..  Agriculture returned to the human scale.

If you are interested in some of the below have a look inside, ideas about them and their combination will show up eventually:

…

What/How/When:

• Earth
• Gardening
• Soil building
• Cover crops
• Green manures
• Rotations
• Seasonal everything
• Agrarianism
• M’ore’ganic  agriculture
• Nutrient dense food
• Cottage/artisan farming
• Home-steading
• Permaculture
• Square foot Gardening
• Intensive gardening methods
• Extensive gardening methods
• Kitchen gardens
• Monastic gardens
• Medicinal/herb gardens
• Orchard
• Pature
• Woodlot
• Chickens
• Small-scale grain
• more to come..

Who/Why

• Albrecht
• Gene Logsdon
• Catholic rural life movement
• Steve Solomon
• Eliot Coleman
• Christopher Alexander
• Charles Walters
• Dick Raymond
• Mel Bartholomew
• John Jeavons
• Wendel Berry
• The Agrarians
• Victor davis Hanson
• more to come..

[Index] [Previous] [Next] [Group] (Page reference: 1157)

Different Chairs

May be part of Sequence of Sitting Spaces (142), Sitting Circle (185), Built-In Seats (202)

Conflict

People are different sizes; they sit in different ways. And yet there is a tendency in modern times to make all chairs alike.

Resolution

Never furnish any place with chairs that are identically the same. Choose a variety of different chairs, some big, some small, some softer than others, some with rockers, some very old, some with arms, some wicker, some wood, some cloth.

May contain Pools of Light (252).

SOURCE

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Or chairs, period.

Starbucks tried something like this, but generally public places avoid catering to the natural desire to have a place to sit. Down the block glass started to fall from the high rise and the sitting area has been closed ever since.  A block sourh they had tables and chairs and then took them away. We could make thousands of jobs just taking care of tables and chairs.

There is hope. On the street below me traffic has been zapped and there are tables and chairs. It;’s a party every night. One day public space will improve. It has to. As to inside the places where we dwell, the above is apposite.

Almost everything Christopher Alexander says is worth repeating until it penetrates the skulls of high and low. This for example:

Things from Your Life

Conflict

“Decor” and conception of “interior design” have spread so widely, that very often people forget their instinct fir the things they really want to keep around them.

Resolution

Do not be tricked into believing that modern decor must be slick or psychedelic, or natural or modern art, or plants or anything else that current taste makers claim. it is most beautiful when it comes straight from your life- the things you care for, the things that tell your story.

SOURCE

*

The more I think about it the more angry I get at the media’s veneration of design and architecture that has nothing to do with Alexander’s concerns. The NYT is a textbook example of this blindness.

In the last post, I drew an analogy between the pedestrian path and the wiki.  My initial inclination had been to compare the pedestrian path with business processes because they also connect people, applications, and domain services, but after attending Ademar Aguiar’s mini-PLoP writer’s workshop, I had to adjust my thinking — the wiki should be the pedestrian path.  But then, what to do with the business processes?

I had no analog for the site itself — that place where the designer confronts the limitations of the current world and the possibilities of its future.  It occurred to me that every organization has processes (both IT and business), though they may or may not be effective, efficient, or valuable.  Walking the site to find those places that are beautiful and inspiring might rely on the building of Geertz’s thick description as advocated by people like Dave West.  Plumbing the depths of that thick description might bring previously unsuspected aspects of the organization to light.  Building on the strengths of the people, methods, and tools discovered during the study might involve appreciative inquiry and the imaginations of all the participants affected by the organization’s processes as they engage in exercises aimed at understanding their organization, themselves, and their shared future.

Designing the pedestrian path to encourage person-to-person or person-to-system engagement and positive experiences in the domain, application, and quality of service spaces would become an exercise in shared theory-building.  Alexander talks about the luminosity of certain colors and visceral resonance of certain spatial configurations.  Reaching these lofty goals within the wiki design in a way such that it gives voice to the systems, users, customers, and system maintainers through the process of theory building would require major changes to the way we build software today.

I think the question posed when a new problem or opportunity is identified would have to change from “What processes or applications should we build to support this?” to “What prevents us from doing this now?”  Here, we get into the area of weak links, where reconfiguring existing nodes might be enough to support the desired solution, but if we don’t have access to the current state of the total organizational system, we can never tell whether that is a possible solution or not.  This is the reason I want to build a system like the one described in Invite Your System to the Party.  We started the process at one client, but never had the opportunity to see it grow and develop the social processes that might deliberately reverse the direction of Conway’s Law by architecting a unifying solution to improve the organization’s communication processes.

That’s my hope for the wiki pedestrian path — that it becomes a unifying force supporting a common vision of a mutually accommodating future.

Thoughts?

I was invited to the complex systems laboratory of the Université de Montréal this week to present emergent urbanism to their twenty-member large research group. Click through to SlideShare in order to see the full text of the presentation under the “notes on” tab. The entire text is in French, however I know a significant share of this website’s visitors enjoy French once in a while.



If someone wants to sponsor me for a translation in English, email me and I’ll upload one very soon. Otherwise my hands are quite full at the moment, it might be a while before I get around to it.

Thanks to Rodolphe Gonzales from the Complex Systems Lab for the invitation. You can read about their work here.

In the third volume of Christopher Alexander’s Nature of Order, he describes an approach to rebuilding a deteriorating Fort Lauderdale neighborhood.  Walking around the neighborhood, he imagines where the most beautiful pedestrian paths might lead people to places where they can congregate as they walk from their homes or cars to work, to public gardens, or to meetings with friends at cafes along the walkway.  Next, he looks along these pedestrian paths for places to build public gardens that capitalize on beautiful centers in the neighborhood, and then for places where homes and businesses should abut the walkway.  Finally, the remaining space is dedicated to roads and parking so that the neighborhood is accessible but not subjected to the tyranny of the automobile.  In his pictures of the proposed neighborhood (see page 43), he color-codes the spaces, using yellow for the pedestrian path, green for gardens, gray for buildings, and red for parking and roads.  The plan, when transformed into an abstract painting, shows that this particular site would best support 17% of its area dedicated to pedestrian paths, 28% dedicated to buildings, 30% dedicated to gardens, and 25% dedicated to roads.

This distribution comes close to his stated ideal of equal parts of the site being dedicated to each of these four purposes, as opposed to the current distribution being primarily dedicated to roads.  In trying to draw analogies to software, I thought about how I would apply this idea to what I do every day.  At  a recent client, I felt that we needed a place for both people and systems in the organization to come together.  To support this goal, we built a wiki that I believe is analogous to the yellow pedestrian path. The wiki was meant to be a place for people to capture their thoughts about their business language, their processes and the systems they were using,  and it was also a place for system and process metadata to expose itself so that it could be connected to those thoughts.  In addition, it was meant to be a place that inspires conversations as business concepts evolve and new systems are built to extend support for internal business processes or integrate with external systems.  I described a pattern language framework for this wiki in a PLoP 2009 submission based on this client’s situation where business analysts were constantly scrambling to describe the system before each project began.  Our solution was to invite them to act as gardeners for the neighborhood, thus refocusing their efforts on promoting conversations and continually documenting the results so that each new project could just unfold from the current state of the system as captured in the wiki.

From the wiki pedestrian path, there is a natural progression into each of the system applications, which in my mental model correspond to the gray buildings housing workshops and residences along the pedestrian path.  In these application buildings, particular services are offered to the business, and people who frequent these buildings move in and out of the wiki space, sharing what they found inside with others on the wiki path.

The green garden areas feel like they reflect business services dedicated to making the business processes more comfortable, robust and adaptable.  The garden areas used by the applications mentioned above are private gardens because they correspond to services accessed by a particular application, while the public gardens along the pedestrian path are available to any application in the business – generally associated with enterprise services.  These gardens are natural extensions of the original domain as it was encountered before rebuilding began.

Finally, the red roads which connect the neighborhood to both residents and outsiders feel like the hardware and platform infrastructure on which the system runs.  These are relegated to the periphery so that they don’t interfere with delivering support for the business, but they are positioned close to the wiki path to facilitate reaching it and its adjacent amenities.

Giving each of these four concerns (wiki pedestrian path, application buildings,  service gardens, and network infrastructure) approximately one fourth of the total effort would likely result in a very different development methodology and budgeting process from what we traditionally see in industry.  Understanding when one area should be emphasized more or less, and what that emphasis implies would then become a new competency that is currently unavailable either in schools or in the workplace.  Maybe that’s a direction we need to be heading.

Thoughts?

Going green is great, but as you point out it is not as easy as magazines suggest. I believe we will start licking things like climate change and over-consumption only when forced by circumstance to see that what is unsustainable is our present world of detached houses, exurbs, reliance on the automobile and dependence on oil.

The future lies in the integration of high tech with the insights of Christopher Alexander and the authors of Pattern Language. For more please visit:

http://stephencrose.wordpress.com/pattern-language/

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

I used to think that Christopher Alexander’s first pattern, the one that underlies all, was the height of idealism, impractical, dispensable.

But it is looking smarter day by day.

Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language I Independent Regions

What I find persuasive is the idea that we cannot really have a sustainable global economy unless our communities or human settlements are themselves sustainable. This means that they must be large enough and concentrated enough to have viable economies.

The problem with metrosprawl is that everything that relates to viable economy is miles away and requires multiple automobiles. This wastes resources, depletes wallets and defeats sustainability.

But a mixed usage settlement that is techno-savvy and green at the same time has the capacity to have its own cultural base, its own shopping, its pedestrian accesses.

Where I would differ from Alexander would be on coordinating the sizes. It seems to me an ideal size for a sustainable settlement shades toward 10,000 with nodes that would be larger. Any sort of representation would need to be calibrated to populations I feel. Otherwise we would end up with the Olympia Snowe problem. Disproportionate power to representatives of low pop areas.

We may never move beyond nations, though there are arguments for doing do. But we can at least begin to recalibrate settlements with attention to simple principles of economy that see the deleterious consequences of our phony abundance society whole.

GUEST POST BY DELLA HANSMANN

Lets talk about windows.  Let’s talk about light.

MORNING WINDOWS

Christopher Alexander explored building design by looking for patterns in existing building styles, and he stresses the importance of natural light – eastern light – in the house, and particularly in bedrooms.  Pattern 138 in his A Pattern Language is “Sleeping to the East.”  Having access to the sunrise allows us to wake more naturally and increases the likelihood that we can wake up in the right part of the sleep cycle.  Also sleeping where you can see the outside allows you to condition your sense of the day.

A human scale (and beautiful) window in the Purcell Cutts house, Minneapolis, MN, 1913. The opposite of plate glass.

“A good morning window looks out on some kind of constant object or growing thing, which reflects the changes of season and the weather, and allows a person to establish the mood of the day as soon as he wakes up.”

Windows connect us to the natural world while we are inside (where we spend most of every day unless we lead very unusual lives).  In the living memory of our parents and grandparents, every room had natural light and operable windows.  Before electricity was common and cheap, building design demanded that windows illuminate every space.  Wooden and brick buildings needed tall, narrow windows at regular intervals so buildings could structurally transfer the load of the upper stories to the ground.  The result was uniform … but it worked.  Older buildings connect powerfully with our humanity but we don’t build this way anymore. Here’s why.

MODERNISM

In the last 70 years, new technology in building materials – steel and glass – has done away with many of these conventions.  We are able to design horizontal glass bands which play with our sense of reality; we can make buildings appear to hover off the ground.

Cheap electric lights and powerful forced air ventilation systems allow us to create larger and larger buildings with rooms that have no access to daylight.  We have developed curtain wall systems – entire buildings covered in glass – but  no actual windows.  In residential design every house must include its great room with walls of glass.  But instead of bringing us closer to the world outside — such walls make us  feel both hermetically sealed and over exposed.

OPEN YOUR WINDOW TO THE WORLD

A window is more than a transparent part of the wall.  We need operable windows to connect with all five senses.  Sure you can see out a sheet of plate glass.  But when you fling open a casement window and lean out of it — you can feel the wind on your face, smell the air, hear what’s happening outside and taste a hint of what the neighbors are planning for dinner.

THE SHAPE AND ARRANGEMENT OF WINDOWS MATTERS

Build up a large view using several smaller windows rather than one large one. Christopher Alexander states that small panes allow us to connect more intensely with the view out the window. This is my desk at our Whole Trees office.

In Home from Nowhere, James Kunstler points out that humans like to anthropomorphize the objects of everyday life.  The classic house shape, with central door and symmetrical, upright windows (as depicted in every four-year-old’s drawing of “house”) looks cheerful and face like.  Also, “vertical windows frame the standing human figure.  They represent the idea of people standing erect inside the house.”

Horizontal windows on the other hand, suggest the idea that “the inhabitants are either sleeping, having sex, or dead.”  This is hardly an appealing way to visualize one’s neighbors.  We’ve forgotten the importance of how window size, shape and placement affects the way our homes contribute to the social fabric outside the front door.

WINDOWS DEFINE OUR DAILY EXPERIENCE

I am fortunate to have a work space set up in front of a bank of windows which allows me to stay in touch with the weather and the world outside.  I may have a “desk job” but I don’t have to be separated from nature while I do it.

Likewise, although I live on the third floor of an apartment building in a city, and my eastern window fronts an alley, I’ve arranged my bed such that I  can see a maple tree a few blocks away over the intervening rooftops.  Watching the outline of that tree, which I can see even without my glasses, gives me a sense of peace every morning when I wake up and each night when I turn in.  And a few nights each month I get to fall asleep by moonlight.

Of course windows let in and out a lot more than light.  I’ll talk about the thermal properties of windows in a future post.

My maple tree view - and the full moon shining in.

As our Afghanistan casualties grow – 131 war dead – many of Canada’s opinion leaders this month caught up to our questions on Afghanistan  (a good read on Grant Kippen).  Christie Blatchford in the Globe featured an Empire Club speech by Canada’s former Ambassador to Afghanistan, Chris Alexander, who seeks a Conservative nomination in a Toronto riding.  Alexander, lauded by Michael Valpy, spent six years in Afghanistan and appears a believer in nation-building and participation in NATO led, US dominated, counter-insurgency efforts.  Our Governor General weighed in, “Afghan mission far from lost cause,” and even Michael Chertoff, former Bush appointee, infamous for his mismanagement of Katrina aid efforts, got limelight at the CBC.

Outside Canada, Robert Fisk commended the Toronto Star for its investigation into a key Canadian civil society project, the eradication of polio in Afghanistan, which CIDA has now down-graded to the “prevention of transmission of polio,” and also praised the National Post for pointing out that Canadian politicians appear to be sleep-walking toward 2011. His gloss differs from the highlights presented by the Chair of the Cabinet Committee on Afghanistan, Hon. Stockwell Day.

But back to Blatchford, a prominent writer in Canada.  Her familiar refrain, that those who “aren’t there” should mind their manners and for heaven’s sake be informed, seems acceptable. Let’s see. How about this:  Ann Jones, author of Kabul in Winter, with her detailed review of the film Fixer: “everything that happens in Afghanistan is based on lies or illusion.” There’s also, Afghanistan by the Numbers, from Tomdispatch.com Or Juan Cole’s Informed Comment.

Today’s questions: How many military contractors hired by the Pentagon in Afghanistan (74,000 by end of June 2009) work with, support, interact, go on mission with our Canadian troops?

Is there any linkage, association, on the ground connection between any of those private military contractors and Canada’s SNC Lavalin at say, the, Dahla Dam? What are the “real life” links between SNC Lavalin and our military maintenance and supply infrastructures in Afghanistan, if any?  Are these covered in Canada’s Fifth Quarterly report on Afghanistan?

Maybe Canada’s opinion leaders will follow this  site and search for answers?

I honour Pte. Jonathan Couturier, killed last Thursday in Afghanistan. A  credit to our nation : his family’s comments about what he thought about our A/Stan efforts appeared on page A6 of the Globe. Ms. Blatchford did not cite them.

1. Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary
2. Christopher Alexander, et al., A Pattern Language
3. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
4. Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One
5. Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition

This is a mere listing of the books. Please see Gretchen Rubin’s original, full post at:

http://www.intent.com/gretchenrubin/blog/five-books-stimulate-your-creativity

Is it even possible to think that the thought of Christopher Alexander and many others will come to fruition?

The built-up world is in many respects fixed. Its patterns are inimical to those proposed by Alexander.  Alexander would build from the natural impulses he attributes to us. The world is built with the forces created by a melding of profit motive, a hierarchical perspective and a belief that originality is synonymous with being exceptional.

In other words, architecture is either designed to fulfill onerous needs — as in housing masses of people with little respect for their needs or their input — or to impress society with something that may have nothing to do with utility or natural impulses, but everything to do with creating a buzz redounding to the individual glory of the architect.

Pattern Language in architecture is a willingness to start over. But starting over is difficult when what we have is not merely in place, but very much in place.

Yesterday I went out to Coney Island. I took the N and Q trains for an hour each way and made it with relative ease. It was a great day. The ocean was there. Waves were there. Kids played in the sand. There was a barker. I even had a Nathan’s hot dog to celebrate. I felt the wind and sun. I will remember it.

How would pattern language build in an area already so fixed?

The answer might be with small things. Like the gradual population of vacant space with outdoor tables and chairs. Like making it easier for small shops to coexist with large apartment complexes. Like reducing the clog of traffic and the enhancement of public modes of going to and fro.

We Also Need To Start From Scratch

The main things I would like to see done involve essentially a tabula rasa — a blank page, somewhere where space exists — say the space contained in a square with a mile on each side.

Within this space imagine two or three structures somewhat similar to Rogers Center in Toronto.

These would seek to be ecologically self contained. In other words to have sustainability built in via recycling and solar and wind collection — along with a mix of residences and commercial and social and educational and athletic establishments sufficient to become the basis of a sustainable economy.

I see Pueblo like residences reached by pedestrian walkways in a spiral from top to bottom and bottom to top. I see sitting and walking areas in profusion as there would be few or no moving vehicles.  I see local artistic endeavors. Local health nodes where one can get preventive things done within a few steps of home. I see Internet nodes so there is some separation between home and cyber-work.

In essence I see some entrepreneurial initiative to defy the present in the name of a future we have not even envisioned yet.

The US is way behind in such discussions. That’s too bad. But it can be remedied.

More on Pattern Language:

See the brief at http://stephencrose.wordpress.com/pattern-language/ and then read in sequence:

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four,, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine, Part Ten, Part Eleven, Part Twelve, Part Thirteen, Part Fourteen

Texting To Death http://ow.ly/ln2R

At present, 36 states do not ban texting while driving; 14 states do, including California, Alaska, Louisiana and New Jersey. New York lawmakers have sent a bill to Governor Paterson.

COMMENT

Having been an opponent of the car for fifty years or so, I am sensitive to the fact that the car is not going away. Oil is not going away. But rather than feel defeated, I want to center down on ways that the car is a positive threat to each of us. And to rev up my advocacy for car-free living areas where work, play and recreation in every sense are all integrated. I do not think we have begun to think this through.

Christopher Alexander Has The Right Approach to The Car

Pattern Language Posts on Automobiles

More on Pattern Language:

See the brief at Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four,, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine, Part Ten, Part Eleven, Part Twelve, Part Thirteen, Part Fourteen

Inner Directed Design — A Nod To Christopher Alexander http://ow.ly/lkUS

SALIENT QUOTE:

Christopher Alexander ends by saying,

“Do not be tricked into believing that modern décor must be slick or psychedelic, or “natural” or “modern art” or “plants” or anything else that current taste-makers claim. It is most beautiful when it comes straight from your life – the things you care for, the things that tell your story.”

by Peter Warren
source: AVN.com

CHATSWORTH, Calif. — Anabolic Digital has moved its headquarters to a new office at 9223 Eton Ave.

The move follows the company’s placing its former building up for sale in Feb., and coincides with several new changes for the studio, including the upcoming introduction of several new lines.

Email addresses, phone numbers and fax numbers for Anabolic personnel have not changed. The main line is (818) 407-6200, fax is (818) 406-6201, and for sales, email randy@anabolic.com.

Thinking about ways to site buildings for Digging in the Driftless this week I pulled my copy of A Pattern Language off the shelf and gave it another thumb through. These patterns struck me as being particularly applicable to what I mentioned casually in my point about slope – don’t build on the flat land.  I thought I’d expand on the idea here on Lost, where I have no mandate for concision.

[I should note that I am by no means a Christopher Alexander purist.  There have been a lot of new developments and ideas in architecture and even natural building since he first published his seminal work in 1977.  I also resent the fact that it still retails for $65 which makes the book (which can also serve as a doorstop) pretty hard for the average person to justify.  Alexander can be sanctimonious and bossy.  And the pictures are in black and white (a horrible crime for an architecture book).  That said, there are a lot of really good ideas in it and my copy is well marked with dog-ears and post-its in various colors.  If you're thinking of building a green something, or just thinking about design at all, visit your local library and check this one out.]

Pattern 4: Agricultural Valleys

“The land which is best for agruiculture happens to be best for building too.  But it is limited – and once destroyed, it cannot be regained for centuries.”

He goes on to talk about how suburban growth has been “spreading over all land, agricultural or not.”  Too well I know it.  I grew up in suburban Chicago in a town called Libertyville.  It had once been an actual town, a way station on the road between Chicago and Milwaukee and it had a few historic buildings and a bit of civic infrastructure left.  But it and the surrounding communities were also growing like cancer out into the surrounding farmland.  At that time (its been 5 years since I was there) Lake County was the northern most edge of Chicago’s continuous development and still contained a fair amount of farm land and open country.  I could drive 15 minutes northwest from my parent’s home and come be out in the among the fields at an almost untrafficed county forest preserve.  But the development was steadily creeping along that route at the rate of a few new strip mall parkinglots per year.

When I was in college I learned that 90 percent of the remaining farm land in Lake County was already owned by developers just waiting for the opportune moment to turn it into subdivisions.  I can only hope that their moment didn’t arrive before the housing market collapsed and that such valuable rich farm country may be preserved a little longer.  As Alexander puts it:

“Preserve all agricultural valleys as farmland and protect this land from any development which would destroy or lock up the unique fertility of the soil.  Even when valleys are not cultivated now, protect them: keep them for farms and parks and wilds.”

Pattern 104: Site Repair

“Buildings must always be built on those parts of the land which are in the worst condition, not the best”

Later he deals with the concept of not building on the best land in a more local context.  He notes that it is human nature to put a building “in the best possible spot.”  But what happens when this is repeated over and over – all the “best spots” get filled up with buildings and the average best-ness of spots is drawn sharply downward over time.  This is also, it should be noted, a Frank Lloyd Wright concept.  Loath as I am to give him credit for a great idea his notion of building along the brow of the hill rather than on ridge tops is inspired.  This works from the owners perspective and also from that of everyone else.  How frustrating is it to look out over a beautiful vista and see the top of every hill blotted with a sprawling edifice?  Likewise, as the occupant of a building wouldn’t you rather look at your favorite view rather than spoil it with a building.  Wright did this with his famous Falling Water.  The family asked him to build them a house on their favorite picnic spot but he demured saying that it would be better to build the house to one side and leave them a view of that place.  The result is an undeniable architectural masterwork.  Need I say more?  I will.

“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.”

Desde niños nos enseñan a ser creativos, a ser originales. Nos educan a no copiar a los demás y a tratar de reinventar el hilo negro todo el tiempo, aunque sólo sea ponerle motitas de decoración para distinguirnos de los demás. Con el tiempo, esas enseñanzas serán aprovechadas por la mercadotecnia que seguirá machacándonos lo mismo: “se original, distínguete de los demás, cómprate un…”

Pero resulta que algunos crecemos y terminamos en medio del desarrollo de software o en la arquitectura o en la ciencia o, para acabar pronto, en la vida real. Una vida en la que ser creativo es importante, pero ser práctico lo es mucho más. De nada nos sirve reinventar mil veces la rueda, a veces sólo necesitamos usarla y lo más razonable será tomar la rueda que alguien más, o muchos alguienes más ya inventaron y perfeccionaron; a veces es casi una rueda lo que necesitamos, entonces nos ahorraremos mucho trabajo comenzando con una rueda y modificándola, que haciendo todo desde el principio y sin ayuda. Y en algunas otras ocasiones, con mucha suerte, lograremos mejorar un poco el diseño de la rueda y podremos publicar nuestra humilde aportación a la humanidad. En cualquiera de estos casos, más nos vale saber qué es lo que ya se inventó, así nos ahorramos mucho trabajo, horas de sueño y bastante dinero.

Uno de los pioneros en esta didáctica de la copia, del refrito y del más de lo mismo fue un arquitecto visionario llamado Christopher Alexander, mucho más conocido en el mundo del desarrollo de software por su libro Pattern Language, inspirador de lo que ahora se ha convertido en el BUM de la arquitectura y el desarrollo de software.

Christopher Alexander no sólo nos enseñó que es más fácil organizar las soluciones ya probadas a problemas típicos en “patrones”, lo más importante es que nos desenseñó a pretender ser originales a toda costa. Nos mostró que es posible y más valioso ser creativo reusando lo que otros han hecho. Hacemos las cosas más fáciles y con más eficiencia si nos aprovechamos de la experiencia de los demás.

Finalmente, lo que Alexander nos mostró no es tampoco muy original. Es la historia de la ciencia y de la tecnología en la humanidad. Nuestro conocimiento se cimenta siempre en el conocimiento anterior. Pero nadie había dicho las cosas tan claritas como aquel viejo arquitecto que, como los jugadores de Go, se dedicó a formar un compendio de Josekis de la arquitectura. Al igual que en el juego, los patrones no son para no pensar, sino para que podamos concentrarnos en la obra completa, dejando los detalles de la implementación en manos de la experiencia acumulada de generaciones de jugadores, arquitectos, desarrolladores, científicos y profesionales de todo tipo.

Canada continues to demonstrate why all of the top five most livable cities in the Americas are within its borders.  Vivian Moreau brings us this story on Victoria’s alleys and laneways.  After giving an interesting example of an alley cottage, she says that alleys are making a comeback in Victoria.  A number of developments, designed by people who remember playing hockey in back alleys, are including these, not because they wish to be social engineers, but because they are actually in demand.  There are a variety of ways to develop alleys, including using grass and pavers similar to a Christopher Alexander pattern.  They also can be used as a means to create affordable housing.  Langford allows garage apartments and carriage houses as part of their affordable housing initiative.  Vancouver has recently adopted similar standards.  Victoria, which, due a lack of existing alleys and a development pattern that doesn’t allow for their easy implementation, is considering what they are calling “garden suites,” units at the rear of homes, whether or not the home backs onto an alley.  Alleys are a very useful and versatile tool in the planner’s belt, and should be better used in American cities.  Canada can, yet again, provide us with a good model to follow.

A comment posted here:

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

This would make sense if the underlying premise was correct.. The idea that we can continue — under a greenish umbrella — as we have in the past is a fallacy.

The massive success of the clunker program is an eerie indication that truth is not getting through.

Our recession will only recur if we do not move from 0ur concept of metrosprawl to the creation of human settlements based on principles articulated by Christopher Alexander in A Pattern Language.

See http://stephencrose.wordpress.com/pattern-language/

Settlements dense enough to enable flourishing businesses, car-free enough to get pre-diabetics back on their feet.

The era of a growth (sic) economy is over. Henceforth growth needs to be measured by increases in the value of services to human beings in the form of enhanced living options, expanding educational opportunities and a move away from a culture of celebritization and conspicuous consumption.

Much of the logic of what we need was articulated by Thorstein Veblen a century ago.

See http://stephencrose.wordpress.com/2006/09/24/thorstein-veblen-on-the-web/

It is appealing to think we can market our way to renewed prosperity. Sadly our prosperity for many decades has been built on the elements like the acceptance of a legal and extralegal pharmaculture, the growth of a prison industrial complex, and a callous disregard for elementary education.

The answer is still blowing in the wind.

More on Pattern Language:

See the brief at http://stephencrose.wordpress.com/pattern-language/ and then read in sequence:

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four,, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine, Part Ten, Part Eleven, Part Twelve, Part Thirteen, Part Fourteen

The best books in life are the ones that help you change.  That change can come in the form of an idea that changes a belief or behavior or an entire way of living in the world.

A book like this is “A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction,” principal author: architect Christopher Alexander.  Available at http://www.patternlanguage.com

It’s  a whopper at 1171 pages, but it gives you all you really need to know to create living environment. If you don’t know what a living environment really is anymore, because you’re trapped by granite counters and the latest in double-wide stainless steel appliances and hardwood floors, take a moment to step away from the trendy this weekend.

Start with a visit to the NY Times. Check out their audio / picture show about a man who built a weekend home, over the course of several weekends. It opens the mind to the vast potential of transformation a weekend can truly bring: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/07/31/greathomesanddestinations/20090731-away-audio/index.html

Also check out the accompanying article. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/greathomesanddestinations/31away.html?pagewanted=2

It’s very inspiring when someone embraces a book so totally that it transform their whole world.  Even if it’s just on the weekends.  So use your weekends well.  And be transformed.

Written in 2008. Still relevant. Updated.

We need to clear up confusion between public and private when it comes to transportation and creating new human settlements.

We presently allow OUR public rights of way to be filled with private automobiles. This leads to a pollution-congestion problem which is not merely inhuman but also deadly to the planet. This pattern is being emulated globally. Public rights of way should belong to the public.

Similarly we talk green and assume it can happen by retrofitting innumerable private and separated dwellings, owned by individuals, What is needed is a scale of housing no individual could afford, but which would makes real green economically viable. The whole kahuna: power, recycling, modular capacities.

The solution to the transportation problem:

Advertiser-supported, shared public transportation. Free to user and gradually replacing private cars for commuting and inter-city transit.

Create a new generation of vehicles of all sizes. Create tons of jobs for the persons who build, operate and maintain such vehicles.

Give them preference in terms of access to rights of way. On city boulevards, make them double-wide or double decker, or both. Power them green, hybrid. Batteries could be easily renewed by maintaining stations at regular intervals. Roads could enable their movement via technologies yet to be created,

WE own the roads after all.

Privately-owned and operated vehicles are at odds with a rational transportation solution. We need to reconsider the way we use our rights of way.

A similar understanding could be applied to the creation of viable, sustainable, green communities.

Lack of “consumer confidence” in the future is understandable. We haven’t drilled down to the changes we need.

The era of the private automobile and the resulting design of our settlements as strip city highway culture splayed over the land, is unsustainable. It should be happily over anon.

We need an era of good news:

To create a prosperous economy, we need to go beyond even Al Gore and his hybrid car proposals to the creation of a world where human settlements are built on a scale that can support green economically. And where the private automobile has an increasingly minor role.

Automobile glutted freeways are a form of hell we should not wish to perpetuate.

So what do we do?

1. Start building a new generation of vehicles and highways that will provide free transportation on major roads supported by advertising.

Ride courtesy of … name your advertiser. Starbucks, your local insurance company, a restaurant. If we plough ad revenues into transportation we are creating a win-win for consumers. Reducing our costs of getting around and stimulating free enterprise and competition within a rational framework.

New vehicles could be green and comfortable. Have a contest among advertisers to produce the very best.

2. Give major tax breaks to companies that build green human settlements with early education, preventive health, entertainment and access to retail products within walking distance. Car free, pedestrian communities, replacing metrosprawl.

Here’s Christopher Alexander’s notion of a self-contained town.

Preserve country towns where they exist; and encourage the growth of new self contained towns, with populations between 500 and 10,000, entirely surrounded by open countryside and at least 10 miles from neighbouring towns. Make it the regions collective concern to give each town the wherewithal it needs to build a base of local industry, so that these towns are not dormitories for people who work in other places, but real towns- able to sustain the whole of life. SOURCE

The Essential Site for Understanding Alexander

3. The technologies needed to help the rest of the world escape the trap of highway-culture will develop naturally. The entire world is going to literal hell because we have not thought beyond individual, private vehicles.

More on Pattern Language:

See the brief at http://stephencrose.wordpress.com/pattern-language/ and then read in sequence:

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four,, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine, Part Ten, Part Eleven, Part Twelve, Part Thirteen, Part Fourteen

Christopher Alexander A City is Not A Tree

Salient excerpts from this seminal article:

Natural Cities “It is more and more widely recognized today that there is some essential ingredient missing from artificial cities. When compared with ancient cities that have acquired the patina of life, our modern attempts to create cities artificially are, from a human point of view, entirely unsuccessful.“

Limitations of Tree Structure “In simplicity of structure the tree is comparable to the compulsive desire for neatness and order that insists the candlesticks on a mantelpiece be perfectly straight and perfectly symmetrical about the centre. The semilattice, by comparison, is the structure of a complex fabric; it is the structure of living things, of great paintings and symphonies.

“It must be emphasized, lest the orderly mind shrink in horror from anything that is not clearly articulated and categorized in tree form, that the idea 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.”

Separation of Work from Housing “The total separation of work from housing, started by Tony Garnier in his industrial city, then incorporated in the 1929 Athens Charter, is now found in every artificial city and accepted everywhere where zoning is enforced. Is this a sound principle? It is easy to see how bad conditions at the beginning of the century prompted planners to try to get the dirty factories out of residential areas. But the separation misses a variety of systems which require, for their sustenance, little parts of both.“

How Difficult It Is To Not See Complex, Interrelated Things As Trees “It is for this reason – because the mind’s first function is to reduce the ambiguity and overlap in a confusing situation and because, to this end, it is endowed with a basic intolerance for ambiguity – that structures like the city, which do require overlapping sets within them, are nevertheless persistently conceived as trees.

“The same rigidity dogs even perception of physical patterns. In experiments by Huggins and myself at Harvard, we showed people patterns whose internal units overlapped, and found that they almost always invent a way of seeing the patterns as a tree – even when the semilattice view of the patterns would have helped them perform the task of experimentation which was before them.”

More on Pattern Language:

See the brief at http://stephencrose.wordpress.com/pattern-language/ and then read in sequence:

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four,, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine, Part Ten, Part Eleven, Part Twelve, Part Thirteen, Part Fourteen