The Germans have a saying: einmal ist keinmal. The ability to do something once, even something wonderful, is ultimately of no value. Repeat-ability, to the Teutonic temperament, is basic validation: it’s the root of the scientific method. It’s a way of establishing what happened, and what is real, if not what’s true.
I find it regrettable, in this light, that the built works of Christopher Alexander are not easily accessible to most of the people I’ve discussed them with — especially given the extent of Alexander’s claims about the nature of order, and having the ability to “make God appear in a field.”
The combination of working as a technology consultant, and being invited to speak at international conferences, has given me the rare opportunity to visit several of Alexander’s buildings, and to put his claims to the test. I’ve been to five of his built projects now, and have re-visited some of them on multiple occasions. In each of these places, the people involved told me the same three things: (1) that these places are becoming more beautiful through the passing of time; (2) that these structures, and the theory of space they’re predicated upon, are completely alien to what other architects and designers would have done; and (3) that people’s lives become more whole and beautiful as a result of their inhabiting of these structures, and dwelling in these places.
Good fit. That’s ultimately what these people are talking about: goodness of fit between the purpose for a building, the conditions of its site, and the given “forces” in the environment.
For example, the pitched roof that characterizes most of the stand-alone residential housing where I live, in the Midwest of the United States: that’s a good fit between the forces of weather, the abundance of timber as a building material, and the desire of people to be indoors comfortably year-round. In cold weather, a pitched roof sheds the snow. In hot weather, the seemingly “wasted” space in the attics created by the shapes of these roofs helps to cool the rooms below.
Alexander first posited this rubric of good fit as a normative criterion for evaluating architecture in his Ph.D. thesis at Harvard[1], and noted that identifying the absence of good fit is a more straightforward operation for most of us than articulating what good means on its own terms.
Prior to visiting some of Alexander’s buildings myself, I had assigned readings from his books to my students at the University of Michigan School of Information for primarily polemical purposes. I wanted to rattle them a bit with the question of what “good” might mean on its own terms. In digital design, products and services are frequently imagined and implemented placelessly: as if the consumer were jacked into The Matrix, and considering this product or that product from among an infinite set of choices at an infinitely-provisioned mercantile[2]. The things we make are good, by this way of reasoning, if they fit the market’s demand.
As a point of departure from the placelessness of contemporary thinking about digital design, I challenged them to consider the so-called timeless criteria Alexander talks about in _The Timeless Way of Building_[3]. How might we (see what I did there?) map some of Alexander’s ideas about value, the self of the maker, and the nature of order into the work they want to do on iPhone apps and websites?
Occasionally, one or two students out of sixty would take this task up with some seriousness, and before too long would visit me in office hours to see if I could relieve them of their distress. They needed me to assure them that what Alexander says in his books isn’t…you know… real. For a number of reasons, not the least of which being the seeming incompatibility between how they’d been taught to think about design and what these teachings insist one must do in order to be, as they might say, “doing it right.”
And having never been to any of Alexander’s buildings, I’d simply turn the question around and ask “but what if it is real?”
My attitude toward Alexander’s teachings prior to experiencing the places and spaces realized in his practice was akin to what Alan Watts said about certain teachings in The Bible:
Sometimes, as St. Paul pointed out, commandments are not given in the expectation that they will be obeyed, but in the expectation that they will reveal something to those who hear them.
[4]
Today, my answer is unequivocal. My interpretive lens: literal. Time and again, across cultures and continents and islands and oceans, in five different places now I’ve examined the evidence, and am persuaded.
Nicht nur einmal: immer wieder.
And it’s not just (or even mostly) architecture nerds who attest to the ways Alexander’s buildings deliver the goods that are promised in the theory. The word most commonly used to characterize professional architects’ attitude toward Alexander and his work is “reviled.” The combination of animus and invective directed at Alexander by architects is all the more astonishing when contrasted with what the people who use these buildings say.
In Japan, for example, the Deputy Principal of a school Alexander built there told me that her students keep on coming back to visit, years after they graduate, because there’s nothing in the world beyond the gates of the school that makes them feel the way it feels to be back there on the campus, in and around those buildings. And she said it was not uncommon for pupils who’d suffered from disorders of one kind or another in their prior school environments to experience relief and healing as part of becoming acclimatized to living and learning on her campus.
In San Jose, California, the clinical program director of a shelter for the homeless told me that the success rates for the programs housed in a Chris Alexander building outperform the same programs when offered in conventionally-constructed buildings.
And in Seattle, Washington, speaking and visiting with a married couple who built their family’s home with Alexander 30 years ago, these contrasting combinations of disregard and disdain from the profession, and awe and wonder from the quotidian, seem to go on and on.
Alexander’s most easily accessible built works are a bench he built at Fort Mason, in San Francisco (almost hidden, behind a historic Fire Station), the municipal farmer’s market in Fresno, California, and the visitor center he built for the gardens of West Dean College in West Sussex, England. All three of these are public spaces, where repeated visits are rewarded by seasonal variations in light, atmosphere, and vegetation.
As I reflect on the extraordinary access I’ve managed to arrange to see the non-public buildings, and to be able to have these conversations with credible people[5] who attest to the truth of Alexander’s theory, I must admit it saddens me. These teachings, and the living structures that attest to their goodness, are supposed to comprise (in Alexandrian cosmology) the ordinary way. I’d like all 60 of my students, each term, to be able to experience these places and the methods for unfolding them for themselves; to hear such stories with their own ears, while looking the storytellers in the eye.
Most of Alexander’s buildings are not open to the general public. It took passing a criminal background check and a few weeks of pre-coordination for me to get the permissions necessary to see inside the Julian Street Inn, which is used to provide residential rehabilitation services to the homeless mentally ill in San Jose, California. In Tokyo, Japan, a conference organizer called in a personal favor to arrange a few hours for me to see Higashino High School[6].
And in Lake Travis, near Austin, Texas, a “for sale” sign by the road in front of one of the three private residences Alexander built there transmuted (I would have told the police officer) what otherwise would have been an illegal act of trespassing into a legal act of self-indulgence, and amateur photo shoot.
You’ll have no luck waiting for the Medlock / Graham house to go on the market, if that’s your strategy for seeing it: since construction began in 1986, Ann and John told me that they have been thoroughly delighted with the way their lives fit into the “beaded necklace” of spaces Alexander set so counterintuitively on the edge of the best part of their property on Whidbey Island, near Seattle.
In an online image collection at the University of Washington[7], Ann Medlock and John Graham’s house is called the “Whidbey Island Pattern House.” Patterns: combinations of problems, conditions, and solutions that, through field research, have proven to be common to the ways that people want to use structures in the built environment. Alexander and his fellow researchers in the 1970s documented and published 253 of these patterns[8], and posited that everyone, not just (or even especially) architects, can adapt and then use the patterns to make places that are alive, and that increase human wellbeing.
On a Saturday morning after an all-day Friday client meeting in Seattle, my colleague and I were invited to meet John at his and Ann’s house for a look-around, and then to have lunch with him in the nearby town of Langley.
The drive up from Seattle was quick, and culminated in a ferry ride that, in season, is known for whale sightings. John is an avid climber and mountaineer, so how wonderful it must have been for him and for Ann to discover, after purchasing their steep, rugged, “rumpled carpet” of a building site, that it is the highest bit of ground on the south side of the island. Ten minutes or so after disembarking from the ferry, our little rental car wended and whined its way up a steep dirt road, forking off once or twice onto successively smaller dirt roads until, at last, we arrived. In 1991, a writer from the Seattle Times described the experience of arriving at and seeing the house for the first time like this:
On the crest of a forested knoll, with land falling off on three sides, the 2,700-square-foot structure looks like nothing so much as a rustic lodge, with horizontal cedar siding broken up by surface-mounted battens. Passing beneath a gaping archway, one enters a clearing framed by the home’s two wings. Small windows, trimmed in green, hug the underside of the eaves, while larger windows line the ground floor below. A protruding porch shelters what appears to be the front door, although most visitors enter through the doorway beneath the arch.[9]
Entering the house through the doorway beneath the big arch, I couldn’t help but notice how tall John is, and the contrast between the relatively narrow width of the entry space and the generous heights of the doorways and ceilings. John told us that he and Ann had visited another residential commission, the Sala house in Albany, California[10], while making plans with Alexander to build on Whidbey Island, and that one of the first things he noticed there was having to stoop down at times to clear the doorways. At the Sala house (built in 1983), and again with the Medlock/Graham house, Alexander adjusted the scale of all the spaces in the structure to the bodies of the people who would live there.
After welcoming us inside, and inviting us to keep our shoes on, John led us a few steps deeper into the entryway to tell us about the spaces we’d be moving through: a procession of rooms that Alexander described as “a sequence of beads, almost like beads on a necklace — each bead [having] a clear and beautiful center, half open to the next.” [11]
John recollected for us the strong disagreement, initially, he and Ann had with Alexander regarding the number of “beads.” Alexander insisted that there needed to be four rooms on the main floor, not three, in spite of there being (at the time of the disagreement) no functional argument for the fourth space. We learned, as John walked us from the entryway into the adjacent kitchen, through a connecting place, and finally into the living room, that the “extra” bead became one of the most important rooms of all, functionally, requiring some genius-level geometry (Alexa, what is a dodecahedron?) to reconcile into the rest of the scheme.[12]
That third space became the joint between the upstairs and downstairs, and between the inside and the outside. Reflecting back on the disagreements, often heated, that he and Ann had had with Alexander during the design and construction of the house, John laughed and said he was glad to have been proven wrong, and grateful that Alexander had refused to yield on several design and construction considerations.[13]
In addition to having been “wrong” on the matter of the 3rd and 4th main-floor spaces, John told us he was equally wrong about the design of the windows looking out into the Puget Sound and Olympic Peninsula.
The reasons Alexander had for situating the house on its site just so, the reasons he had for making the windows a certain way, and for determining the relationships between the spaces, have become clearer for John and Ann over the years of living in the house together. As their guest, and as an architecture enthusiast, I enjoyed trying to use the research from _A Pattern Language_ to understand some of the extraordinary choices Alexander made in the course of building this place. After all, the reason John and Ann decided to work with Alexander in the first place was because of Ann’s love for the Pattern Language book, and her ability to think and work with patterns in her creative practice as a painter and colorist.
As you look at the photos below, consider the way the patterns described below explain what you’re seeing[14].
Site Repair**
On no account place buildings in the places which are most beautiful. In fact, do the opposite. Consider the site and its buildings as a single living eco-system. Leave those areas that are the most precious, beautiful, comfortable, and healthy as they are, and build new structures in those parts of the site which are least pleasant now.
[15]
Holy Ground*
In each community and neighborhood, identify some sacred site as consecrated ground, and form a series of nested precincts, each marked by a gateway, each one progressively more private, and more sacred than the last, the innermost a final sanctum that can only be reached by passing through all of the outer ones.
[16]
Long Thin House*
In small buildings, don’t cluster all the rooms together around each other; instead string out the rooms one after another, so that distance between each room is as great as it can be. You can do this horizontally — so that the plan becomes a thin, long rectangle; or you can do it vertically — so that the building becomes a tall narrow tower. In either case, the building can be surprisingly narrow and still work — 8, 10, and 112 feet are all quite possible.
[17]
Tapestry of Light and Dark*
Create alternating areas of light and dark throughout the building, in such a way that people naturally walk toward the light, whenever they are going to important places: seats, entrances, stairs, passages, places of special beauty, and make other areas darker, to increase the contrast.
[18]
Small Panes**
When plate glass windows became possible, people thought that they would put us more directly in touch with nature. In fact, they do the opposite. They alienate us from the view. The smaller the windows are, and the smaller the panes are, the more intensely windows help connect us with what is on the other side.
[19]
Photos © Christopher Alexander /Center For Environmental Structure
Photos © Ann Medlock and John Graham
Seeing and experiencing, first-person, the mastery of Alexander’s knitting-together of materials, geometry, geography, topology, and a client’s dreams is thrilling. And even while I take these pains to try and translate something of what I’ve come to appreciate and believe about Alexander’s teachings and work, I will again admit that pictures and words were ultimately incapable of unlocking the visceral understanding I myself needed in order to make the move from curious observer of, to active participant in, the community of practice that’s grown around Chris and his wife, Maggie Moore Alexander.
What’s even more exciting, as I’ve become involved with the work that’s being done in Sorrento, Italy with the post-graduate Building Beauty program[20], is bearing witness to the repeatability of Alexander’s theory in the work of the students. The rigor that they’ve applied in their investigation of Alexander’s claims about the order of space, and the ability they’ve shown to apply those theories to built structure, is attracting learners, practitioners, and teachers from all around the world.
Registration for the 2019/20 academic year at Building Beauty is now open. And next semester, when my students in Ann Arbor ask me if it’s true, if it’s real, if Alexander can really deliver on his claims, I can answer with a question more: why not roll up your sleeves and see if you can?
References
Photographs not identified otherwise are by the author.
[1] Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964)
[2] In the Wachowskis’ iconic film The Matrix (1999), this infinite mercantile is called The Construct, and to my eye is not unlike the aesthetic and attitude of an Apple retail store.
[3] The Timeless Way of Building (1979)
[4] Alan Watts, On Being God (1977)
[5] I spoke with Patricia Dolan, Clinical Program Director at Julian Street Inn, and Yoko Kitamura, Deputy Principal at Higashino High School and can provide contact information upon request.
[6] In Alexander’s CV, this project is referred to as New Eishin University, Tokyo, Japan
[7] https://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/digital/collection/buildings/search/searchterm/whidbey%20island%20pattern%20house
[8] A Pattern Language (1977)
[9] http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19911020&slug=1312017
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sala_House
[11] Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, volume 3, page 413.
[12] Alexander’s colleague, Bin Jiang, made an observation while providing a technical review of this article that the resolution of the problem of the “beads” at the Medlock/Graham house reflects a scaling law in living structure, where there are far more smalls than larges.
[13] I recognize the risk of slipping into the mode hagiography as I enthuse about these experiences and share anecdotes. I will note that Medlock and Graham did not characterize all of the disagreements between client and architect as valuable and essential to attaining the service and results that they expected and demanded. The owners’ telling of the process of making the Medlock/Graham house is underway, and I hope it becomes a book: https://www.annmedlock.com/building-with-christopher-alexander-an-illustrated-memoir
After reviewing a draft of this article, Ann Medlock noted that they’d started talking with Alexander about the site on Whidbey Island in 1984, and that the build-out unfolded over three years (with Ann and John moving in on 8/8/1988). Recollecting some of the disagreement described in the article, Ann shared the following anecdote:
We had all been uneasy at the sticks-and-strings-in-the-woods + pencil sketches stage. Something just felt off.
Chris went for a walk in the woods and came back with a new sketch (on the back of a receipt from a gas station!).
He’d put in that space where the stairs would end and the porch would open.
Immediately, I felt my shoulders come down from my ears. This was The Answer. We all felt it.
The disagreement was about the door to the porch!
The customary thing would be to put a glass door there so each time you came down you’d be greeted by the mountains and the sea.
Chris was sure the door had to be solid and despite our objections he ordered up a custom door, of solid wood.
It cost a lot so we sort of had to agree to it rather than blow all that money. :-)
And of course, he was absolutely right. If you wanna see the mountains and the sea, you should have to make a little effort.
It should never be a ho-hum view.
[14] All of the patterns I have selected for reflection in this article are marked in the text with one or two asterisks, of which the authors say:
Asterisks represent our degree of faith in these [patterns].
But of course, no matter what the asterisks say, the patterns are still hypotheses, all 253 of them — and are, therefore, all tentative, all free to evolve under the impact of new experience and observation.
[15] Pattern number 104, p. 508
[16] Pattern number 66, p. 331
[17] Pattern number 109, p. 535
[18] Pattern number 135, p.644
[19] Pattern number 239, p. 1108
[20] As stated on its website, the Building Beauty program “explores the principles expressed in Christopher Alexander’s _The Nature of Order_ through an integrated approach to hands-on making, appropriate technology construction and self-aware design (at the individual and community levels). The program, housed at the Sant’Anna Institute in Sorrento, Italy, offers a one-year life-changing intensive experience in one of the world’s most remarkable environments, where the natural and the man-made have historically evolved into an integrated whole of astounding beauty.”
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