Alexander On The Nature Of Order

WENDY KOHN INTERVIEWS CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER ON THE NATURE OF ORDER |
The following interview took place in Berkeley, during the spring of 2002, sponsored by the Wilson Quarterly. It was not published at that time, and appears here by kind permission of Wendy Kohn |
Interview:
WK: For whom have you been working these 35 years-- for yourself, for architects, your kids, the public…?
CA: Ialways try to write for anyone who can read…I’m very concerned about what’s happening to the earth in the twentieth century and I suppose you can say I write for anyone who will read it. The more people who read it, the more pleased I’ll be. We’re in a drastic situation and so I don’t have modest ambitions about how many people will read it.
WK: Do you feel as though you’ve been trying to write thisparticular work your whole life?
CA: Since about 1971, which is when I started it. But you’re asking a slightly different question, which is whether the ideas that are presented in this book were with me when I started working in the late 1950s. No, they were not.
I date that to went I went to Harvard to my fellowship. Because I’d been through architecture school at Cambridge, learnt nothing,thought it was absurd…said “ok, no one is telling me what this is really all about. I know people knew how to do this at one time; so I’m going to find out what it really means to do it.” And I began at the beginning: absolute zero, as I considered it.
So in those years, I was just getting some kind of a grip on what architecture is, how one can approach it, and after a long time, the patternlanguage came out--it was written in the 70s, came out in 77 or something. I had by then realized that there were things similar to the approaches that were common in all human societies, which had been abandoned, and tried to do something about that. When I wrote the pattern language, I thought everything was going to be fine from now on, that this was going to solve the problem. It sounds so funnybut actually it is what I thought..
WK:. Well, there were all 253 patterns…
CA: (3:35)Well, of course I realized what nonsense that was…and as you can tell from the dates, I actually began this book before that one came out…but of course it was finished as far as I was concerned. Having got that under my belt, I was really concerned with geometry, what is the issue about geometry? Architectureis entirely about geometry. In fact, I think one of the earliest versions of this book was entitled “Geometry.” It went through a lot of titles before this one came clear.
WK: How is this different from the pattern language.. you said that you wrote chapter 8 ages ago. It was being incubated during the same period?
CA: I began to realize, while I was working on this, early on, that I wasenmeshed in a stupendous mental trap.It felt as though it needed superhuman effort to break the bonds of this trap. Of course I was educated as a scientist and as a mathematician and I wasn’t so much concerned with having to say goodbye to whatever passed for architectural teachers. I didn’t mind about that, but gradually, the further I got into it, I realized I had to say goodbye to my scientificteachers, and that was very very hard. I mean, that took years, because (5:45)
WK: Because you realized you were straying outside the Cartesian, objective world of your scientific training?
CA: Yeah. But at the beginning it didn’t seem like a very big deal. I didn’t embark on some quest..it wasn’t like that. I mean those properties described in Chapter 5 are very, kind of straightforwardobservations. So that doesn’t break any particularly new ground. In other words, I think they’re very interesting. They’re somewhat like the Patterns except they’re deeper and more general. But I didn’t need to make any cosmological adventures to see them. Actually, that was kind of like straightforward science: the way I was making observations all the time-- saying “ok, this thing is there when it’s...