The Timeless Way of Building

Author: Christopher Alexander
First Published: 1979
Genre: non-fiction, architecture

Introduction

It is 1979, 15 years after Christopher Alexander first wrote Notes on the Synthesis of Form. The contrast. In the place of rigorous, rationally defensible, but unworkable mathematical modelling, we have a spiritual, gnostic philosophy of architecture. The goal of building is to create life, to imbue the building with meaning:

It is open to the inverse criticism of Notes On the Synthesis of Form: it is undemocratic because the “quality without a name” is only open to those who can appreciate or experience it. We are therefore caught by modernity’s fork:

The solution of Christopher Alexander – as with all who propose to resolve the second half of the fork – is to assert the same quality of goodness is within us all:

Our apparent fragmentation is only temporary. It is a tragic state of affairs (either a wrong turn or fall from heaven) produced by a sick modernism. Yet all who enter a timeless building will see, or can see, the quality without a name.

Christopher Alexander’s argument is deeply spiritual: he believes in a version of non-dualistic panpsychism in which everything possesses this kind of spiritual “quality without a name.” It is there when you feel most yourself; it is there in the calm of the brook; in the setting of the sun and the whistle of the wind.

Alexander is not alone in recommending this as a solution to modernity. He is joined by many other Romantic Liberals who favour his world of acoustic, natural small-scale living. What is, for Alexander, the good life? It has been described as “comfortable, easygoing, sensuously pleasurable, communal, and full of leisure time for socializing and solitude.”

Based on his buildings, this is indeed what he wants: natural materials; space for quiet reflection, relaxation, thought, and appreciation of beauty; communal life; love; heartbreak; games; and quiet. Here is his life:

And his favourite moments:

So yes, Alexander is a believer in the (domesticated) Romantic Liberal life. He is a humanist, a friend of humanity and enemy of the artificiality of modernity. This happens to make him appear retrograde. His buildings are always consistent with their local, surrounding style, and they are often traditional, small scale, and oriented around living life in a communal, intimate way.

It is a life, above all, freed of fear, of control, of strictures.

It is a highly liberal model, one premised on the belief that we should be allowed to act freely, for in each of us is endless wonderful possibility. It is perfect for an individualistic-spiritualistic model of life: that you just need to be yourself, and you will produce beauty:

What, exactly, does it feel like to “live”? Alexander is not particularly clear here. He believes people in the past lived intuitively according to the quality without a name (hence why their buildings were invariably more beautiful). Thus, it cannot be euphoric: people in the past did not live invariably exciting, dynamic lives. Nor is it straightforwardly about living in the moment. In general, their lives were often miserable, difficult, and painful.

I think his model of the quality without a name is best seen as the following:

On the other hand, he does seem to adopt a far more Romantic view of the liberated individual. When you give up all forms of control, stricture, limitation; all possessions, all worries, all fear of ridicule, you reveal this quality:

It is a life of “no ties”, “no suits”, “no anxiety”: “only the laughter and the rain.” It is the intense vividness and clarity of purpose which, for example, the protagonist of Ikiru experiences when he finds out he is going to die. And yet… how many people, either now or in the past, have ever lived like this? Could live like this? It seem to be the exact dilemma of My Dinner With Andre of the extraordinary meeting the ordinary.

As with all specific pictures of living well, the danger is in the details. There are three controversial aspects in The Timeless Way of Building.

First, there appears to be a clear limit on how big society can get whilst retaining the “quality without a name”:

I have no idea what he made of post-1960s civilisation: how did he think we could live at a local level given current population densities? His relationship with modern technology was similarly difficult. He is probably best regarded as having a kind of secular-Amish view of technology. He accepts the car, the telephone, the computer, and the aeroplane. He likely would have accepted the early internet of the 90s, and possibly the dumb mobile-phone. Yet you can rest assured he would have opposed smartphones, the modern internet, the motorway, mass air travel, and many more of our modern innovations. How on earth are we meant to work out where this sweet spot is…?

To some degree, then, you fear that he implicitly resigned himself to the same fate as the organisers of the Newport Folk Festival: as one subculture, theoretically the true way of living but practically no better or worse, amongst all the rest. The problems of collective slow living seem just that insurmountable.

Second, he is clearly at least reasonably socially conservative. That is, he appears to believe in general differences between men and women:

Alexander appears to also believe these differences, actualised at a local level, need to be taken as a fixed part of the design “context”:

Where to begin? The real crux of the matter lies in how much flexibility there is in the

quality without a name . The way I read him, Alexander believes that within us all is the spark of “life” – that is, the quality without a name. This quality can be suppressed and hidden by modernism but is always lurking beneath (c.f. the ‘inner child’).

• Once freed, this spark of life has immense generativity. It can produce multiple solutions to different ‘design problems’ (thus, allowing variation for both subcultures and individuals). One can spot, immediately, whether a given solution was implemented with ‘life.’ For some problems, however, there are a more limited number of solutions. There may only be a select few ways of making a living doorway.
• All we have as evidence of ‘living’ solutions is existing buildings. One can sense immediately if they possess life so there is no need for large sweeping historical surveys. Nonetheless, we should expect, given the universality of life, to see similar solutions across time and space. Alexander extracts, as examples of the Timeless Way, buildings from China, Japan, India, Morocco, Istanbul, Europe, America, and South America.

So far so good. This makes sense for responses to essentially natural design problems: e.g., where to get water, how to produce food, producing shelter. It is also fairly compelling for semi-natural problems, such as caring for the elderly, providing space for raising the young, and communal spaces for living. But here we immediately ask: can ‘life’ produce a living solution to all problems, even those produced by ‘dead’ processes? Is there a ‘living’ way of making an advert for car insurance?

• Many of the problems we think of here are produced culturally: we only need to worry about the modesty of our women because of a cultural norm about their modesty. Maybe this norm is itself not ‘alive’? Or maybe it was ‘alive’ but now is outdated in the 21st century? Alexander would probably say: if it is before the 18th century (?), then it is de facto alive because our ancestors were not organised, reflective, or powerful enough to produce dead patterns.
• Regarding today, maybe, given our techno-cultural context, the right culture – that is, the ‘living culture’ – changes. Maybe there are multiple possible living cultures which open up as our technology changes?

Finally, he seems fairly committed to the idea of distinct, historico-cultural communities:

This is connected to his idea of the “pattern gene-pool” which are all the patterns percolating, inherited (via person-person traditions), in a community. Naturally, if we emphasise feeling, experience, and tradition, we are naturally going to become more conservative regarding our communities. This is good because it also increases the variety of life: a “natural differentiation will occur, in which each town, each region, each culture, adopts a different set of patterns – so the great stock of pattern languages across the earth will gradually get differentiated.” (346).

It is completely unclear whether he thinks there are national patterns, or, for that matter, global patterns (even if he thinks, at the local level, there are many parallels between countries).

To summarise, then, Alexander remains pluralistic regarding different subcultures. This is because the design problems thrown up by human life and our current technology offer multiple living solutions: a culture which suppresses gay people, or one which imprisons women in suburban hell is not a living culture. But there are often several living cultures for a given environment (which includes, maybe, genes, existing buildings, the natural environment, the legacy of childhoods). But who is to say if, given a particular culture, there is “life?” And how much life?

Perhaps all we need to say here is that we all immediately know, when entering a culture, if it is alive. The people fall in love, they feel things, they build things, they produce more life, they building their own style of living buildings, they have parties, they appreciate nature.

Additional Problems With the Quality Without a Name

“Verifiability”

Remember modernity’s fork? Well guess what: it’s back. Most modern people are not exactly thrilled by the idea of the personal and experiential taking precedence over the rigorous, the verifiable, and the objective. Alexander’s buildings, as far as I can tell, can only be built in person, ideally with someone sensitive (and you feel Alexander’s unusual drive and charisma is behind why any of his buildings were made at all), with close connection to the people involved. A necessary corollary of this was a distrust of specialists:

Naturally, specialists hate him (as do their lackeys, academics), who criticise him for being ‘unnecessarily provocative’, and for not producing empirically verifiable work. They have a point in substance: it is impossible to build large scale infrastructure today if it is going to be more expensive (“System B”) and which relies purely on ineffable, unquantifiable experience. You need to be strategic to get such buildings constructed. And yet Alexander ignores this:

He believes in the objectivity of experience. And how could a theory like that ever succeed without buy-in by a relatively small, culturally and experientially homogonous community of elites? Much better to have a highly abstract idea which can travel widely and cleanly across borders; one which is technical and obtuse, and therefore immune from criticism.

Kohn makes this point well: “One of the most apparent of Alexander’s unavoidable contradictions is the deep devotion to romantic visions and utopian principles that exists alongside an equally persistent drive to quantify, prove, and universally pronounce “scientific” bases for his architectural prescriptions, just as Karl Marx labored to provide a scientific basis for his vision of a stateless society.” (30)

Alexander realised that, absent a world of a small cultural elite – or fully local, pre-modern society – he needed to communicate and justify his ideas. But his ideas are entirely local and experiential! You had to be there!

“Subjectivity”

The most direct argument against Christopher Alexander is that the way he feels is not universal. That is, it’s just a matter of his own opinion. The most brutal, direct criticism here is from Kohn:

[Obviously the buildings she makes are unbearably ugly derivatives of Holiday Inn]

Other vicious attacks include the claim he is obsessed merely with “comfort”, or with middle class bourgeoise virtues. Here is a good one from a survey of criticisms: “furthermore, the very idea that all humanity shares an innate and common value system is deeply problematic.” Of course Alexander thinks this is absurd: ““Alexander believes that the architectural profession has “gone bonkers” because it thinks that what’s good and bad is merely a matter of opinion.”

The Timeless Way includes a strong negative element as well as a positive element. It is not the bland and unhelpful “equality” of “all cultures are equally good”, it is not the insane communist/muscular liberal “we will have no culture”, nor is it the sclerotic, commercial, American “we will have any and all culture.” Consider that critics considered this a valid argument:

It is clear CA’s model of the good life is not obviously universal – it is quite specific after all. This is what opens it up to criticism and attack. Indeed, the sketch we produced above is confirmed by the images he uses to illustrate his “good life.” They involve three motifs: (1) love; (2) children; and – paradoxically the most persuasive - (3) casual loitering:

Now, there are three different ways of responding to this “subjectivity” argument:

1. Insist, as Alexander does, that everyone does have the ability to appreciate the Quality Without a Name. This must be so, he seems to be saying, because of traditional buildings and crafts! They were made by ordinary people, not some special elite, and thus such beauty is available to all. Why do they not appreciate it? Because they are “brainwashed” by modernity, or have “psychological problems."
• Slight concession: everyone can appreciate the quality, but not everyone can implement it. Anyone who actually goes into a building – has to use it, live in it, rather than merely dissect pictures of it – will agree what is the quality.
• Not everyone can implement it because it takes special feeling, perception, which places limits on craftsmen. Not everyone can become a great craftsman, just as not everyone can become a great lumberjack, or weaver, or fisherman.
2. We concede that the quality is the preference of a (relatively?) small group of sensitive folk (what do we make of the locals who didn’t get his 2-week deliberation on the colour of their social housing…?). Enjoy as a small subculture. Throw your hands up, along with everyone else, in despair when it comes to planning public spaces and buildings.
3. We argue it could be the preference of everyone – or at least most people – albeit it needs quite a large degree of enculturation. That is, say 30% are naturally inclined towards it, 50% are easy either way (its presence wouldn’t make much of a difference to them), and 20% are mildly opposed (e.g., because it is apparently slow or boring).

To insist that we make buildings with the quality as the public default is to believe, at least at some level, that some ways of life are better than others. And to believe this, we have to commit ourselves to some degree of the good life transcending even enculturation: that there is a better counterfactual life for most people, and this life includes the quality.

On the one hand, many groups believe this equally fervently: consider what would happen if we replaced everything in The Timeless Way of Building with Christian dogma. Would it remain plausible, or would we discount it as more Christian waffling over the “seeing the light”?

On the other, the idea we should abandon making beautiful, liveable, human-sized buildings is insane and grotesque. And such decisions do need to be made, because there are, whether we like it or not, aspects of public culture which affect all of us, whether we opt in or not (unless we privatise everything…?). Consider the alternative to Alexander: the deconstructivist Eisenmann who was anti-human. That is, he made public buildings deliberately to be uncomfortable (even spreading a rumour one of his galleries made people queasy). Yet he argues:

How can we respond to this public menace without some conception of what is a good or bad building? And how do we respond to the fact that ordinary people do genuinely prefer Alexander’s buildings?

Tending the Garden

To some extent Alexander is a proponent of view (3) above. How could he not be? He believes that modernity has perverted the true spirit of the people (an ‘activated people.’) So some degree of social planning will be necessary to prevent people from becoming deluded. Alexander naively believed this could be achieved through books (The Timeless Way, A Pattern Language, The Oregon Experience, The Nature of Order). Incredibly, this was not enough to persuade the world’s population of his views.

His view is more or less that of the original founder of Summerhill: if you give people freedom, they will express themselves beautifully, magnificently, wonderfully. In fact, Summerhill is very much like The Timeless Way of Building in more than just period (1960) or writer (lone male genius). Summerhill also has a view of the good life: one of freedom; of communal life; of virtually no hierarchy; of traditional-esque gender roles (and, for the latter, opposition to homosexuality as deviance); of incredible dedication to the idea of “objective good.”

The idea, like The Timeless Way, is that you can trust people with freedom because they will invariably all align, in a kind of Utopian society, to be reasonable, cooperative, beneficent, and energetic, due to an underlying “truth.” And yet people disappoint. Summerhill has proven a failure when measured against the dreams of its founder. The successor of Alexander Sutherland Neill (his daughter Zoe Readhead) has increased the severity of discipline in the school (due to a lack of discipline at home) and maintains the relatively prohibitive cost of the school. That is: it is no longer universal, but a little private pocket of the country which a small selected group of children experience, and even then in a diluted form.

A movement like that of Christopher Alexander or A.S. Neill can work so long as the leader is charismatic and can make people feel the importance and meaningfulness of the project. But if they leave, or they cannot gain direct access to those they seek to persuade, and the link is broken. This is the problem with a purely experiential or phenomenological program: it is fragile and human-sized, in a world which now demands system-sized solutions. Blindly holding on to the conviction that “the people will activate”, whether in response to scripture, Das Kapital, folk music, revolutionary schooling, or a new form of building is a form of magical thinking.

A social planning perspective would take a more ruthless, enculturation approach. We can prevent the ‘brainwashing’ of modernism through the careful enculturation of people (assuming people can be encultured) at a young age. Thus, even if the original leaders vanish, they will produce a new generation, who in turn can produce a new generation: all of whom believe in the truth of the values they impart. Provided, that is, a degree of (1) is true.

This is necessary to ensure people are ‘living’, and that they continue to produce diverse, distinct culture (through careful boundaries between places). This is of course awkward because it denies the Equality, Nothing, Everything logic of “either we have no modern transport, or we connect everything equally, or we don’t plan anything at all.” But it is necessary to continue the evolution of life itself:

Or, another way of expressing this directly and powerfully (written in 1999!):

It is the belief that life lies in negativity as well as positivity (c.f. Burnout Society). That living, for most people, occurs when there is sustained interest, discipline, and energy, rather than innately in conditions of total freedom.