Andrea Torreblanca (AT) The Nature of Order is a four-volume book that was written by Christopher Alexander and published in 2002–3. It delves into the notion of the living world: living as a continuous process that evolves and unfolds. One of the central concepts for this book, and of all of Alexander’s theory, I think, is the idea of wholeness, a very interesting concept to me because it talks about how things are connected, and are linked from the microscopic to the macroscopic, and how organisms adapt and regenerate.

Michael Mehaffy (MM) So, the interesting thing to me about Alexander is that he started out in 1950s. He was at Harvard when [Walter] Gropius was there. And so, you have somebody who has spanned this enormous period of the twentieth century, right up to the twenty-first century. This idea of wholeness, or what the philosophers call “mereology” is the ancient topic of part-whole relations. You think about the parts that make the whole right? But do the leaves make the tree? Actually, the tree makes the leaves. So, it’s a very interesting set of ideas that Alexander in many ways helped us to unpack in the world of architecture.

AT Yes. And I think when he discovered the atom and DNA, he tried to figure out whether architecture had a DNA, which also relates to the idea of the pattern. A Pattern Language is often misunderstood as being these rigid rules. But in fact, by calling it a language, it speaks about a grammar, and about an alphabet. So, a pattern language speaks about how to create a different vocabulary from a few elements.

MM It’s a loose structure, not a deterministic structure. In Notes on the Synthesis of Form, he was unpacking the idea that you can decompose a design problem into its elements and into the way that those elements are related, what he called the forces. And this was something that other people were working on at the same time, [like] Herbert Simon in his great paper “The Architecture of Complexity.”

When Alexander was working on The Pattern Language, he shared some of its criticisms and deficiencies: that it was incomplete, that it didn’t address some of the geometric characteristics that are so important for part-whole relations, a living structure as he came to call it. He began to see fifteen geometric properties or fundamental properties that he observed consistently over and over again in not only physical structures in the universe, but in architectural structures, traditional art, [and in] many structures where you can see these geometric patterns that are very consistent. He saw architecture as the kind of ultimate scientific laboratory. Quite fascinating, I think.

AT It is interesting that Alexander studied mathematics. Many of the theories and ideas that he proposed became very influential to design and other disciplines. He found elements in nature that were quite important, such as symmetry and the void, not really physical things, but elements that we normally don’t see in nature. So, it was also about these invisible things that are interconnected in nature and in biology.

MM Someone found A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building and sent them to a bunch of software people. And a few of those software people recognized that Alexander had his finger on a problem they were struggling with, which was, how do you make a wholeness in software? And they applied that methodology to programming, which is now a major domain of software design and software technology. It’s an enormous field that has grown up around this idea of pattern languages. Alexander was a structuralist, a neostructuralist, you might say, from a philosophical point of view, an intermediary between us and our culture and our world.

AT I find very interesting that when Christopher Alexander was asked, What is one of our biggest problems? And you would imagine that as any architect, he would respond that it is the housing problem, or urbanism. But Alexander said the major problem we have today is ugliness.

MM You know, people laugh at that, but that’s because we have diminished the idea of what beauty is and what ugliness is to something that’s commodified and trivialized. And, actually, we are beginning to understand that there’s something a lot deeper going on. This is coming out from a lot of fields in the sciences, like neuroscience and environmental psychology and other fields where it seems pretty clear that what we regard as ugly is what is threatening to us as human beings. You know, what is likely to make us physically ill or emotionally ill, or, you know, unwell in some way. And there’s a lot of research on this, that many people do think that the human environment is getting uglier. The other thing that I find really interesting, and frankly inspiring about Alexander, is that he sees that we have choices. We are not powerless in this sort of world of economic forces and cynicism and postmodern angst. We have choices now. I think that’s very, very hopeful.

AT In his book The Nature of Order, that took many decades, [Alexander] goes deep into the spiritual, in thinking about the cosmos. I was very surprised to find that some of the patterns do not talk about the physical world. They talk about how people are connected through living situations, like a carnival, he’s proposing places for people to have places in the city to play, to dance. He talks about the city as a receptacle for life.

MM It’s an understanding that the universe is not a dead place. Maybe we need a sense of the divine or a sense of the connection that he talked about in The Nature of Order. The City Is Not a Tree made the point that you can’t support living activities if you don’t have the capacity for those interconnecting relationships: the kinds of relationships that spaces can have if they’re too linear and fragmented. We need to pay attention to the world, not our model of the world, and not impose our simplified abstract model on the world, but understand the way the world really is, and make sure that our models, when we use them, are loose enough, and language like enough that we can accommodate the real life that occurs in the city.