Christopher Alexander thinks he is the messiah of building. The buildings he has built are not good, though, and not all of the other architects in the world are as stupid as you might want to believe. "A Pattern Language" just isn't the great gift to humanity that some people, eager for prescriptions, want it to be.
Well, he died last year, so presumably he isn’t thinking any more.
But if you’re going to criticize his work (or anyone’s work, for that matter) you’ll need to put in a little more effort. Why are his buildings not good?
I trained as an architectural historian, and let me tell you, architectural quality can't be put into words. Architects and arch. historians have intuitive opinions. There is no science of architectural criticism. Alexander was the kind of person who thought such a science was possible.
The most important clues to the mediocrity of his buildings are the facts that a) they aren't widely imitated and b) they don't usually appear in fine books about architecture, trad or otherwise.
Alexander was more of a mathematician than an architect. It's a long time since any one person did both of those things well.
If it can’t be put into words, how can you call it not good?
The fact that something isn’t imitated or featured in books has almost nothing to do with whether it is “good” or not, merely that it’s not in line with the wants and needs of builders and publishers.
I’m not a huge fan of Alexander and in fact I don’t actually know much of his work, but these aren’t very good criticisms.
Well, tough. This is how art works: a consensus emerges among practitioners that some things are better than other things, even though nobody can articulate in words just what makes the good things so good, or the bad things bad. The discipline of aesthetics is kind of irrelevant to art and architecture: it doesn't have much useful content, and it's not helpful in judging work. Most artists/architects don't use it in any way. It's just windy philosophizing.
The taste of food is similar. If I'm a restaurant critic and I tell you that a certain restaurant is good, you need to have a way of assessing that opinion which doesn't involve requiring it to be written in some kind of positivistic, quantified, apodictic form.
No, that isn’t how art works at all. The actual practitioners often have very little influence on art criticism.
This clearly isn’t a serious discussion and you don’t seem interested in (or capable of) justifying any opinions you have, so I think I’ll end it here.
I agree his buildings weren't very pleasing aesthetically, and The Timeless Way of Building was embarrassing at points for the excuses he makes for poor execution, but his design patterns are very well-grounded IMO. I don't think you could just take them without any architectural sense and produce a decent structure, though all houses that I've found charming fit his ideas pretty neatly. The failure of A Pattern Language (IMO) is that he breaks things down into constituent pieces but fails to articulate a method for putting them into a cohesive (or tasteful) whole again. APL ends up being better viewed as a series of observations of things that generally work, than a system that produces successful buildings. He had inspiring ideas, but failed to achieve what he set out, and claimed, quite loudly, to do.
What he really hits on for me though is his fairly detailed critique of modern architecture. It's a disaster, and he was right to emphasize the impact it has on the people that have to live in and around it. I don't know how to describe it any other way than being psychically oppressive. His human-centric design approach was novel and may be needed more today than when he was writing about it.
Still making my way through his work, but I like him quite a bit, overall. He's not the final answer to architecture, but he has stimulating ideas.
> The most important clues to the mediocrity of his buildings are the facts that a) they aren't widely imitated and b) they don't usually appear in fine books about architecture, trad or otherwise.
Lol @ this standard for what is good. I also trained and practiced as an architect, so take my opinion with the same weight as yours. A home with good craftsmanship beats most of the homes in the 'fine books about architecture'. Yes, he wasn't a great designer, but his contribution was more about looking at the living language that develops in the tradition of building, rather than looking at the insulated self congratulatory world of academic dick measuring contests which is what the Fine Art side of architecture is today.
I don't know where you got the idea that there is a first guess that comes from a table. The table lookup just brings x into a suitable range, given A.
Shades of "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?"— a Taylor series can only do so much!
If you search for "perpetual motion machine" you can find a ton of cheap knockoffs of this device. You can get a badly made wooden knockoff for $50 or quite a bit less?
