The Timeless Way of Building
I find a thing the best when I can feel it multiple times differently. I can reread a book, I can rewatch a film, listen to an album many times and be in a place with a different mood.
TWOB definitely has this property. You can take from it many times, as you take water from a well or breathing fresh air in mountains, egolessly, always getting more than you expected.
For me the book is about getting rid of any imposed fears, images, and rules. As a result, be able to direct your inner self to make beautiful and alive things, which put smiles on faces.
I've heard of Christopher in my high school, as anyone who started programming and saw references to “A Pattern Language”. Then I stumbled upon Dave West's Object Thinking — a more serious and mature writing on programming and design which has many references to Alexander's works — then I read his paper “Conversations with Alexander” and it sparked a real interest in me. Only four years after, I've been ready to begin.
I can't read the book at once. I have to wait around, forget about it, find it again, look at people who has read it before, forget again, then stumble on it and be ready to read, suddenly put the book on the desk just for rest. I'll feel when I'm ready.
Chapter 1: The Timeless Way
It's a process which brings order out of nothing but ourselves; it cannot be attained, but it will happen on its own accord, if we will only let it.
The process Alexander talks about is how to make a building as beautiful as any place that you have ever seen. You should not treat this as only applicable to buildings or by architects, the process can be used anywhere, Alexander will talk about this throughout the book. The trick is to be curious about life and have a will to sustain it — this is the hard part, the easier one is applying the process.
I like how he puts incentives as the continuation of nature:
…to complete a world which is already made of mountains, streams, snowdrops, and stones, with something made by us, as much a part of nature, and a part of our immediate surroundings.
The role of surroundings goes through much of his work. You can be at peace with yourself only when you are at peace with the environment. And to sustain it one should follow the process.
I want to slip in a related quote from Alan Kay about computing and its environment:
Computing is terrible. People think (falsely) that there's been something like Darwinian processes generating the present. So therefore what we have now must be better than anything that had been done before. And they don't realise that Darwinian processes, as any biologist will tell you, have nothing to do with optimisation. They have to do with fitness. If you have a stupid environment you are going to get a stupid fit.
The first part of the book focused on finding patterns in the environment, and similarities every building has. These patterns will be described in more detail in next Alexander's book. The second one is about finding patterns inside patterns, a generative process that creates them. Again, comparing them we should find the invariant one, this is the way to create beautiful buildings.
And it turns out that, invariant, behind all processes which allow us to make buildings live, there is a single process.
This generative process resembles a language or some context-dependent structure. It's always different, it's always the same.
But though this method is precise, it cannot be used mechanically
—
because it's not a method.
Reading Alexander involves some patience as he throws things beforehand without much context,
you should expect the explanation in further paragraphs or even chapters.
A process or a method, the thing is there's a method to kill the method (this gets clear later). To find this method we need to analyse patterns at the deepest level.
The value of the method is in what we already know, quite the opposite of what science does. "…finally it becomes valuable, not so much because it shows us things which we don't know, but instead, because it shows us what we know already, only daren't admit because it seems so childish, and so primitive".
Why doesn't everyone use it already?
But as things are, we have so far beset ourselves with rules, and concepts, and ideas of what must be done to make a building or a town alive…
Basically, internet. Continuing with:
Or is it, perhaps, that we are most afraid of all that if we do make chaos, when we hope to create art, we will ourselves be chaos, hollow, nothing? This is why it is so easy for others to play on our fears.
The last sentence seems the key to me. I've been finding myself many times in the wrong view of someone else, which never let to good. This is greatly amplified by how the Internet works.
The final message in the chapter is actually to unlearn the method after you know what it is. "…we must first learn a discipline which teaches us the true relationships between ourselves and our surroundings … then we will be ready to give up the discipline, and act as nature does".
The next chapters will teach us the discipline.
Have you ever thought of what you're doing as beautiful? This question struck me at the first reading. Now I carry it with me.