Architectural Approaches - Pattern Language and Generative Process

Pattern Language & Generative Process

Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein have identified more than two hundred fifty patterns that they describe as archetypal. This pattern language is archetypal in the sense that it is composed of design elements that we humans have used since we began building shelter. The patterns that Alexander identifies range in size from very large (e.g. countryside) to very small (e.g. radiant heat). It is important that these patterns be implemented over time as a generative process at the site, rather than determined all at once in a ‘flash of brilliance’ on a piece of paper.

Alexander believes that specific patterns themselves, from which buildings or towns are made, may be alive or dead. He defines a living pattern by its ability to “let our inner forces loose and set us free.” When patterns are dead, however, “they keep us locked in inner conflict.”

Alexander also believes that to make a building live, its patterns must be generated on the site itself. This is so that each pattern can take its own shape according to its context. Only when each pattern responds to the others already in place can a site grow as a whole. Only when a site grows as a whole, can a building come to life. In other words, the reason that we feel so ambivalent about modern buildings is that they have been created as an assemblage of separate parts, seemingly independent from each other.

Vishu Magee describes pattern language work as an attempt to identify design elements which complement our own instincts and archetypal nature. In The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander attempts to uncover the roots of pattern language which he sees as shared among all indigenous and agrarian people through all time and space. He defines the timeless way as “that process which brings order out of nothing but ourselves; it cannot be attained, but will happen of its own accord, if we will only let it.” The parallels to the Tao Te Ching are obvious. Alexander continues by describing the quality without a name: “there is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in [hu]man, town, buildings, or wilderness; this quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.” He writes that words often used to refer to this quality without a name include alive, whole, comfortable, free, exact, egoless, and eternal. Yet each one fails to describe the phenomenon completely, and so, Alexander contends, we are left more to rely on our feelings than our intellect. Mystery before mastery. Biophilia before biognosis. Finally, Alexander describes the goal: quality itself: “When a building has this fire, then it becomes part of nature. Like ocean waves, or blades of grass, its parts are governed by an endless play of repetition and variety, created, in the presence of the fact that all things pass.”

In what has been referred to as his magnum opus, a four-volume set entitled, The Nature of Order, (a reversal of the more common inquiry into the order of nature), Christopher Alexander delves deeper into concepts that gave birth to pattern language as well as further into generative process, the importance of the passage of time. In the first volume, The Phenomenon of Life, Alexander points out that our human feelings are mostly the same from person to person. Pattern language, he claims, describes that part of our feeling which is common to 90 percent of us, so that only 10 percent of our feeling is idiosyncratic and personal. Alexander feels that every thing, each stone, every rafter, has some degree of life. Yet that life is not intrinsic to the material itself, Alexander implies, but to the very nature of the deep geometric reality of order in our universe. That geometric reality describes wholeness and it is this wholeness from which life emerges.

He continues that, indeed, life itself is wholeness. Here, by not focusing on things, Alexander seems to transcend the organic life/inorganic substance dichotomy.

Since every form of order has some degree of life, this is where Alexander feels that we need to work. The more that we are able to design for wholeness, the greater the feeling of life that will emerge. Because this degree of life is an objectively real physical phenomenon as determined by the order of space and because life is inextricably connected with human feeling, our experience of deep resonance is a mark of life in things and in places. Further, in an environment that has living structure, each of us tends more easily to become alive.

In his second volume, The Process of Creating Life, Christopher Alexander delves deeper into generative process. He begins by noting that in indigenous cultures, within those building processes which were so closely aligned to natural processes, nearly everything created had living structure by necessity. Alexander cautions, however, against associating living structure with any particular style such as classical, baroque, or postmodern. It does resemble closely, however, ancient and primitive forms in that they are derived from the deepest and oldest archetypes. Alexander notes that most of the places we consider beautiful today have grown over large stretches of time. Examples include medieval cities, Asian monasteries, and the Taos Pueblo. These places display the more fundamental role of process, rather than design, in determining life. This unfolding in time is, above all, Alexander claims, a geometric process. He believes that the essence of every living process is geometric and that this geometry is markedly different from the geometry of design done on a drawing board. All living processes produce deep feeling, says Alexander. Yet the word feeling has been confused with emotions in our modern era. The feeling that Alexander is referring to here is what he calls the experience of wholeness.

Alexander prefers simple designs, since they resolve forces, processes, and conditions with the greatest economy of form. He notes that everything in nature is symmetrical unless there is a certain reason for it not to be. For example, as trees grow upward, they will generally grow outward horizontally in an equally balanced way unless they happen to inhabit a particularly windy spot, such as an ocean coastline or a mountain ridgetop. In such places, trees begin to take on an elongated form, quite similar to that of a sail. Alexander recognizes that at a certain point in the design process, a brutal geometry is necessary. After all, a design that is proper for a leaf and a tree is not necessarily appropriate for human habitation. Once this ‘brutal’ form is determined, it can be easily softened by an appropriate division of space. This will often happen naturally, if generative process is allowed to proceed. Many modern buildings appear cold and monolithic because they have been considered ‘final products’ and are not being adjusted and corrected. Their errors are not being admitted.

In A Vision of a Living World, Christopher Alexander discovers that the core of living process is that it comes from the genuine inner desires of people. The use of living sequence, generative process, helps the builder to respond to what already exists, rather than imposing his own will on the situation. Alexander states that the purpose of each building is primarily to enliven, intensify, and activate the land. Building volumes become beautiful in the context of helping the land. Perhaps this explains why McMansions strike us as so ugly, we intuitively feel that they are only taking from, and imposing themselves on, the land. Even the old aristocratic manor and plantation house gave something back to the land in the form of agricultural husbandry. Alexander believes that the essence of all agriculture is for built materials and human structures to create a setting in which people, animals, and plants thrive. He feels that the geometry of the built structures is what makes the growing of a garden possible. Indeed, Alexander feels that the greatest buildings and the greatest art express this quality of a garden, a quality in which the living process depends on people following their own hearts, on people allowing the call of their own hearts to become actual in that place.

Finally, Alexander feels that the function of a thing and its ornamentation are inseparable. The whole building, he writes, is an ornament. The sensuous quality of a building comes from its details, its subtle vibrations. By recognizing the house as an ornament from the beginning, this sensual beauty emerges naturally. By using simple appropriate forms at the start, the house can then evolve and grow into a more complex structure, much like a living organism does. Alexander is attempting to characterize an architectural geometry of archetypal forms that have the deepest symmetries and most complex form.

In the final volume, The Luminous Ground, Christopher Alexander identifies two worlds in our modern mind: one is scientific as pictured through a highly complex system of mechanisms, while the other is the world that we actually experience. He feels that architecture cannot be good within the mechanical conception. We must gain a vision in which life is understood as something that is objective and inspiring. A vision that places consciousness as a physical feature of the universe and art as not merely a pleasant or interesting activity, but as having an importance that goes to the very core of our cosmology We must shift the paradigm that we work from to one that is more aligned with the world of living experience.