11 February

Was sad to hear that Christopher Alexander died, nearly 2 years ago. Alexander was a giant of modern architecture, entirely different. His ideas went well beyond architecture, agile software development and wikis for example stemmed from his work. He strongly believed you couldn’t create a building with any great beauty or even functionality using the method we use now, with drawings then built out on site. He thought buildings needed to be built from patterns, patterns that repeat at multiple scales, with the design evolving during the building process itself. An example of a pattern is ‘light on two sides of every room’. The patterns he developed were all derived from the lived experience of buildings, things people found inspiring in them. They were simple statements, not drawings, in a hierarchical list, so that the big and small patterns were always linked together, every pattern shaped every other pattern, every detail in the building went towards creating the larger whole of the building, and every change to that whole shaped the details. Once you had the pattern list, the building would then evolve from them on site, in the process of construction. He compared this process to cell differentiation, where instead of adding bits and pieces together to create a whole, you began with the whole (the cell), which then differentiates into different details, with the whole and the details always woven together, so that changes to one always changed the others, at the same time. He refined this process over time, but it was this idea of nested patterns that software makers for example took up.