rclayton reviewed The Oregon experiment by Christopher Alexander (The Center for Environmental Structure Series, #Volume 3)
The Oregon Experiment
The first volume in this series describes a timeless way of building realizing the quality with no name by organizing patterns of local habit within a languages of local custom. The second volume describes patterns and languages for designing and constructing towns of predominantly residential buildings. This third volume applies these techniques to a single large project: revising the University of Oregon’s campus master plan.
The case study deals largely with the hows and whys of project organization and management. Oddly, these matters are handled as lists of procedures and rules, not as patterns and languages. It may be that project management is antithetical to the quality with no name, or maybe applying the timeless way to the timeless way would make things too recursive and meta. There are some examples of designs developed by patterns and languages, but the emphasis on higher-level matters seems to make them less lively …
The first volume in this series describes a timeless way of building realizing the quality with no name by organizing patterns of local habit within a languages of local custom. The second volume describes patterns and languages for designing and constructing towns of predominantly residential buildings. This third volume applies these techniques to a single large project: revising the University of Oregon’s campus master plan.
The case study deals largely with the hows and whys of project organization and management. Oddly, these matters are handled as lists of procedures and rules, not as patterns and languages. It may be that project management is antithetical to the quality with no name, or maybe applying the timeless way to the timeless way would make things too recursive and meta. There are some examples of designs developed by patterns and languages, but the emphasis on higher-level matters seems to make them less lively than the examples given in The Timeless Way. There is also no evaluation; even a casual student of architecture knows it’s easy to build something that photographs well, but is much harder to build something for which people express long-term satisfaction. Alexander's approach is far enough outside mainstream architectural practice that it’s important to see how it fares when run up against what is possibly a worst-case circumstances for the timeless way: a public-works project run by a state bureaucracy.
