[Scpg] An interview with "Pattern Language" author Christopher Alexander by Rob Hopkins

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

An interview with "Pattern Language" author Christopher Alexander
by Rob Hopkins
0

http://energybulletin.net/stories/2010-12-23/interview-pattern-language-author-christopher-alexander



I know that I have officially signed off for 
Christmas, but I can't resist the temptation to 
post this now, think of it as my Christmas gift. 
About 3 weeks ago, I travelled to a snow-covered 
West Sussex to meet one of my heroes. Christopher 
Alexander, architect, thinker, designer, author 
of the seminal 'A Pattern Language' and of the 
more recent extraordinary 'The Nature of Order' 
series of books, has long been someone whose work 
I have admired greatly. It is sometimes said that 
it is generally best not to meet your heroes as 
they usually disappoint, but that wasn't the case 
here. I met Chris and his wife Maggie in their 
beautiful old home (I'm starting to sound like a 
writer for Hello! magazine), and after lunch and 
a general chat about the Transition approach 
(about which Chris knew very little in advance of 
our conversation), we did the following 
interview. I am deeply grateful to them both for 
a fascinating and illuminating afternoon.

The first question is, how did A Pattern Language 
come about? Where did the idea come from?
Oh that I can tell you very simply. In 1961 I 
went to India - lived in a village. I was a 
fellow at Harvard and I just wanted to go to 
India, I always wanted to go there. I had Indian 
friends from all over the shop but I'd never been 
there. So the Society Fellows were kind enough to 
send me out there. I was living in this village - 
just mud huts, there was only one brick building 
which was vaguely temple-ishŠ.at a scale and 
finish of a porch in a cow barn. I actually did 
something quite similar to what I was describing 
to you, in one of my books - it contains that 
analysis - and they're all about issues 
pertaining to a simple Indian village. I made a 
set of diagrams - it was very early on in my 
career, it was one of the first projects I ever 
did.

Then it was time for me to go back to the States, 
so I went back to Harvard where I still had about 
another year to run of my Fellowship. And then 
one day I get a letter from a fairly high 
official in the state of Gujurat. He had somehow 
seen or heard of these diagrams I had made and so 
they wrote to me and said, look, would you be 
willing to come and plan a village because a dam 
was being built in the vicinity and so all those 
people were going to be dispossessed. My first 
reaction was, how fabulous, I must try to do 
this. Then I sat and brooded about this thing for 
a couple of weeks before answering the letter.

This was the first sizeable commission of any 
sort that I'd ever had. I wrote them a letter and 
said, "I'm very, very sorry but I can't take this 
project on. I'd love to do it, I have the time 
and the energy but I'm not sure it would work 
because although I made and an analysis of all 
kinds of cultural issues, having to do with that 
kind of village, number one I don't know for 
sureŠŠit's classic for someone who thinks he's a 
semi-anthropologist to come in and completely 
mis-understand or screw it up". I said I really 
couldn't take the risk of doing that when I think 
there were a thousand people involved. I said I'd 
love to do it but I just can't do a good enough 
job, so I don't want to do it. And that was it. 
There was no come back to it - I was serious and 
I meant what I said.

I was pretty annoyed with myself because I really 
wanted to do something like that - but I knew I 
was making the right choice. And thenŠ.that 
Spring I sat and thought in my apartment in 
Cambridge, Mass., about this problem and how 
aggravating it was, and what could I do about it. 
I actually read quite a lot of anthropology, 
particularly anthropology governing human 
settlements, villages and houses. I became 
familiar with the literature of fifteen or twenty 
different cultures, just to see how it worked. 
What I was asking myself when I read these 
various ethnographies, was what was going on? How 
come people knew how to build beautiful and 
practical buildings without any architects? 
Sounds like a ridiculous question, but it was 
really troubling to me.
Then I finally realised that every one of these 
cultures had essentially a system of rules - 
though 'rules' is too strong a word because they 
were not binding. They weren't being forced down 
somebody's throat, but they were rules that 
everyone understood and which had to be used to 
get a good result. So I started experimenting 
with this and the work of decomposing the issues 
that surrounded that village - not the one I was 
asked to build, but the one where I was living, I 
had to find some practical way that I could put 
this to use, and make it into something practical 
that Indian village people could use.
But of course, my knowledge of Gujarati and Hindi 
was minimal - I couldn't actually communicate 
with them on that level. I had some friends that 
would translate for me and there were a number of 
people in the village that could understand 
English as well as I could understand Gujarati. 
But anyway, we got along great and I built a 
school with them while I was there just in order 
to keep my hands busy. But when I was done with 
that, then I realised it was effectively the seed 
bed for trying to write A Pattern Language. The 
first project we actually did was A Pattern 
Language for something called 'multi-service 
centres' in the U.S. Do you know what they are?

Are they like what they call a Hub now where you 
have different businesses based thereŠ?
No they weren't businesses but social services, 
but it was a hub anyway. We did a whole thing and 
wrote a book called A Pattern Language for 
Generating Multi Service Centres. I knew that 
that would be something that could have worked in 
India if I hadn't lost the opportunity. They had 
to move those villagers, and they weren't going 
to wait for a couple of years for me to figure 
this out. But anyway, that's how I came to the 
concept of Pattern Languages.

Looking back, what do you see as having been its 
strengths and its weaknesses as well, over the 30 
or 40 years since it was published?
Well the strengths are fairly obvious because 
they do encapsulate the things that are important 
to the people that live there and work there, 
whether we're talking about a village, urban 
community or whatever. So it's the input of the 
people and their affectionate cooperation. That 
was one of the obvious strong points and was 
relatively easy to do because I liked asking 
people questions and talking to them. Probably 
the most serious negative was that there was a 
certain mystery to how these various patterns 
would be combined, and although I'd tried to give 
an account of that in the Pattern Language book, 
the main one I mean, it was very rudimentary.

It does describe some things that are true and 
helpful and correct, I think, but it never got to 
the point of elegance, let's say, of a Japanese 
tea house where it's a definite language. The 
people who built those things, not all alike 
necessarily, but they all have roughly the same 
patterns across Japan. Of course these tea houses 
are not being built now - occasionally they are 
but the traditional ones were being built a 
couple of hundred years ago, and more.That 
language was different - it was a sequential 
series of actions that you had to take which is 
much more like the morphological unfolding of an 
organism.

As you probably know, when an organism is being 
built - obviously it's happening over the course 
of time. At each moment or at each stage in the 
history of the unfolding, certain morphological 
structures appear, or are given certain 
characteristics. It's a one way process, so it's 
not like an architect playing around on a piece 
of tracing paper trying to see if it can 
work.It's one of those things where you do 
something and then it's there; you do something 
else and then it's there,There's no going back. 
These generative processes are the essence of it. 
It has a lot to do with biology. I've never yet 
given a fully coherent account of how these 
generative sequences work, but I have written 
about them and I feel now that that would have 
been a better approach.But I didn't know that at 
the time.

It's not so simple because the canons of Pattern 
Language, like the book A Pattern Language, are 
sort of multipurpose. You're trying to achieve 
many, many different things with this one book of 
patterns. These traditional ones aren't like that 
at all, the biological ones aren't like that. 
With the biological ones there's no fooling 
around - this is how this one works. You want an 
embryo for a locust, there's only one way to do 
it! So that was, I would say, my biggest failure. 
Incredibly, so many years later, I have not 
solved that problem to my satisfaction. Part of 
my trouble is I have so much work soŠ.

What's been your opinion of subsequent peoples' 
attempts at doing Pattern Languages - I've seen a 
couple of different ones, have you seen many?
Some. They're not that good. The reason I say 
that is that the people who've attempted to work 
with Pattern Languages, think about them, but are 
not conscious of the role of morphological 
elegance in the unfolding. In a biological case, 
they always are elegant and the unfolding 
morphology is a sort of magic. But it's very 
simple.It's not as if it's magic because it's 
complicated, it's justŠ.like that.

I guess when we were talking before about how a 
Pattern Language goes from the large down to the 
small, maybe when we were talking about it as 
going outwards maybe it is more like an unfolding 
process?
I think it is yes. The business of going from the 
large to the small was more for convenienceŠ.you 
could make sense of the book most easily like 
that but it isn't necessarily the way to actually 
do it.

In the Luminous Ground - I've got the first two 
books in the Nature of Order series, but I 
haven't got very far with them because they're 
very big! They're wonderful - if I'm ever on 
Desert Island Discs, they're my desert island 
read. That would be the only time in my life I'd 
ever get to sit and read them! You wrote in 
Luminous Ground:
"Space itself is somehow being-like, has the 
potential for beings to appear in it - not in a 
mechanistic sense of assembly from components, 
but in the far more startling sense of something 
within space and matter. That something within 
space and matter could be awoken by the presence 
of proper configurations."

So how does one, in the light of that, go beyond 
a patterned language just being a collection of 
things, like Lego, that you would start to 
assembleŠ
Well they're not actually things.
ElementsŠ
They're not elements either. They are actually 
field-like structures that appear in space. They 
are not sharp to define. They're not like sets. 
As an organism grows, it's a very fluid entity 
which is fluid at every moment including its 
later stages when it's maturing into a 
functioning atom. I think that is the nature of 
space - when it has that fluidity it has 
unbelievable capacity to form morphological 
structures, much more than anything remotely 
resembling tinker toys and the like, so it's just 
not similar.
The problem in our society in the last forty 
years is that some people have thought it is like 
a tinker toy, and it's just nonsense! So that's 
one of the most absorbing questions in all of 
biology and architecture, is how that works. I'm 
hoping to have a few more years left to be more 
precise about it.
Maggie: Wouldn't you say that's one of the draw 
backs of Pattern Language, that people could 
treat it like tinker toys?
Absolutely, yes. I forgot to mention that.
Pattern Language looks at built environments and 
space - what does the concept of wholeness or 
'The Quality That Has No Name' look like in terms 
of a community or a bottom up process like 
transition. How would you know that a process 
like Transition has the quality that has no name?
My hope is, (I'm guessing, just from what I've 
heard and picked up) that the people who are 
building communities on the basis of Transition 
thinking would not be inept enough to make those 
kind of mistakes. I would think they would make 
things that are somewhat more rough and ready.I 
don't mean anything disrespectful by that - I 
think rough and ready is good, just like this 
house. You probably saw reference to the fifteen 
morphological generators (in The Nature of Order) 
and those things are by nature fluid, even though 
they are quite precise actually. The book that I 
have coming out called Sustainability and 
Morphogenesis - we'll probably change the title 
before we get to it - but anyway it's a book 
that's almost complete.

Those 15 properties are the kind of essential 
generators which, when they knock up against each 
other, because they're all over lapping and it's 
a very tight squeeze. What I mean by that is that 
every one of the 15 properties is very powerful 
as a configuration generator and, in order to 
manage to have the result come out, you have to 
do an incredible amount of pushing and shoving 
and squeezing and pulling. I'm not talking 
literally, but I am talking literally in terms of 
this morphological process. Heaven is a cloud, 
you know!

If you see there's a fence over there beyond 
those rose bushes - it's just a bunch of sticks 
stuck in the ground with some wire. Obviously it 
did not come from the drawing board of an 
architect. It's the product of some very simple 
things - cutting some poles, sticking them in the 
ground at approximately equal centres. By the 
time you put it up, it's never going to be 
perfect, it's just impossible. After a couple of 
years of rainfall and frost and snow and sun, 
it's already developed a whole set of 
complexities. Architecture as per the RIBA knows 
nothing about that - they don't know anything 
about it, they don't know how to create it, they 
don't want to create it. That's my opinion on 
that!

One of the things that struck meŠ..I've been 
involved in doing lots of natural building 
projects, straw bale building, cob building, 
round timber that kind of stuff - it's very hard 
to make anything ugly out of cob. What's your 
sense of that movement, the natural building 
movement and if we're looking at relocalisation 
and the move back to predominantly local 
materials Š I mean, this house, for example, is 
the result of people being able to build with 
what they can get to this site on the back of a 
horse and cart. Is your sense that returning to 
more local materials, more vernacular forms of 
building, inherently we end up with more 
beautiful buildings?
Vernacular buildings have always been a huge 
influence to me, that's obvious from what I've 
built, but that's not because I'm trying to copy 
the vernacular. All people who have built 
vernacular buildings in any culture all do the 
same things, and I do what they do. I'm copying 
nothing except the process.

Were people taught that process? Did they absorb it by osmosis?
Common sense really. People have an amazing 
amount of common sense. And now, the RIBA is 
trying to prove that's impossible Š and by the 
way, I hope to defeat the RIBA.

Good luck!
Oh I will do it. It'll be posthumous but I will do it!

In The Nature of Order books you argue that some 
built environments are inherently more beautiful 
and life affirming than others. But couldn't you 
argue that each generation bemoans the 
architecture that follows it and that actually 
the Gherkin that you and I might think is 
repugnant - kids growing up today see it as part 
of their world and they celebrate it?
This is a huge issue, not one that I can embark 
on right now. But believe me, it's not like that. 
There are real tests - and the morphology is 
essential to making buildings work and people 
have forgotten, have no idea what that morphology 
is. I'm speaking about the morphological process, 
not the particular morphology of a flint barn or 
something. I'm talking about the way people think 
and act with their hands that produces things. 
From what you've built you know all about that - 
a lot about that, and I'm afraid you won't build 
a Gherkin like thatŠ

You couldn't build a gherkin out of cob! In The 
Nature of Order you talk about the word 
'sustainable' and you say: "in a deeper and more 
comprehensive sense this is a deeper and more 
technological sustainability than that has become 
fashionable in recent years." What does 
sustainability mean to you?
I'm trying to think - when did I give that lecture?

Maggie: 2004.
2004, so that's only 6 years ago. I was asked to 
give one of the Schumacher lectures. At that time 
it was very clear that the word 'sustainable' 
meant a certain kind of technological track.But 
at that time, it meant doing technological 
gimmicks which were believed to be important. And 
some of them we're still suffering from.It's 
beginning to disappear. I think people are now 
somewhat more sensible, so that they're more 
likely to make friends with materials that are 
potentially more organic, more malleable, 
cheaper, better! I actually don't use sustainable 
as a term. I think I understand what people would 
like it to mean. I suppose in that sense, many of 
my buildings are sustainable, but not because I 
went through a technological check list, and 
they're not green listed. I think it's probably 
not a terribly good word, actually, because 
again, it separates things from one another, so 
that it artificially creates divisions. I think 
it's a silly idea but it's understandable that 
people use it.

Maggie: Would you say that if you follow a 
morphological process would you end up with 
something that is sustainable?
Not automatically, there are considerations to do 
with stability and heat and moisture and so on. 
You can't remove all those things obviously. I 
think that the architectural establishment has 
just done incredible damage, much during the 
course of the twentieth century.The way 
architects talk and gesture and draw is ludicrous 
in my opinion, and it sets up conditions that 
make it virtually impossible to make a good 
building or a beautiful one.

I always think it's also the fact that very few of them do draw anymoreŠ
That's true.

I increasingly think Transition isn't an 
environmental approach but more a cultural one - 
about how you build a culture better equipped to 
build resilienceŠ.and to see these times as an 
opportunity. How do you see your work informs and 
deepens a process like that?
Well, the answer to that question is sitting on 
my desk but it's not published yet, and it's a 
long story, it's not a simple thing to answer. I 
hope we'll send it to the printer in the spring. 
This is called Battle.

The last question is just what do you think about 
the idea of using the Pattern approach to look at 
how Transition works, what your thoughts are on 
what we discussed beforeŠ?
I think this is very interesting. I would caution 
you - I'm not trying to knock my own work - but I 
would caution you. Don't automatically say I'm 
going to do a Pattern Language because it's such 
a great idea or whatever. I would want to know a 
little bit more about Transition and what it 
means. As I hear it in my head, Transition could 
be like the word 'sustainability'. I would hate 
Transition to get coupled with that whole 
insufficient idea of sustainability.
I think if it's understood as a transition to an 
enlightened form of living, that's something else 
and then I'm completely behind it and all for it. 
But I do think that has to be made incredibly 
clear, though not if you don't agree with it - 
but I think you probably do. It's a source of 
confusion I think for people who haven't thought 
very carefully about it. I think it would be very 
sad if it did get coupled with that mechanistic 
sustainability thing, or a mechanistic Transition 
either.

I suppose the tension now is always around - if 
you're working with very diverse communities and 
you're doing a process, which is ultimately not 
purely a transition about local food and energy 
but a big cultural shift in reconnecting with 
each other and coming home to each other, 
building those relationships. There's always a 
tension between what's made implicit and what's 
explicit. Because if you start the process and 
you say up front, 'This process is about the 
collective enlightenment of this community' 
there's a handful of people up at the front that 
say, 'yeah, fantastic!'. But actually a lot of 
peopleŠ.we have to be very careful with the 
language I think. There's always a tension within 
Transition and the wider movement about how much 
is made explicit and how much is implicit.
I understand exactly what you're talking about. I 
would say that what needs to be said can be said 
in common sense language and words like 
'enlightenment' do not need to be used. There's 
no point and it's just pretentious. It's not 
really pretentious if that's what you think 
about, but to drag it in by the heels is not 
going to help because people will freak out or 
turn away. I try to keep my own language pretty 
down to earth if I can, unless my wife drags me 
intoŠŠ

Maggie: Actually I was just thinking about 
simpler language in reaction to your question - 
if Transition was successful, what the community 
would feel - it would feel like home. Simple. 
Everyone can feel that feeling. You know it when 
you see it; it just feels like home. You walk 
down the street and somebody's planted nut trees 
and they're excited to tell you about all the nut 
trees they've planted and about how much 
proteinŠ.just like you rattled off. And how it 
can replace wheat or what it was you said. 
They're excited because they're making their home 
- that's what it looks like!

We just had a conference in Scotland, Transition 
Scotland, and it was called 'Diverse Routes to 
Belonging' and it was all aboutŠ.particularly 
that question of being indigenous to place. And 
one of the exercises was about tracing where your 
grandparents came from and where your own parents 
came from, and where your life has taken you. The 
question was 'where is home?' It was interesting 
because I was saying, 'well, I guess where I live 
now.' But in terms of home home I can't think of 
anywhere because I've moved around so many times. 
And the guy on my table lived in Glasgow, grown 
up in Perth in Scotland and his mother lived on 
the Isle of Skye - he'd never been to the Isle of 
Skye but he'd grown up with her telling stories 
about the Isle of Skye though he'd never been. 
His mother was in her 80s and he took his mother 
to Skye on a visit, the last visit she'd be able 
to take there, and he said he just had this 
aching feeling of home, though he'd never been 
there. I think so many people, we've lost the 
connection to that, but it's about creating home 
wherever we areŠ

Maggie: I never felt it until I came here. Now I 
feel like I have roots into the ground and I ache 
when I leave but I was 52 before it happened.
I hope to die here. You never know where you're 
going to die so you can't ordain it but that's 
what I hope for.
Thank you very much.
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