in the nature of order he does show a number of old buildings that are bad
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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?
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I mean, you’re a smart guy building some bespoke things, but… like you’re not say Google or other producer of vast volumes of design. If it’s mostly people like you, then the question to ask is, why doesn’t the approach scale?
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entirely plausible nobody has fully circumscribed his work yet, which is why I have read (nearly) everything he wrote. alexander became a general contractor so he could implement his process end to end, including a contract he did up from scratch which is in this book:
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ie not "just" an architect who hands off a set of drawings
like we have agile project management but we barely have agile contracts and agile procurement is a nonentity
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