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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Incidentally my first intro to him was quite future-oriented via the Stewart Brand crowd. Straightforward design exercises. Then I found mostly trads getting into it, and I was like “huh, okay, not my scene.”
The patterns on the software side never appealed to me.
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So… what are actual modern examples of his thinking driving the “synthesis of form”? If architects reject him and the software version failed, who’s actually using his ideas for design as opposed to design criticism? Or is it reduced now to a purely analytical/critical frame?
but seriously though, the design pattern stuff (according to ) was primarily a failure to transmit the important aspects of patterns to the software dev community, but imo to paraphrase gretzky, they were "skating to where the puck was, not where it was going"
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Perhaps is worth mentioning here? m.youtube.com/watch?v=vjWJBy
However practical Alexander wanted his work to be, his later stuff is more about metaphysics, meaning crisis, and astute observations on cognitive aspects of the design process.
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There is an argument that part of software patterns fizzling out was because attention shifted from what-design-produces to how-design-happens. That is: 1/n
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I can't keep up with this branching discussion, but I do think that the failure of patterns in architecture has almost nothing to do with their failure in software. I think the two audiences were approaching/misinterpreting the idea with very different goals.
I think how people use in practice, and how the language itself has grown, parallels with Alexander's thinking.
I see essential truths in Alexander's writing that he both explains wonderfully and inapproachably. It helps that the printed books are beautiful.
A Pattern Language is unwieldy as a building design technique, but it makes a good fit as a fitness function:
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Homemaker is a collection of tools to help us design humane, adaptable and sustainable buildings. Designs that minimise construction costs, where Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language is the guide for meeting human needs.
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