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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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.
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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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that's one of those "if you actually read the books" issues: there is a distinct reason *why* old is (often) good and new is (often) bad according to him, and it has mainly to do with procurement and contracting practices and the inability to admit new information
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of course trudging through five or so thousand pages of alexander is too much for most
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Ironic. The books… uhh… sound like an authoritative design doc for reproducing his mind palace in your own head 😂

