The Nature of Order

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-59062752009-03-08T21:48:48.049-07:00The Nature of OrderGreg Bryant's notes on Christopher Alexander's results. Greg Bryanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13408526593029789018noreply@blogger.comBlogger12125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5906275.post-13778019892764521372007-08-07T16:30:00.000-07:002007-08-07T17:47:28.704-07:00Easily detroyed

Christopher Alexander spent decades analyzing physical reality, and our relationship to it. He wanted to find a way to improve the built environment for people.At the end of his road, The Nature of Order offers this essential, boiled-down advice: to make something alive, use your feeling.This works well for those who are sensitive to such things, who have control of their projects (perhaps an

Greg Bryanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13408526593029789018noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5906275.post-74867450201193844652007-03-21T12:03:00.000-07:002007-03-21T12:31:39.824-07:00Solutions always come from people

Dr. Jerome Groopman, in an interview about his new book How Doctors Think, said basic things about doctors and patients, that resonate with the rest of the fight for human rights, in architecture and urban planning.I should point out that "first do no harm" is essentially a non-existent sentiment among urban planners, a rare sentiment among architects, but a majority sentiment among doctors. But

Greg Bryanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13408526593029789018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5906275.post-57351264182013955942007-03-07T17:01:00.000-08:002007-08-07T17:00:22.468-07:00Stop architecture. Stop urban planning. Stop development. Start giving people control.

I just finished watching a lecture by Christopher Alexander from 1994, before the Nature of Order was published. In it he posed a personal problem to his fellow architects: he seemed unable to consistently make places which had a quality of "belonging". That is, in which people felt that the place was truly theirs.He pointed out that in places that are heavily "designed", people have almost no

Greg Bryanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13408526593029789018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5906275.post-1143777202792544542006-03-30T19:42:00.000-08:002006-03-30T19:53:22.803-08:00Communities are more important than their buildings

This is a kind of heresy.But with the world so trapped in the path of negative structural development, the priority is not to build better-adapted buildings. It's to build good humane organizations.In some way, current buildings are well-adapted to suit their anti-human purposes.Take the soul-deadening, cubicle-based office park. This is exactly the environment in which you want to run a tyranny,

Greg Bryanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13408526593029789018noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5906275.post-1139421505132131512006-02-08T08:57:00.000-08:002006-02-08T10:01:06.356-08:00Involvement, empowerment and feeling

With the city planner for downtown Eugene, Oregon, I discussed a massive, proposed private urban plan, subsidized by public funds of course, which looks very negative. If built, it would wipe out a lot of incremental improvements downtown, and would happen essentially without public input.At some point in the discussion I made an assertion, one that I think is true, but which is not the kind of

Greg Bryanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13408526593029789018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5906275.post-1114215274336579062005-04-22T16:56:00.000-07:002005-04-23T15:26:09.380-07:00Keeping things alive is the key to self-repair

The process of good design must be an incremental one, and a living one. That means: make your project work from the start, and keep it alive as you work on it. If you don't do this, if you try to re-design the whole system, you'll learn nothing about designing while building. And you'll learn nothing about how nature works.If you keep your system working, you will learn how self-repairing

Greg Bryanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13408526593029789018noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5906275.post-1105715795192262602005-01-14T07:02:00.000-08:002005-01-17T18:32:18.156-08:00Centers and the web

I just had an interesting dream, about an extraordinary community in the woods I just visited, known as Breitenbush. There was a meeting space, with quite a lot of steam, very atmospheric in the way Breitenbush is with its countless hot springs. Somehow, everything we said in this space was being recorded, as a community memory. Over time, slowly, community administrators would go through and

Greg Bryanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13408526593029789018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5906275.post-1103871535328027552004-12-23T22:13:00.000-08:002005-04-23T15:28:10.310-07:00Where's the spark?

If you're hunting for US towns that kept much of their pre-WWII structure, look no further than Albany, Oregon. Blocks and blocks of buildings begun in the 19th century. Including the beauty above, the Flinn Block, on sale now for $350,000. The wonder of downtown Albany is that you can still see the pedestrian network, between a dense downtown and pre-WWII small-town suburbs.Unfortunately,

Greg Bryanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13408526593029789018noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5906275.post-1103537536806530062004-12-20T01:57:00.000-08:002004-12-20T02:12:16.806-08:00Latent bookshelves

If you believe that the universe is just a bunch of isolated bits & pieces which tend towards entropy, well, how does one explain life? Or, for that matter: gravity, magnetism, chemical bonds ... As the Taoists knew, things fall apart, but only as a complement of the way they cohere, or come together. In the same way that an object in a gravitational field has potential energy, so a field of

Greg Bryanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13408526593029789018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5906275.post-1103535786379019052004-12-20T01:18:00.000-08:002004-12-20T01:47:13.816-08:00What's a pattern?

A pattern is something that is repeated ... and a pattern in the sense of A Pattern Language is a solution that is repeated. One of the most difficult issues, is the quality of the pattern. It should be generative, as many people have pointed out. I think it's more useful to say it should be inspiring. That implies that it must be good. No one is turned on by a bad pattern: although in software

Greg Bryanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13408526593029789018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5906275.post-1100569061933551372004-11-15T17:11:00.000-08:002004-12-20T01:53:58.683-08:00Undercurrents

I'm back ... but I'm just blogging this subject for myself. I'll look for a good home for a public discussion on this topic. But a blog isn't the place for it. I apologize to Christopher Alexander for suggesting that it might be. I'd still like him to blog, and I'll do my best to goad him into it. I'm always in the midst of new projects. I'm a maniac, with too many ideas, all the time, and I

Greg Bryanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13408526593029789018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5906275.post-1065469127405283002003-10-06T13:38:00.000-07:002004-12-20T01:45:34.783-08:00The Nature of Order

The Nature of Order is a series of books I've been waiting to see for years. The first volumes are now available.

Greg Bryanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13408526593029789018noreply@blogger.com0