Easily detroyed
Christopher Alexander spent decades analyzing physical reality, and our relationship to it. He wanted to find a way to improve the built environment for people.
At the end of his road, The Nature of Order offers this essential, boiled-down advice: to make something alive, use your feeling.
This works well for those who are sensitive to such things, who have control of their projects (perhaps an architect/developer), and for those who are working directly with Christopher Alexander. But in the rest of the world, it is advice easily dismissed. Even the computer engineers, usually eager for Alexander's ideas, have ignored this potent tool.
It is a tool that is used in indigenous cultures, to this day ... the same ones that are being destroyed by the march of technocracy. It is the tool that built those beautiful, special places, centuries ago, which tug at our hearts when we see them today.
Our modern social organization has separated our modes-of-action completely from the necessary reality -- the reality that could make use of the tool -- so the tool itself is no longer potent. Stand up in front of a City Council anywhere in the US, and describe a process that makes use of feeling. Some heads will nod. And then the buttons that destroy neighborhoods and replace them with parking structures, will still be pushed.
Before the natural tools of humanity are available to us again, we must enable people to unite, to come together again, in coalition, so they have the power and freedom to use such tools. This is the primary work ahead, for students of Alexander's research on the timeless way of building.
At the end of his road, The Nature of Order offers this essential, boiled-down advice: to make something alive, use your feeling.
This works well for those who are sensitive to such things, who have control of their projects (perhaps an architect/developer), and for those who are working directly with Christopher Alexander. But in the rest of the world, it is advice easily dismissed. Even the computer engineers, usually eager for Alexander's ideas, have ignored this potent tool.
It is a tool that is used in indigenous cultures, to this day ... the same ones that are being destroyed by the march of technocracy. It is the tool that built those beautiful, special places, centuries ago, which tug at our hearts when we see them today.
Our modern social organization has separated our modes-of-action completely from the necessary reality -- the reality that could make use of the tool -- so the tool itself is no longer potent. Stand up in front of a City Council anywhere in the US, and describe a process that makes use of feeling. Some heads will nod. And then the buttons that destroy neighborhoods and replace them with parking structures, will still be pushed.
Before the natural tools of humanity are available to us again, we must enable people to unite, to come together again, in coalition, so they have the power and freedom to use such tools. This is the primary work ahead, for students of Alexander's research on the timeless way of building.
1 Comments:
Having read some of Alexander's work, I agree that his central message seems to boil down to capturing this feeling of "wholeness" in a place.
Your entry suggests perhaps you have tried to persuade people to see this central truth and not succeeded? It is disheartening to see that the mind numbing, cookie cutter construction is still the norm in America. Americans love to go on European vacations and rave about the architecture there, and yet seem to be perfectly happy to come back to their sterile, lifeless suburbs.
Your call to "unite, to come together", is very poetic. But at a more practical level do you have any suggestions as to where one might begin?
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