…software people tend to latch onto the patterns (the single best-selling book out of oxford university press) and despite taking a decade to develop, they were only really an ultimately inadequate stopgap solution, and he even said as much himself
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…really though you can trace an arc from the mathematical work in his 20s and 30s through the patterns and into the nature of order (fifteen properties/structure-preserving transformations, "fundamental differentiating process" &c)…
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notes on the synthesis of form (a thesis on min-cut graph partitioning) argued that every (design) problem has an inherent structure, and there are objectively better and worse ways to subdivide the structure (recursively) into subproblems that are ultimately tractable
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the pattern stuff can therefore be viewed as a set of connected subproblems that have been pre-disarticulated along relatively min-cut boundaries
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(also worth noting that the book was called *A* pattern language not *THE* pattern language; it was meant to be a prototype for other pattern languages people would either adapt or make from scratch; why it's called a "language" is it's a set of shared concepts for discussing)
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anyway it's a shame software people latched onto patterns and didn't really look much past them:
• the later CES books have a lot of practical things to say about procurement, contracting, project management
• the nature of order describes a "zero-cut" incremental process
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• notes on the synthesis of form tried to answer the practical question of "how do i break a complex problem down into something manageable while destroying as little information as possible?"
• nature of order describes how to do that without resorting to phd-level math
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…those who would paint alexander as a nostalgic traditionalist fail to take into account that what he's ultimately indicting is the building process invented in the 20th century that puts an immutable drawing as the authoritative legally-binding reference document…
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…in other words the drawings dictate the benchmark for performance and nonperformance: if you don't build to the drawings, you don't get paid—rather you get sued—it doesn't matter what new information comes along; it doesn't matter how insane or stupid the drawings are
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i guess my question to software people is: does this sound at all familiar?
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Replying to
I think a lot of it is simply that he attracts a certain kind of following and invites a certain pattern of interpretation. That’s generally a robust signal of an implicit bias in the work.
Ie kinda like if mainly reactionaries cite him, maybe there’s a reactionary tendency there? If almost all examples of “good” by a theory are old, and examples of “bad” are new, that theory has a non-trivial trad bias.
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Possibly the rhetorical issue is he conflated a temporal era (modern) with a principle (authoritative design doc) and a good general principle should be sort of ahistorical.
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