Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
None
What emerges from A Pattern Language is a vision of life and how it should be. A society where people are mixing and aren’t isolated. There’s a good saying: when the revolution starts, everyone should know where to go. And if you think about your town, what is the public square? Having a center or public square where people gather is part of being in a real city. Having civic life means having these public spaces. And in these spaces, you can have carnivals, you can have old people and young people playing chess outside. What makes an idyllic city? It’s certainly one that has social engagement.
None
Another suggestion in A Pattern Language is animals everywhere
None
guide to the elements that are needed to make great places but it has this bizarre and surprising mixture of things. You see things about how to design walkable cities and good roofs, but then there are suggestions like “Old People Everywhere.” It says a good city should have a mix of ages, lots of old people about. One of the recommendations is “A Carnival.” Or “Dancing In The Street.” My favorite is “Child Caves.” Any good space should have smaller spaces that are only accessible to children, because children love to have a little cave they can go in.
None
They are taking aspects of human life that make being alive joyful and interesting and then treating those as being important design elements.
None
Alexander, in one of his books, imagines himself sitting down at a table cutting open an orange, and imagining what the room beyond him looks like. That’s a totally different perspective from the high-level or God view of this giant contorted cube of a building, or drone shots, perspectives you would never have. Flying through the sky looking at a building. Renderings can be very deceiving. And a lot of architects are so obsessed with the abstruse terms of the geometry and the little transformations they’ve done, whether or not the center is occupied, or iterations of certain patterns, that they’ve totally lost track of the people inside.
None
When architects design with CAD software, they have these little things called “scalies,” which are tiny representations of people that you litter your model with to simulate human inhabitants. You also look at your building from the God’s eye view. Not from the first-person subjective experience. So one of the things that Alexander does is start from the point of view of the subjective experience of those who have to live in a space. And there’s something radically democratic about his project, this idea that if a thing is beautiful, it shouldn’t only be the people who know the math behind it who can appreciate the beauty. It should be everyone who lives and works in the space.
None
Peter Eisenman, who I mentioned earlier, has a marvelous quote, something like my job is not to think about what people want, it’s to think about what they would want if they knew what they should want. He once designed a house that was so bizarre, very geometrically innovative but totally inconvenient. The clients could barely inhabit it successfully. (“Eisenman grudgingly permitted a handful of compromises, such as a bathroom.”)
None
there are all these really nice balconies and arcades against the street and it’s one example of an “in between zone,” part inside and part outside. And that kind of gradation of space helps generate life in the sense Alexander was writing about.
None
I learned about Alexander, actually, from a computer programmer who designed his own house in Miami on “Alexandrian” principles. It was a cool kind of Key West style house. But in applying Alexander’s philosophy, what he did was make sure that you could inhabit every space, and that every space was its own thing. Let’s take the transition. There’s a porch between the indoors and outdoors. It’s a transition space you can inhabit. Then the window ledges are all thick enough so that you can set a coffee mug down on the ledge. A small detail. Then you think about the passages between different rooms. It’s not just a tiny wall, it’s like maybe a three foot thick arch between different rooms, that creates this zone between rooms and these proper transitions. Making every space its own is something he took directly from Alexander, and he built a super-sustainable house. It was really interesting to see how using this philosophy made a richer space.
None
To implement a pattern language, you go to a site, you sit down, you have some kind of relaxing drink, and imagine what patterns might be layered into it to generate kind of the code or DNA of the community. You can pose a pattern language like a poem. So you’d think about the City-Country Fingers [Pattern #3], and then a Work Community [Pattern #41]. Within one of the neighborhoods, you’d have a Main Gateway [Pattern #53] that leads into it. Each of the work communities has a square out front, they cluster to form a square [Pattern # 37], but there’s a quiet back. Everyone has their own kind of individual space, and the rooms or the offices have light coming in from two sides [Pattern #159]. And you can imagine Pools of Light [Pattern #252]. So you can imagine weaving together a community.