Christopher Alexander on Form Language

” … we do not start each new design from scratch. Somehow, we learn, over years, the ingredients that make a building good … the form language we use to speak the words that come out as buildings.

… at any given period of history, in any particular society, there are a certain number of schemata which provide rules of thumb for desining and constructing buildings. The form language is the (usually unspoken) combinatory system of these schemata (social, technological, geometric, stylistic, etc.) which architects and builders have in their minds about how buildings ought to be organized, how built, how they must look. We may even call form-language a repository of style.

… At any given time in our history, we are able to create only what can be “made” from the schemata which we already have in our form-language …

… it is imperative that the form languages we use, and the form languages available to us, help us and support us in this task [to reach the goal of living process in our highly modern and technically sophisticated society] …

… Why did the experimental form-languages of the 20th century not work? The reason is not hard to see. It is rather as if someone gave you a ruler and a T-square and said “Use these drawing tools to draw a human face.” You would say, “But that is almost impossible: the ruler and the T-square create the wrong kind of geometry. A human face is made of different shapes and different relationships than can be drawn with these tools.”

Just so with buildings that have living form … The kind of shapes which appear as a result of unfolding when it is done right … are mainly rectilinear, but they include roughness, they include shapes in which angles are nearly square but not quite square; they necessarily include imperfect repetition … requiring that things are bent, adjusted, made carefully to fit the nature of an emerging whole. Twentieth-century form did – and could do – none of this”

Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 2: The Process of Creating Life