…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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If so, had it been my theory, I’d probably have looked for counterexamples to prevent correlation=causation. Like “here’s an old Roman building that’s bad in the same way, and a new skyscraper that’s good in the old way.”
But maybe pattern-based thinkers don’t naturally do that.
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(but again that's a 4-volume, 2500-page book that will cost you $350 and take you a year to read)
new buildings that are "good in the old way"—at least ones he didn't build—are harder to come by because of the dictates of the economic process that gets them built
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Again if it had been my theory… I’d have gone out of my way to find other good things to say about modern stuff. But that’s because I’m sensitive to having views attributed to me that I don’t hold, so I tend to invest in active counterprogramming of misreadings I can anticipate.
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honestly i think the job was too big for that; it took him a lifetime just to get where he got
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Perhaps. If so, it’s probably a proportionately big task to reclaim his legacy from the misreading you appear to be countering. Like an essay applying his theories to the design of space stations or something.
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I wish he did. I think there are modern architects doing work Alexander would approve of. Tadao Ando comes to my mind, though I'm not familiar with the process by which his works are built.
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