Weeknotes #10: Reorienting Process, Knowledge Transmission

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Approaching Alexander

17 min readDec 20, 2020

Notes on the Nature of Order Seminar series — part of the Building Beauty Post-Graduate Diploma in Architecture. A weekly running reflection for myself, for friends, and for those curious about Christopher Alexander’s work and its importance in shaping a healthy, living world.

10 December, 2020. It is the 10th seminar, in which:

We read pp. 495–564 in the The Process of Creating Life, looking at the idea of process-as-backbone-of-society and a the role of architects in the 3rd millennium
We read pp. 49–64 in the Discovery of Architecture, looking at regeneration through learning, and the modern and colonial disruption of the traditional transfer of knowledge in society
James presents Chapter 20, The Spread of Living Process Throughout Society, provides a compelling frame for Alexander’s humanist call to action
We work with the ideas of snippable process sequences as a grounding home for the transition of knowledge
Yodan asks us, what can we do now to help this spread of knowledge?
There is one seminar remaining in 2020

Process and Society

These four chapters provide the fullest picture of what it means to create a living architecture. It’s massive: the full force of what Alexander has been working towards is nothing short of a re-orientation of the entirety of society; how we act and interact, how we work with the people around us, how we drive the shape of our environments. If we want a living world where we can feel whole and alive and free, we must find ourselves capable of doing that type of building in the first place.

And it all starts with process. The processes in place, at all levels of scale — law, zoning, regulation, government, design, planning, thinking, routines — the connected latticework of all these processes together is what Alexander identifies as the backbone of society. And every single instance of process can be a living process, or not, to varying degrees. Alexander’s own projects — each requiring heroic effort and a dogged, near fanatical, insistence on the use of living process throughout the project — prove that it is indeed possible to create living structure, but that the effort required to build an entire project in this manner is currently unsustainable. In these chapters, we work towards a vision of how we might begin to inject living processes into this societal process framework.

Encouraging Freedom (Ch.18)

Process and policy can have degrees of freedom in them, some inherently setting us free to do what is right, to bring space to life, others liming and or ability to act. When we talk about acting, here in the functional-building sense, we mean the ability to undertake structure preserving transformations, to create living center. And every process, even those taking place in our minds, can be scrutinized, can be evaluated, for its potential degrees of life. For each process of these types — the backbone of society! — are all socially constructed.

Of all the processes we undertake there are those that contribute directly to the creation of form in the world. When these are generative processes of unfodling, when they are structure preserving and take on the charcacteristics of living process, we call them morphogenetic. It’s a big word and a bigger idea: Alexander says the thought of a morphogenetic process encompasses Book 1 and Book 2 of the Nature of Order, all in a single phrase.

Here is where freedom comes in: we as people in a society cannot act freely and appropriately in situations where the physical organization of the environment does not allow us to act appropriately. In Alexander’s view of society, its primary function, and the criterion we should use to judge it, “is its capacity to create and recreate a living world for us (p. 509).” “In this vein, I with to propose the concept that society — the huge system of process-rules and principles we know as society — should be viewed as having as one of its major functions the continuous creation and perpetuation of a living physical world.”

We create a world that is trending toward freedom when we are able to instantiate morphogenetic process.

Massive Process Difficulties (Ch.19)

Living processes are morphogenetic: their target is producing living form, and they do so in structure preserving ways that exhibit all the characteristics discussed in Week 7, Week 8, and Week 9.

The driving question presented here… in this modern world… is it even possible to build in basic structure preserving considerations? Living in the legacy of Descartes, working in modes largely influenced by Taylorist manufacturing principles, the fundamental mindset of the modern world is at odds with our purpose. And Taylor knew this:

Here is a quote from Taylor himself: “Now, in the best of the ordinary types of management, the managers recognize frankly that the workmen who are under them possess a mass of traditional knowledge, most of which is not within the possession of the management. The most experienced managers frankly place before their workmen the problem of doing the work in the best and most economical way. They recognize the task before them as that of inducing each workman to use his best endeavors, his hardest work, all his traditional knowledge, his skill, his ingenuity, and his good will, in a word, his initiative, so as to yield the largest possible return to his employer.”
Taylor understood all this extremely well. And then, for reasons of money and efficiency, he deliberately set out to destroy it. (p. 516)

Taylor made, and pursued, a simple tradeoff: he destroyed flexibility and life of the product and the agency of labor, to create a modular efficiency and economic expediency for management. It is a system of work that is a near polar opposite of living processes, disassociating labor from skills, separating conception from execution, ultimately shifting essential knowledge to management. The ‘massive process difficulties’ we face mean that we must replace these structure destroying transformations which are taken as the modern default, with structure preserving transformations.

And Alexander points to another driving force we must grapple with: speculation with money. (If what we valued, first and foremost, was a living world and productive and fulfilling labor, how might Taylor’s management science have turned out?) When pure profit is the driver of any activity, and absolutely when it effects the built environment, those elements necessary for morphogenetic process cannot exist. Taylorist efficiency replaces the human relationships of trust, and ability to make on-going tradeoffs and decisions throughout the life of the process. We cannot use of money as a management tool and flexible resource if it’s not pointed to an outcome like living structure, when it is seen as the end and not the means.

All this wraps up into the massive process difficulties we face in trying to effect a more living world. Our processes are organized, but they are not oriented towards creating living wholes. In fact, many of the existing elements that drive our building processes have a direct negative impact on our ability to employ morphogenetic process and structure a more living world. Alexander notes, specifically:

• The process of banking
• The control and regulation of money
• The way money flows through a project
• The conditions in which risk is deployed
• The process of development.
• Speculation in land
• Construction contracts
• The role of architects and engineers
• Organization of construction companies
• The nature of planning
• The nature of master plans
• The nature of construction contracts
• The process of ecological evaluation
• Evaluation by lending institutions
• Architectural competitions
• The size and scope of architect’s work
• The teaching of architecture
• The priorities of manufacturers
• Building codes and regulations
• The role of town planners
• The mortgage process
• The process of housing ownership
• Control over housing
• Ownership of public land and streets
• Protection of the wilderness
Every one of these elements, in its late 20th-century form, contains features which actively inhibit the possibility of implementing living processes (p. 528).

How do we begin to grapple with this task? Alexander frames a Kuhnian view: we are working towards now a fundamental shift of paradigm, and we must find ways to transform throughout society, how we think and act with respect to every process that touches the environment.

The Spread of Living Processes Throughout Society (Ch. 20)

It is a tall order, and, according to Alexander, not one that can be accomplished in a revolutionary manner. The “revolution” of morphogenetic process will happen slowly and steadily:

The present system cannot be destroyed and replaced: it is too widely present, and too deeply embedded, in too many institutions. And it is, besides, for all its faults, serving us too well, in too many areas of life, for us to want to destroy or replace it.
I take it for granted, therefore, that the practical means we seek must be gradual, incremental modes of change, which somehow manage to inject living sequences — and morphogenetic ones — into the present system of processes, in such a way that as deeper and more morphogenetic character gradually gets a foothold, is established, and slowly becomes the norm (p.532).

Beyond implementing living process in one’s own work and thought, how do we consider this shift more broadly? We’ll look first at scale of implementation, and then process genetics.

Scale is difficult. When a project becomes too large for one whole or one collectively to simply envision the life of the larger whole, any attempt at a living process is already in danger. And in the modern building environment, taking on a project using the methods presented thus far becomes a literal fight against an entrenched world-system. So Alexander proposes a small bite. Rather than attempt to build an entire house with living processes, which requires control over the entirely of design and construction, architects can find one trade to work with and inject life into the larger process. An architect who cannot run the building process for an entire house, may be quite capable of running the interior tile work: setting decisions points, situating the tile effort such that craftsmen are working to increase the life of the whole, making it clear that the process will take some ongoing negotiation, decisionmaking, trust and tradeoffs throughout the project. An architect who can succeed in this scope, and learn to run one trade, may eventually be able to expand, running more trades, slowly shifting the process more towards one that enables life.

In more general terms, Alexander presents the idea of ‘snippable genes’, from gene theory and genetics as a mechanism by which living process can spread. One order higher than patterns alone, these simple genes are process sequences that we can see as basic units of process transmission, small chains of patterns that together constitute an isolated instance of living process.

Alexander’s first example is that of the Grameen Bank. The ‘gene’ of which is a fairly simple process:

Lend small amounts without collateral
Lend within a small face to face community: people you know and whose plans you truly understand
Charge normal interest
Lend to those whom you trust instinctively

Muhammad Yunus had the idea to lend to small families in Bangladesh without collateral. He could not find institutional support to back up his own efforts, and so began with this small sequence, repeating it over and over until its value was clear. Starting with loans of US$27 to 42 families in a rural village, the Grameen bank reported assets of US$1.5 billion in 2010. One little ‘gene’ that replicates, spreads itself, and can ultimately transform the industry of finance and banking.

And we go further, to the idea of a gene pool. Alexander imagines a bank of such sequences, like the sequence necessary for interior tilework, or the sequence that leads to the formation of a lively and useful kitchen, or the sequence that allows one to create a productive and wholesome small office space. Each sequence a key for how we create life in some local context. Each living sequence interdependent invoking one another throughout their use, reflecting just that interlocking, overlapping, and interdependent character of the very centers they aim to bring forth from the wholeness. A cascade of sequences available at all levels of scale, reminiscent of the shifting contextual gradient we see in A Pattern Language.

And the idea of genetic sequences is an excellent metaphor, fundamentally viable for what Alexander hopes we can achieve. As the emerging discipline of Evolutionary Developmental Biology shows us, a fairly standard set of genetic building blocks, over 500 million years old, is responsible for the entire breadth of diversity of animal life we have seen since then. The question for us, interesting in growing the structure of a living world like organisms that grow and adapt and evolve to their surroundings, then, is not just the gene pool, but also the signaling criteria and how the basic genes are turned on-and-off. This will be the basis of an evolutionary architecture going forward.

I am continually impressed by the complexity and depth presented here in just a few moments—and the questions that these ideas pose for us interested in bringing the structure the of the world to life.

When this comes to bear, when we have a structural gene pool of basic architectural and societal process genes, and we evolve the signal sequences that allow us to understand how, when, and in-what-order to invoke these genes, then we can build a living world. We will be working toward the “exalting humanist” picture, as James put it, that Alexander sees as the ultimate goal of the Nature of Order. (Here is the longest excerpt of text I will present, which James read aloud in seminar to great effect.)

When we build a world for ourselves, we are not only building a world which is convenient, where we can be comfortable, where we can — as far as possible — be alive ourselves. We are also actively building a picture of our own sacred life, ordinary, dumb as it sometimes is, even — but a picture of the life which truly lies within us.
In a healthy world, each one of us must, in some degree, participate in this work, and allow our individual thoughts and desires to shape, at least a part of our small world. The world, what we call the world, is our work of sacrifice, our adoration, that we make this thing, this con- tainer, this world, which then makes us, and allows us to live.
But to create this thing, obviously we have to be — during the process — in touch with what we are. In touch with what it means to be a person, man or woman or child. In touch with what it means to be a father, a friend. In touch with the desire for a cup of coffee, for the smell of the freesias loosely gathered in the bowl on the table, for the special taste of the strawberries when they are sliced thin in the bowl with cream, in touch with the dung of animals, with dead leaves on the ground, in touch with the noisy blowing of the storm.
If we are to imagine a process which can allow all of us in society to create our communal life together, then this process must — to an extraordinary extent — allow these ordinary feelings, our ordinary thoughts and passions, to enter the world and therefore to enter the processes by which the world is made. No bureaucrat can handle this for us. No well-meaning master-architect, alone, will do it for us, not if what matters in the end is the tone of the jukebox, the smile of the waitress, the slightly raucous atmosphere in which the locals lean on the bar and eye each other, swapping tales, stifling their loneliness.
For all that to be contained, captured, brought to life, it must be us, mustn’t it — we ourselves — who do the deciding and at least some of the building, so that it is ours when it is finished, and we can still feel what it means to be alive in that thing, built, unfinished, but nevertheless open to our ordinary stories and our ordinary human life.
Well, now we can see why a refined and politely worked-out process will not do, why something conceived in the planning depart-or in the professional pages of legislation, or in a professional code of ethics, will not sufficiently catch the glint of that something that engages us, here, in our life on Earth. (pp. 548–549)

The Role of the Architect in the Third Millenium (Ch.21)

We close the reading in The Process of Creating Life with a look at Alexander’s conception of “the architect,” one driven deeply by his desire to bring the whole world alive, and rooted in his experience as a maker and a builder first and foremost.

Essentially, what architects could-and-should-be are gardeners who are tending to life and beauty of every built structure on earth — and all the space in between. They need not be the ones who “design” every building, but must feel charged and responsible for the life and vigor of each building that does sprout out of our world. To create the dazzling beauty and harmony of living structure.

Four words encompass this shifted perspective: Making, Designing, Building, Helping.

Making, as in practicing the art oneself of contributing to the physical form and development of a building, and using this knowledge to develop living evolve the living sequences by which our buildings come about.
Designing, in a more classical sense, for those larger and special or more important buildings that stand for something the people or community would like to have. Invoking new generative sequences to make those designs, and ensuring those sequences are structure preserving, will above all allow life and contribute to healing the world in this specific place.
Building, as in acting as the contractor who manages money, construction, budgets, and ultimately has the power to dynamically modify the structure as it is unfolding, so it can truly become alive.
Helping, as in helping hundreds of others design and lay out and build their own structures, supporting and contributing to the larger scale processes as necessary. Inventing, creating, and transmitting the generative sequences that will allow this large-scale bottom-up architecture to bring the world to life. Helping always ensure the emphasis of these processes are on contributing to and enhancing the whole.

As in all of Alexander’s work, it’s a point of view will only coalesce whenwe look from a number of levels of scale. A focus on drawing and drafting to define the architectural profession is myopic and irresponsible. Instead we must zoom out as far as possible, and see the architect as responsible for the conditions, tools, languages that allow living structure to spring up in the world, to have an orientation towards the whole, the architect-as-systems-creator. Instead we must zoom in as far as possible, knowing that to make anything come to life, each and every decision must be made with care, with slowness, with adaptation, the architect-as-craftsperson.

In all this, we must remember that the architect’s job — ultimately — is to create beauty, harmony, living structure both in the large and in the small. It is the dazzling beauty of darkness and light, color and silence, warmth and material and vegetation, which makes us gasp. That is what an architect’s life is for. That is what we stand for. No matter how sophisticated the work of procurement, no matter how powerful the generative sequences may be, it must be organized in such a way that it helps and inspires the architect to make beautiful and miraculous buildings which make all of us experience the soul. And along with this, living structure must be created worldwide. That, too, is something that must have attention. And we, the architects of the world, are uniquely placed by inclination and tradition to take on the job of safeguarding and creating the skiing structure on the earth’s surface. (pp. 560–561.)

Discovery of Architecture

Muni and Narendra also present in this seminar, on our final reading from their treatise.

We talk about regeneration through learning, and memory as the continuum of life, across the generations, a persistent backdrop to rhythm of life and death. In modern architecture, we have been so relentless in the focus on method, it’s happening now at the expense of wisdom. Not just individual wisdom, but collective wisdom, practiced, refined, transmitted, throughout the generations.

And yet… the modern movement, establishing itself as modern, allows us to look at the past, and past modes of working, being, and thinking, as something that we are disconnected from (once we invented the modern, we had to invent a past.) We in the modern age, it appears, have no need to respect the indigenous wisdom and practices that have served us for thousands of years. (See also Week 8: once we have materials that last forever, we can finally impose a permanent and unrelenting architecture from the top down.) We come now to a point in time where our ability to practice through action is drastically reduced, because of the modern dissociation of planning and production, of conception and execution. And the ways in which currently pursue our practices de-value our collective memories of the past, all of this knowledge built and fine-tuned for a specific purpose, in a specific place.

“Thought is the response of memory,” J. Krishnamurti says. It means that if there is no memory there will be no thought. What would be the source of action in the absence of thought, one wonders. Is it thoughtless action, or is the action free from the burden of thought and in the process the act is a creative act in the true sense of the term? All skills that make an act possible are essentially memory based, as may be understood in the expression of language or of construction. The organizing principle or thought may not be rooted in any personal memory but rather in the repository of the collective memory unconnected to ego (p.50).

I, now, am interested in spreading the baseline message — that this type of thinking and value for life is possible, and is what we could and should strive for. While the name “Christopher Alexander” may close a conversation immediately in some circles of architecture, I have yet to find those who are opposed to the basic humanity of what Alexander hopes to achieve and the ideals that drive this work. There are so many who are already doing their part to build life into the world, to enable more freedom, and don’t know that Alexander’s cosmology of life-in-structure can serve as another layer of purpose, a rallying ground for the paradigm shift to come. Perhaps more interesting is the fact that it’s been an odd and circuitous path to now, through America, through the production of software for the construction industry, through Europe, to an online course based in Italy espousing the principles of living architecture. I will attest that it was not so easy to find and tap in to this type of collective memory.

James recounts his own experience seeking out the “old masters” of communities where he’s been involved. People who are established in the craft, who might appear at the outset to be unreachable or distant, and are in actuality quite willing to find an apprentice or a student to whom they can pass on their knowledge. To the old masters: how might you share and transmit your knowledge? Teacher seeks pupil.

Saachi mentions three styles of learning, and the different characters of learners. A characterization based on the desire to learn, and sensibility to see what is actually being offered as teaching. Where are the interested students? How do we come to find and know the people who already have the sensibility to learn what is here offered? And what might it be that unlocks the sensibility for those who are interested?

What can we, now, do?

Yodan asks us, how we might be able to be a part of this shift. How we might store and transmit this knowledge of sequences of building.

As we talk about learning, teaching, sharing, gene pools, and process sequences… it’s clear we have so much to do, and we all can find different ways to support the paradigm shift to come. What might we do, to play our part?