns should be
designed not by professionals but by the people who live in
them, the authors presented the book as an all-purpose
how-to guide for creating a global utopia: the built world
boiled down to 253 patterns. From "country towns" (pattern
6) and "green streets" (pattern 51) to "six-foot balcony"
(pattern 167), no design feature was too big or too small
to merit detailed consideration. 

Buildings should be no more than four stories high (pattern
21), the authors stipulated. Town squares should include
paved surfaces for dancing in the street (pattern 63). And
people should sleep facing east (pattern 138), for optimal
well-being. 

These were not arbitrary rules, Mr. Alexander and his
collaborators insisted. Rather, they were "archetypal"
patterns, "so deeply rooted in the nature of things, that
it seems likely that they will be a part of human nature,
and human action, as much in 500 years, as they are today."


Melding a 1960's feel-good social philosophy with a
rigorous structuralism, the book had broad appeal. Like
Jane Jacobs's "Life and Death of Great American Cities"
(1961), "A Pattern Language" offered a promising
alternative to the sterility and exhaustion of modernist
architecture. 

By the early 1980's, computer scientists were eagerly
discussing the book as well. In Mr. Alexander's patterns,
programmers saw the solution to a software design problem
that had long plagued the field. According to the dominant
approach at the time, whenever a program was needed, one
would be written from scratch, a method that tended to
produce unwieldy and bug-ridden software. Inspired by "A
Pattern Language," computer scientists discovered they
could get more efficient and reliable results if they
thought of programs as assemblies of predefined code
patterns instead. To the thousands of programmers who use
this approach today, said Richard Gabriel, a computer
scientist at Sun Microsystems and a leading advocate of the
software patterns approach, "Chris is a revered cult
figure." 

In his own field, his reputation has proved more fickle. By
the 1980's, structuralist theory had given way on American
campuses to the more playful and rule-free dispensations of
deconstruction and postmodernism. At Berkeley, Mr.
Alexander came into increasing conflict with colleagues. He
says he and and his students were victims of intellectual
harassment. In 1985 he filed a formal complaint against the
university, charging it with violating his academic
freedom. Seven years later, the matter was quietly settled,
and in 1998, he retired. 

But the embattled life seems to agree with Mr. Alexander,
who has been getting up at 2 a.m. to work on a new book,
"Deep Adaptation." Skeptics, he said cheerfully, would do
well to recall the success of "A Pattern Language." As he
put it: "Even the cautiously skeptical reader might say:
`He did it once. Maybe it's possible that he's done it
again.' " 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/12/arts/design/12ALEX.html?ex=1059018101&ei=1&en=1dd165623370cd6c