The Phenomenon of Life by Christopher W. Alexander

In computer science, however, programmers recognized the value of his patterns and the pattern method as a general framework for organizing complexity.ĭesign Patterns That Determine Human WellbeingĪlexander and his colleagues introduced “design patterns” as a tool for adaptive design in the 1977 book A Pattern Language. The pattern movement flourished in the self-building counterculture, but could not spread beyond that restricted niche. There is no space in the curriculum, because faculty and the accreditation system have other priorities. (A Google search for Quality Without A Name or QWAN gives many thousands of software pages but no architecture pages.) Those prejudices shaped the educational system so that patterns cannot be implemented within the current design paradigm. An opinionated profession judged the healing buildings and environments from which they arose not to be worth investigating. Design patterns and the QWAN are new concepts, now supported by the latest research in neuroscience. This is not a question of resurrecting an older method that somehow became lost because of neglect through changing currents in fashion. Practitioners who try to implement Alexander’s toolkit for adaptive design find themselves marginalized in the architecture profession and shunned by academia. The architecture-industrial complex also conditioned the general public to reject the QWAN as irrelevant, nostalgic, and silly. And it was not a natural extinction, but an aggression: dominant architectural culture wiped out the genetic material of adaptive architecture contained in traditional design patterns. Breaking with convention by not discussing design formalism and ideology, he always focuses on how to achieve a space or structure that gives a positive and profound feeling to the user. The wonderfully adaptive patterns Alexander described in all his books had become extinct by the time he published his results. Whenever such a pattern-rich environment succeeds in connecting to the user, people sense the QWAN-“The Quality Without A Name.” Perceiving the QWAN allows one to judge the design’s level of adaptation to human feelings.īut there remain serious unsolved problems. These common elements of configurations, paths, and spaces work well to provide an emotionally comfortable environment. At the same time, his model validated millennia of traditional building activity, making it newly relevant for construction today. Christopher Alexander introduced an astonishingly novel way of thinking about architecture.

The Phenomenon of Life by Christopher W. Alexander