(2022-03-24) Taylor Alexander At Any Given Moment In A Process

Dorian Taylor on Christopher Alexander: At Any Given Moment in a Process. Alexander had an unusual way of speaking, in that he rather unabashedly used language that made people feel uncomfortable. He wrote plainly and earnestly about concepts like wholeness, life, and living structure. To him these aren’t nebulous, mystical, touchy-feely sentiments, but actual concrete things that can be treated with rigour, and that’s what his whole career was about.

Math Era (1960s & change)

The thesis of the dissertation, which was published under the title Notes on the Synthesis of Form, is that if we take it as a given that intractable complex problems are solved by breaking them down into simpler, more tractable ones, then for a given problem there are ways to take it apart that are better than others, and indeed there is often a single, unique decomposition pattern that is objectively better than the rest

Alexander rather innovatively defined a “design problem” as a network of interacting concerns, such that any two interconnected concerns must be satisfied in tandem

Alexander’s dissertation showed not only how this could be done, but why it should be done by severing the fewest connections possible.

We will often agree on whether a given design concern is valid, but less so on the degree to which it is important. Therefore, instead of spending time arguing over which design concerns to cut, throw them all into the hopper and let the math sort them out.

If you have done any kind of design work, you will likely bristle at how antithetical this sounds to your process

I spent a lot of time with this book, with the math, and with the work of Alexander’s contemporaries (notably Herbert Simon and Horst Rittel). I even tried to implement it, thinking it would be a great methodology for cost-estimating software projects. What I found—and I was warned, as the book says as much—was that adding a new design concern to the network has the potential to dramatically alter the optimal decomposition pattern. Also, the sheer effort of gathering and structuring these design concerns is significant and irreducible, and there is always the possibility that any new design concern added to the network would yield yet another new design concern.

more practical issues, like the computing hardware of the era

The HIDECS program, which is what the implementation was called, would only realistically be able to be run once for a given project

In the preface to the paperback edition of Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Alexander wrote that the math wasn’t even really important, but rather the diagrams sprinkled throughout the book—which he called patterns—were.

Pattern Era (1970s-80s)

If you have heard of Christopher Alexander at all, it is almost certainly in conjunction with this most successful book, A Pattern Language.

The patterns are what got computer people interested in Alexander’s work. In his own words, they were “a convenient format for exchanging—let’s call them—good ideas: context, problem, solution…and that’s fine.”

The big book is Gamma et. al’s Design Patterns, which I own but have never read

There is also Richard Gabriel’s Patterns of Software, to which Alexander wrote the foreword, which is more introspective and interesting

The point of A Pattern Language people tend to miss—or perhaps, in the interest of publishing their own books, shrewdly understand—is that it’s called A Pattern Language, not The Pattern Language.

A Pattern Language was directly and deliberately about empowering ordinary people with the conceptual and rhetorical materials needed to express what they wanted to manifest in the built environment. (agency)

The books of this era that are interesting to me, however, are in the tail of the sales distribution. All of them are case studies

These are profoundly fascinating documents that shed light on how to translate the high-minded theory of A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building into actual projects.

Magnum Opus Era (1990s, 2000s)

The thing people who just look at patterns miss, is that Alexander himself renounced them. He said so plainly in 1996, at a keynote address to a room full of software developers

What he replaced patterns with is the four-volume, 2500-ish-page tome known as The Nature of Order.

Logically, it is one book... the entire thing is one contiguous essay, in the original sense of the term.

The essay is about Alexander’s conceptualization of life, how to create living structure, and why

At the core of this work is the idea of a center, which I will attempt to characterize roughly as an identity, a discernible region of space, a perceptible thing—that is, in contrast to a non-thing

In living structure, centers are recursive: centers contain smaller centers, interact with centers at the same scale, and aggregate into larger centers (fractal)

According to Alexander, living structure strongly exhibits certain physical (geometric or topological) properties, of which he identified fifteen:

Alexander himself wrote that the number of properties is unimportant—indeed he had a separate (though borrowing several physical/​geometric ones) set of eleven properties when discussing colour. If you squint enough, you can tell that the properties overlap considerably, as would any attempt to attach labels to something that is truly ineffable

The process of creating living structure involves using these properties as structure-preserving transformations. At each iteration of what Alexander called the fundamental differentiating process, you pick one and apply it.

• We use one or more of the fifteen structure-preserving transformations, singly or in combination
• We also test that what we have done is the simplest differentiation possible
• When complete, we go back to the beginning of the cycle, and apply the same process again.

The fundamental differentiating process is an outer loop, and the fifteen properties/​transformations are primitives.

In a way it reaches back to his earliest mathematical work, circumventing the problem of gathering and partitioning a snarl of design concerns, by performing the computation in situ.

Alexander called it the mirror-of-the-self test. It reduces, roughly, to comparing one configuration to another, and asking yourself, not “do I prefer” one or the other, but “which of these is a better representation of myself?” This formulation, according to Alexander, gets overwhelming agreement among those who ask, and is the basis for guidance by what he called deep feeling.

Software people who study Alexander should, in my opinion, really be studying this work, and leave patterns behind, as he did.

The Battle (2010s and on…)

I recall being surprised in 2012 to learn that Alexander had published another book

peculiar—and at the time I thought hyperbolic—title, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth.

it’s more of a plea, framed as a dichotomy between conflicting worldviews:
System A, Alexander’s worldview, which creates the built environment based on deep feeling and devotion to the people who will ultimately occupy the space,
System B, the one we typically see around us, which designs based on images, and where the reference image supersedes the actual work product, cutting corners to maximize profit.

This book, in an oblique way, is ultimately why I turned my attention to finance, procurement, contracting, and project management

any drawing of a building Alexander drew was only ever a suggestion.

The central problem of authoritative blueprints is that they have to be fixed and cemented up front, with incomplete information

Rejecting System B, on ethical grounds or otherwise, you will find, as Alexander did, that it will fight you. If you go back through his portfolio, you will find that many of his projects had been usurped, sabotaged, or canceled.

By replacing living structure in the built environment, the implacable System B would erase any evidence of an alternative

For System A to gain ground, it needs to camouflage, or it must otherwise go where System B isn’t looking. Only when it has accumulated enough power, can it engage System B directly. It may be too late for construction, but, Alexander conjectured elsewhere, it may not be too late for software.

We certainly see echoes of Alexander’s worldview in the Agile movement, its signatories being eminently present for the Pattern craze in the 1990s. But, as I argued in a popular piece, the sights of that movement are still set to tactical goals. The way software systems are financed, procured, contracted, and project-managed still draw heavy influence from construction and manufacturing, which matured at the peak of the industrial era—that is to say, the second world war.

We’ll Have To Take It From Here

Proponents and critics alike regularly misunderstand Alexander as being “trad”. For better or worse, they view him as a nostalgic who wanted to take civilization back to some idyllic, pre-industrial utopia.

a tradition is always going to represent a local optimum, a satisficing (to use Herbert Simon’s term) state of affairs. Traditions are by definition “good enough” until they aren’t. Challenging tradition is fine; we should endeavour to societies that can accommodate that. But we should be able to answer why the Chesterton's fence was put in place, before we have license to remove it.

in many parts of the world, pitched roof says “house”, in a way that a more exotic structure does not, to the extent that (according to the relevant patterns) people feel less comfortable around odd roof and ceiling shapes.

Perhaps the most dramatically underrepresented feature of Alexander’s approach, to me at least, was his attitude toward money. He believed that construction costs ought to be fixed in advance, from which he would receive a fixed income. When one of his projects was completed under budget, he actually returned the surplus to the client.

As we say farewell to a figure who inspired so many, I am reminded of his closing remarks to that room full of programmers in 1996: ""…what I’m proposing here is…a view of programming as the natural, genetic infrastructure of a living world, which you are capable of creating, managing, making available, and which could then have the result, that a living structure in our towns, houses, workplaces, cities, is an attainable thing, which it has not been for the last 50 to 100 years. That is an incredible vision of the future—and I realize that you may think I’m nuts, because this is not what I’m supposed to be talking about to you, and you may say “well gosh, great idea, but we’re not interested.” But I do think you are capable of that. And I don’t think anybody else is going to do this job.""