The Timeless Way of Building

by Christopher Alexander, published 1979

The Timeless Way of Building⊕
The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander (1979) ( image via squarespace-cdn.com)

has influenced countless architects, software engineers, city planners, and other folks who think about systems. Even though he is primarily writing about buildings, Alexander’s reach is wide because he is predominately concerned with the way patterns interrelate.

Think of it a bit like the 12 note scale in music. Any piece of music will use some subset of those 12 notes to form a melody. The melody is a pattern. This pattern on its own is a simple expression of culture. The complexity comes from how a simple melody interacts with other aspects of music, including other melodies. In Alexander’s own words:

The patterns operate upon the whole: they are not parts, which can be added - but relationships, which get imposed upon the previous ones, in order to make more detail, more structure, and more substance - so the substance of the building [or piece of music] emerges gradually, but always as a whole, at each stage of its growth. (pg 459)

Thus complexity emerges in a way that is natural, Alexander argues, and perhaps even harnessed by a master.

It is not necessarily complicated. It is not necessarily simple. Many students, when they first try to create this character, create a tortured intricacy. But this is almost the opposite of the true character. In order for a place to have this character, it does not necessarily have hundreds of small angles, funny corners, and so on. Sometimes, it is perfectly regular. (pg 522)

Egolessness vs. The Radical

Alexander aspires to construct “egoless” buildings where the practitioners “start with a void” (pg 538). I read this as a bit of light Buddhism that echoes the great teachings such as The Lankavatara Sutra:

Where there is no form, projections do not arise. What neither arises nor ceases is what I call nirvana. Mahamati, nirvana is to see the meaning of what is truly so and to get free from the net of thoughts of previous projections.

The implication of The Timeless Way of Building is that contemporary architecture is filled with egos and that’s why it is lacking, inhumane, or even ugly.

Architects sometimes say that in order to design a building, you must have “an image” to start with, so as to give coherence and order to the whole. But you can never create a natural thing in this state of mind. If you have an idea - and try to add the patterns to it, the idea controls, distorts, makes artificial, the work which the patterns themselves are trying to do in your mind. (538)

And with this foundation, the book becomes trapped by its own rhetoric. Alexander makes no room for radical ideas. Emergent culture is paramount. Thus generations of readers searching for a more “authentic” world have found The Timeless Way of Building attractive because it is loaded with answers.

But it is the radical who has the ego to think that they are right and the predominant cultural narratives are wrong. Any book about patterns needs to at least acknowledge the value of those who break them.

Patterns: Alive or Dead

Alexander conjures fifty specific patterns near the beginning of the book. He uses them to describe how patterns can be alive or dead. Think of active Italian piazza (alive) or the empty center of a monumental traffic circle (dead) to get a sense of these terms. Any pattern on its own does not guarantee liveness. Life emerges from their interrelation.

Here again my mind wanders eastward to the beautiful game of Go. Shapes emerge within the game and possess degrees of liveness.See my related review of A Short Treatise Inviting the Reader to Discover the Subtle Art of Go

Encircled areas are considered alive if the boundaries between areas remain porous. Similarly, Alexander’s patterns must leak to be useful. The book holds this tension elegantly: it is at once specific and prescriptive while also open to interpretation.

Here are some specific examples of what I pulled from Alexander when making decisions on my next home:

Patterns: Subjectivity and Objectivity

Alexander claims to have come to his method in The Timeless Way of Building through a humble observation:

If I consider my life honestly, I see that it is governed by a certain very small number of patterns of events which I take part in over and over again.

Being in bed, having a shower, having breakfast in the kitchen, sitting in my study writing, walking in the garden, cooking and eating our common lunch at my office with my friends, going to the movies, taking my family to eat at a restaurant, having a drink at a friend’s house, driving on the freeway, going to bed again. There are a few more. (67)

Far from humble, Philip E. Agre convinced me that these habits form the seat of consciousness in Computation and Human Experience (1997). Agre’s book was written largely in response to the pursuit of Artificial Intelligence in the late 20th century. But his critique resonates today - the patterns that form consciousness aren’t fully seated in the objective facts and figures that empiricists value:

More than Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty developed the theme that our activities are those of embodied agents. He construed very broadly the traditional notion of the “body” as the residence of habit and desire. In doing so, he tried to break down the conventional opposition between consciousness and the world, replacing it with a positive account of the body as a site of convergence and overlap between them (see Leder 1990). Intentionality for Merleau-Ponty is the intentionality of one’s bodily ways of relating oneself to things in the course of one’s activities. (256)

Habit then becomes the crux of embodied wisdom. Not in an individualist’s view of “good habits” and “bad habits” but in an inter-generational transmission of knowledge. This transmission is what we crave and it is what Alexander delivers. Regardless of its limitations, The Timeless Way of Building provides a flexible practice that we can use to inform our own decisions.