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Why Christopher Alexander Still Matters

Why Christopher Alexander Still Matters

Section titled “Why Christopher Alexander Still Matters”

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  • The places we love, the places that are most successful and most alive, have a wholeness about them that is lacking in too many contemporary environments, Alexander observed. This problem stems, he thought, from a deep misconception of what design really is, and what planning is. It is not “creating from nothing”—or from our own mental abstractions—but rather, transforming existing wholes into new ones, and using our mental processes and our abstractions to guide this natural life-supporting process.
  • “The final conclusion,” said Whitehead, summing up the arguments in his remarkable 1938 book Modes of Thought, “is the importance of a right adjustment of the process of abstraction… The higher animals are distinguished from mere life, by their abstractions, and by their use of them. Mankind is distinguished from animal life by its emphasis on abstractions. The degeneracy of mankind is distinguished from its uprise by the dominance of chill abstractions, divorced from aesthetic content.”
  • Alexander noted that we think of parts as discrete things that are put together into our own compositions to “make” a whole. But this is not how nature works, says Alexander—or how human nature works at its best. In nature, the leaves don’t “make” a tree. In fact, the tree makes the leaves! There is a constant process of adaptive differentiation, and this process gives rise to new forms, through a process of morphogenesis. This is going on all the time in healthy structures, and healthy environments. We as planners and architects can either learn to support this kind of process, and support life, or we can choke it off, and create dead places. According to Alexander, we have been doing the latter too much.
  • “It must be emphasised, lest the orderly mind shrink in horror from anything that is not clearly articulated and categorised in tree form, that the ideas of overlap, ambiguity, multiplicity of aspect, and the semilattice, are not less orderly than the rigid tree, but more so. They represent a thicker, tougher, more subtle and more complex view of structure.”
  • Alexander concluded: “For the human mind, the tree is the easiest vehicle for complex thoughts. But the city is not, cannot and must not be a tree. The city is a receptacle for life. If the receptacle severs the overlap of the strands of life within it, because it is a tree, it will be like a bowl full of razor blades on edge, ready to cut up whatever is entrusted to it. In such a receptacle life will be cut to pieces. If we make cities which are trees, they will cut our life within to pieces.”
  • Alexander certainly had his share of critics, notably including some star architects. They often dismissed him—often from a position of philosophical illiteracy—as a kind of irrelevant Romantic or Luddite. Perhaps worse, he was a critic who dared challenge the legitimacy of their own proud regime. For them, the modern era has been the pinnacle of human civilization, to be manifested and celebrated in its architecture—a time of great achievements in human rights, advancements in medicine and sanitation, and development of powerful stripped-down and sanitized technologies that made life safer and more comfortable. No doubt all that is true, up to a point, and Alexander would not disagree. But it is also true that this advancement has come at a potentially catastrophic cost, leaving us today in a post-modern period where all our advancements count for little if we can’t learn now to sustain the life around us.