Weeknotes #8: Nature of Order—Centers, Process, Uniqueness; Maintenance as Renewal
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.
26 November, 2020. It is the 8th seminar, in which:
- We read The Process of Creating Life, pp. 267–340, and The Discovery of Architecture, pp. 35–48.
- Alexander introduces three more characteristics of all living processes: ‘Always Making Centers,’ ‘The Sequence of Unfolding,’ and ‘Every Part Unique’
- Diana Ramos interprets and presents the reading, especially touching on the play between repetition and uniqueness
- Muni and Narendra present on maintenance, renewal, time… and the cycle of life and death in architecture
- We discuss the mania of ‘materials that last forever’ and the ideas of modularity and rigidity
More on Living Processes
In the three chapters we read this week, Alexander continues to describe the universal characteristics of living processes. Again, this is the class of all processes that instantiate the Fundamental Differentiating Process, those processes who are capable of generating living structure (as opposed to processes of arrangement or assemblage which create fabricated structure.)
Previously, we saw that living processes are (1) a step-by-step adaptation that carries the opportunity for feedback at each increment, and (2) governed by the whole — always shaping the parts to create more life in the whole.
3. Always Making Centers
A living process is always governed and guided by the creation of living centers. Now, we reincorporate some of the core work of Book One: we go back into the theory of wholeness and the framing of a field of living, interlocking, and co-evolving centers.
This is easy to say and much more difficult to accomplish. To bring forth living centers, we must work with vision of the whole in mind, and an honest ability to sense the life in those centers we work. We can create experiments that allow us to determine if we are moving towards more wholeness and life, as we begin to work with a center, or if we are moving away from it. We have tools to assess the strength of our experiments: remember the Mirror and its associated tests from Week #4.
It’s something that architects and builders of traditional society understood, and so could construct their processes to give this effort the time it required. Alexander notes what he calls the pervasive generality of this center making process. The practical reality of the matter is that, in every moment of the living process, every decision we take, every act of attending to what we do, and what we design, is simply part of the pervasive process of making strong and stronger centers as a part of everything that we’re dealing with. That’s all there is!
A wholeness composed of a field of centers, expresses them not as components, but vital foci of space whose very existence suggests and establishes relationships of varying levels with other and related regions of space. Barring complete uniformity of void, there is always a portion of the whole we can work on. There is always some center that by its very existence — by the fact that it is a region of space and not an atomic building block — relates it to that space around it and suggests places where we can put our attention in strengthening and unfolding the latent whole with this incremental act of living process. It is not always building more things, but always bringing more regions of space to life, with more depth, and more clarity.
4. The Sequence of Unfolding
As we dipped into Book Two, and started understanding that Fifteen Properties were in fact Fifteen Possible Transformations — steps in a process, static characteristics only because the structure had been transformed to draw these properties forth.
Now, we move into the specificity of sequence and the dramatic importance this has on the quality and life of the work. Again, Alexander brings the classic example of the embryo to bear, describing how this massive and marvelous complexity can unfold into a real and living structure, because it does so in a specific order of events. It is not a design at the end of the process that guides the unfolding of the whole but it is a sequence of decisions that, when taken in the correct order, allow the whole to come to life. (I post the same example — it’s really quite marvelous to watch the unfolding. This time, consider the order in which successive differentiations are introduced.)
We go from “process,” generically, to the specific importance of having a specific sequence of actions in a specific project or unfolding. Last week, we learned the distinction between generated structure and fabricated structure. This facet of living processes speaks most strongly about the nature of generated structure: the crux of the matter is that the sequence of actions taken is what generates the structure. The operations, and the order that they were chosen in, are the forces that generate the structure, the path to unfolding each of these centers.
Making the garden first: Alexander presents a simple example, highlighting how a sequence-decision can drastically alter the final character of the whole. (It also calls back to ideas presented in A Pattern Language — the order in which patterns-as-choices are presented, is very deliberate.) The example is the process of laying out a house on a lot. Alexander says that common sense says that first you would lay out the house and then you would work on the garden. And that this common sense is wrong: because almost inevitably, when the garden must be taken from the leftover space, it is unlikely that this can develop to become a real living center in its own right. Rather, a sequence that first locates the place with the best light that can support the most lively garden and then chooses the house to support that garden location is what will create from the whole living centers, and two centers that can be further brought to life with real potential to live. All this, solely on the the order in which these centers were focused on.
The ability to identify and come to master a generative sequence calls to mind Alexander’s description of carpenter in the pattern “208. Gradual Stiffening.”
The essence of this process is very fundamental indeed. We may understand it best by comparing the work of a fifty-year-old carpenter with the work of a novice. The experienced carpenter keeps going. He doesn’t have to keep stopping, because every action he performs, is calculated in such a way that some later action can put it right to the extent that it is imperfect now. What is critical here, is the sequence of events. The carpenter never takes a step which he cannot correct later; so he can keep working, confidently, steadily.
The novice by comparison, spends a great deal of his time trying to figure out what to do. He does this essentially because he knows that an action he takes now may cause unretractable problems a little further down the line; and if he is not careful, he will find himself with a joint that requires the shortening of some crucial member — at a stage when it is too late to shorten that member. The fear of these kinds of mistakes forces him to spend hours trying to figure ahead: and it forces him to work as far as possible to exact drawings because they will guarantee that he avoids these kinds of mistakes.
The difference between the novice and the master is simply that the novice has not learnt, yet, how to do things in such a way that he can afford to make small mistakes. The master knows that the sequence of his actions will always allow him to cover his mistakes a little further down the line. It is this simple but essential knowledge which gives the work of a master carpenter its wonderful, smooth, relaxed, and almost unconcerned simplicity. ( — A Pattern Language, p.964)
When we understand how to bring forth life and living centers, and our work is incrementally moving through a successful generative sequence, then we can do so with natural and unconcerned simplicity.
A final thought on generative sequences: Alexander brings up mathematical scarcity. For anything that we are making, given the number of steps requisite in producing that thing, an overwhelming majority of the possible sequences with which we could create it will be wrong. It takes time, effort, feeling to find a successful generative sequence. But when we do — it can be used to marvelous and richly varied effect, even when it’s the same sequence being applied. Traditional building processes were able to find successful generative sequences over hundreds of thousands of years. In our modern processes that spit out fabricated structures, the sequences are not generative, and we also have had an extremely limited amount of time to cope with the possibilities that current building technologies afford. One hopes we can progress, find the skill and wherewithal with advance our modern system of production into one of living process.
So, there are three things that we need now for a process to create generated structure: step by step adaptations [always enhancing the whole], working on the structure of the centers itself, and a beautiful sequence of differentiations, steps, patterns.
5. Every Part Unique
Two major mistakes in the 20th century distort our ideas about uniqueness and repetition, says Alexander. First the idea of that mass production, when it is efficient and effective, must produce exactly identical replicas. Second, a conception of the order of the universe’s fundamental building blocks as atoms which are individual and separate pieces, distinct modular bits.
In a world of wholeness, under the theory of centers, it means that while each atom may be nearly identical in character — because it is a field, a wave as well as a particle, a center, if you will — it has the capability to and must also be responding to its environment. It must be unique because its context is unique. The key is that regularity does not imply identicality; we can have a regularity that also supports uniqueness.
Regularity is important. Repetition is important. Identical replicas assembled as purely modular units however, are not building blocks for life, as they fundamentally dissect the universe into an assemblage that is reconstructed from its deconstructed parts. It will not, as the theory of centers and unfolding pushes us to do, allow adaptation to context.
Parts made on the other side of the world, for any building, are not likely suited for this building. In the prior chapter, Alexander brings the example of producing tiles for the Julian Street Inn, how each tile is its own strong center. It’s also an example of bringing life into the process by making each part unique. Yes, these tiles repeat, regularly, however, they are not identical in the factory-made mindset of pure expedience. First, they were worked out to fit the specific building context, making the wall unique; and each was hand-produced so that each tile itself was unique. (It is a lovely example. I would love to visit the Julian Street Inn and see how it feels in practice. Also interesting would be the potential to undertake a comparative quality-of-life study with this shelter, built through a living process, versus a comparable shelter of fabricated structure.)
So, even among regularity and repetition, the subtle uniqueness necessary to create this place as one whole living place, to bring it to life, is due to a full and real attention for the unique context of every possible part of the space, every center. This idea of making every part unique also speaks to a respect for what exists in the world: a living process, because it always works to enhance the whole and always extends what is there, implores us to first understand and respect what exists, what is. The enigma, says Alexander, is that something new, unique, previously unseen — even innovative and astonishing — arises from the extent to which we are able to attend to what is already there, and learn to extend it, enliven it, make each part unique.
Maintenance as Renewal
Muni and Narendra also present from the Discovery of Architecture. Time here also plays a crucial role, and Muni says:: “The simple fact of the matter is that once you build something, it deteriorates. We start this idea with the awareness of time, as the major deciding factor in how the object is going to age.”
Narendra shows a striking juxtaposition: a Tokyo cemetery along with New York City — the resemblance is remarkable. This leads into the discussion of buildings’ maintenance and renewal as one more aspect of the cycle of life and death, the foundations of our existence. It quickly puts technical marvels of building into perspective.
We look at buildings from Gandhi’s ashram, which are simple and are built such that they clearly require maintenance, yet can last for hundreds — thousands — of years. We contrast that with the false hopes of a material that won’t weather; the hubris of building an everlasting monument, the religious fanaticism with which some modern architects have focused on the material technology over the human impact of their work…
Few works in the western canon of architecture deal with the idea of upkeep, repair, renewal, or the “what happens” to a building after it is built. (Yodan mentions Steward Brand’s How Buildings Learn, a lovely look at the development and adaptation of buildings over time.) It’s as if we see our buildings in the same way we treat our consumer products: a package, an image to be bought, used, and discarded when we’re done with it.
What Muni and Narendra draw out in The Discovery of Architecture, is a clear and fundamental situating of architecture as it impacts and supports human existence. We feel a strong connection between life and architecture, the rhythms of birth, care, maintenance, regeneration, death, renewal… all blended, all rooted in a point of view that respects the larger ecosystem, the act of architecture as rooted in culture and society. If, when we build, we can simply recognize that “once you build something, it deteriorates,” then we can honestly ask ourselves how to approach that deterioration, which systems or social support will be needed for maintenance and regeneration, how we may produce a building that is one living part of a larger living system, each which can support each other.
We are dealing, in the modern world, with a system that produces its structures dead-on-arrival. Perhaps this is why we so rarely mind their regeneration and further adaptation.
Closing
Toward the middle of seminar, with good humor, Yodan muses on institutions and longevity:
A dying institution will seek to monumentalize itself, and often the expense of that cost will accelerate the death of the institution. Look at schools, families, campuses… the desire of the institution to immortalize itself, in stone and steel and concrete.
And that’s Week 8 in the books. See you next week.
Thanks to Building Beauty for creating the Nature of Order reading seminar, and keeping it a free and publicly accessible part of the program.
