tat tvam asi

… putting buildings in service of the land … being in service gives purpose and context and direction … being in service becomes a nourishing relationship (if you can get it right) … being in service of what wants to be instead of expecting to be served what I want …

“The most crucial thing to understand throughout the volume-creating processes, is that IT IS THE LAND WHICH MATTERS. The purpose of the buildings is to bring life to the land. The building volumes are the tools with which we undertake this task. This is a radical point of view. It puts the building in a humble position making it a tool, the clay from which we mold the pace. But it is the land and its space, as they become activated by this clay, which really matter.

… It is remarkable to realize that it is this uncompromising attitude of attention to the land which also makes the building volumes subtle and beautiful. That is truly surprising. The land itself, and our love for it, is enough to give the actual building volumes their shape …

Like a person who, in being helpful, becomes more graceful, more beautiful as a person, the building volumes become beautiful as they help the land.”

Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 3: A Vision of a Living World

This takes me back to the conversation Annelieke and I had about the roofing material used for the deck. I designed for corrugated sheet metal, Annelieke prefered clay tiles (which is what came to be). When Annelieke explained her position based on vague notions of magnetic fields I wasn’t comfortable with it … because neither of us know much about it … not substantial knowledge that we can relate to with any depth. However it is clear that the metal roof would have been a much less involved roof … I chose it because it was cheap and easy for me to build. The choice to go with clay tiles was much more demanding (the roof structure had to be changed / reinforced) and more involved … and in the end not that much more expensive. I also felt, and still feel that a green roof was the most “living” option … but it felt beyond my capacity when the building was taking place.

“The feeling of a material does not depend on what it is – it depends on how it is handled.”

Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 3: A Vision of a Living World

This quote comes from a context of large building projects … these ideas may need to be adapted to different scales of projects … but what strikes me most about this is that it creates an alignment of motivations using a budgetary approach … instead of typical conflicts of interest which arise around money and budgets:

“Money is the lifeblood of every building. How it is garnered and spent determines the outcome and the artistic life and soul of the finished building. It is the overall global pattern of expenditure which controls the way feeling can occur, because it is this which controls the overall pattern of material, in quantity and quality …

… starting with the money, and allowing the overview of money to guide the process every day and at every stage of work, help unfolding, because it is only in this procedural atmosphere that one truly has a grasp of the whole at every stage.

… In program budgeting, a cost plan is made starting even before design begins. This cost plan is an assignment of budget amounts allocated to different categories of work. To start with the cost plan is made intuitively, to capture how much one wants to spend in these categories.

… One guesses and can feel the result of spending 14% on foundations, 22% on roof structure, etc. The purpose is to find a set of numbers which are realistic, and yet create the best possible depth of feeling that can be attained within the given budget envelope. For a team with experience, numbers like these translate directly and intuitively into a sense of how the building will turn out …

Of course the allocations in the first cost plan are subsequently tested and modified continually, as the work goes forward …

The assumption throughout is that the numbers will remain within the framework set. What floats is the design, not the price. One assumes that “something” can always be done for any sum suggested, and the subcontractors and general manager must make do with that so as not to disturb the whole – the whole, in this instance, being the overall budget distribution that has been allocated in the cost plan.

Thus, as the building design develops, each subcontractor … instead of being shown the drawings and asked to bid the work, he is told the sum allocated, and asked what he can do that is best for the project within that sum of money.

… the benchmark of the process is that the allocation which has been made gives the failsafe distribution: in the best interest of the building overall, and it is unwise for any one operation to be allowed to drive it out of balance, merely because something has been drawn or specified, which is expensive. Rather, one takes the attitude, let this allocated amount be fixed, and – unless exceptional conditions dictate otherwise – whatever can be done for that amount will serve the project well. “

Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 3: A Vision of a Living World

“… there is a connection between ordinary human happiness and the existence of a living structure in our physical world … when architectural structure is an unfolded one … when it is created by repeated application of living processes, and by … structure preserving processes … then what comes from it is a world where people are able to feel happy. They can be themselves, more easily. They are more free – free in spirit, free in their emotions.

And … that on the contrary, within the dead structure we have become used to as the normal 20th-21st-century environment, this freedom, this blissful state, is almost unattainable.

… What is the character of the kind of world where we experience emotional possession of the places we are in? It is a world in which the find adaptation between people and their buildings and gardens and streets is so subtle, goes so deeply to the core of human experience, that the people who then live and work and play in that environment feel as if they belong there, as if it belongs to them, as if they are a part of it, as if, like an old shoe, it is completely and utterly theirs.

… Historically, this quality … came about as a result of a long process – often years, even centuries long … But in our era, the opportunity for this very long time span is less available. We live in a time where things move quickly, where society evolves at a very great speed, where people are highly mobile, where things change at a great speed … we must invent new kinds of process which can [created belongingness] … in some new form, and by different means…

… The true landscape of architecture … is that arrangement of materials, windows, seats, roofs … which, as nearly as possible, helps us arrive at this blissful state. It is generated by the free application of a living adaptive process.”

Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 3: A Vision of a Living World

“What was lost in the 20th-century building was the freshness of our buildings …. it is not style that makes a building living or dead, but the freshness of its response to its surroundings; the truthful and spontaneous unfolding of order within its own fabric.

… the essence of all life in any system at all, lies in the adaptive response of each new development in the system to the previous existing state …

… Although the adaptive sequences are highly ordered, and seem predefined, because they define steps and transformations in a disciplined sequence, it is the character of these sequences to help the user, the artist, the builder RESPOND to what is there, rather than to IMPOSE on what is there. And this too, stands as the foundation of any world where we experience true belonging. It cannot be achieved by a mechanical framework, by any mechanical system, nor by any stereotyped or stylistic response.”

Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 3: A Vision of a Living World

“… the structure of social processes we created during the 20th century, again and again create a mental catch-22 situation where the means needed to escape from the anti-living process, are prohibited by the very process we are trying to replace.

… The key to the idea that will allow a system of workable morphogenetic sequences to evolve in a not-too great length of time, is highlighted in the genetic ideas of John Holland.

Holland has shown how an information system which guides a real world system may evolve and “learn” by gradually building effective models of functioning, in the form of “genes” … he describes the genes which we know in organisms as a special case of a much more general phenomenon …

…his discovery … mathematical reasons why the learning, and spreading, and successful evolution of … genes, will occur most successfully to the extent that the genes are small and independent … One example of his argument, is simply the fact that at the time of meiosis, when male and female chromosomes cross over and intermingle, the shorter the genes are, the less likely they are to be damaged at the crossover point, and the more likely, therefore, to survive and be passed on to later generations … merely one example of a more general argument … small independent “lumps” of coherent problem-solving information, the smaller they are, and the more independent, the more likely they are to survive and spread into the gene pool …

What is essentially remarkable about the genetic system is that, individually, genes are small … and largely interchangeable. Amazing, but true, that a gene which causes a certain desirable kind of enzyme activity can be transplanted from a fish to a person, sometimes even to a mushroom. Most genes are highly general in what they do. What they do is limited, but “snippable” – each one can be cut out and used, individually, by itself. The “snippet” – the individual genes … are effectively almost context-free …

This is the secret of biological evolution. I believe it will also turn out to be the secret of the evolution of the genes controlling the living structure of the earth and the built world on Earth.

… It is difficult to find the social conditions in which all the features of the construction process can change at the same time, hence extremely difficult to introduce such a new process as a whole. But suppose that the same improved process of contracting is broken up into, say, twenty separable sequences … each one … separable from the nineteen others, and can therefore be successfully injected by itself into an otherwise normal or mainstream system of construction. If the snippet works well, it may be adopted, and may spread to new construction methods …

What was difficult or impossible as a larger act of social transformation, becomes possible when one uses a genetic approach to achieve the same aims. What is needed is simply a way of ‘cutting up’ the original innovative process, into a small set of process genes or small sequences that work individually, and that are robust enough to work in a wide variety of contexts, even when not supported by others part of the new system.”

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

… the first example of this, that came to my mind, are the now common-in-Transition-practices of check-in in the beginnings and check-out at the ends of meetings … a “gene” from the “inner-transition chromosomes” introduced by Sophy Banks

“Frederick Taylor … was one of the individuals who had the greatest influence on the 20th century. An American machinist working at the very end of the 19th century, Taylor conceived the idea of time-and-motion studies … which make the repetitive production of objects more efficient.

Taylor first inspired Henry Ford’s factory at Dearborn, the first highly efficient moder factory. Ford employed Taylor as a consultant while he planned and built this factory. Later, as a direct result of Taylor’s work, almost all natural and organic processes throughout the world which relied on judgment, participation, and common sense were replaced by a way of thinking about process, which relied on rules, rigidly applied, codification of category, task, function. What we know as the modern organization with machinelike repetition of processes, came from Frederick Taylor. What we know of as modern bureaucracy … came from the application of Frederick Taylor’s ideas to large human institutions … modern construction … modern agriculture …

It is amazing to realize that Taylor himself very well understood the positive social and human conditions of the living process he was trying to replace. Here is a quote from Taylor himself:

”Now, in the best of the ordinary types of management, the managers recognize frankly that the workmen who are under them possess a mass of traditional knowledge most of which is not within the possession of the management. The most experienced managers frankly place before their workmen the problem of doing the work in the best and most economical way. They recognize the task before them as that of inducing each workman to use his best endeavors, his hardest work, all his traditional knowledge, his skill, his ingenuity, and his good will, in a word, his initiative, so as to yield the largest possible return to his employer”

Taylor understood all this extremely well. And then, for reasons of money and efficiency, he deliberately set out to destroy it. Three principles of Taylorism are: (1) Disassociate the labor process from the skills. Labor must be independent of craft, tradition, and knowledge … (2) Separate conception from execution. (3) Gain monopoly over knowledge to control labor process … As Taylor himself wrote:

The full possibilities of my system will not have been realized until almost all of the machines in the shop are run by men who are of smaller caliber and attainment, and who are therefore cheaper than those required under the old system”

… I have given a short summary of Taylor’s ideas because even those of us who are thoroughly sick of the bureaucratic and machinelike character of modern society, will, in general, not be aware of the extent to which it all started with the work of one man, nor the extraordinary extent to which these changes were deliberate, conscious, willfull. Obviously, if all this was created by the deliberate thought of an individual – as indeed it was – it becomes easier for us to conceive the possibility of changing it.”

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

When I read the words “men who are of smaller caliber and attainment” I thought to myself … and then we set about creating systems of education which created (1) such men and (2) men educated to create such men more efficiently.