TIMELESS WAY OF BUILDING

BY CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER

The timeless way of architecture according to Christopher Alexander focuses on his theories of
almost everything starting from a door to towns and cities and concludes on saying that there is no
need for architects at all. Alexander believes in his philosophy of architecture which reflects “the
quality without a name” and that it is indefinable and some of the adjectives associated with it were
‘alive’ ‘whole’ ‘comfortable’ ‘free’ ‘exact’ ‘egoless’ ‘eternal’ .According to him any built structure which
is “quality without a name” become indistinguishable from nature and invariably becomes a part of it.

He asserts that just as there are unidentifiable patterns in nature, such as in the ripples in a patch of
wind-blown sand, there are natural patterns in the built environment too. He says that there is a
pattern language in nature which exists in everything and this can be understood in a certain way
which has been narrated in the book via many examples. As you can see, the idea of a pattern
language can get rather complicated. But that is the last thing Alexander intends it to be. For him,
patterns already exist and they are just meant to be discovered and then adhered to.

Essentially, according to him, everything is already designed. And perhaps he implies that everything
is already designed by God or the Divine. Just like an seed has the blue print in its DNA to grow into a
tree, our built environment has built-in blueprints as well. And these are the pattern languages that
he’s set out to define. Our job as mortal human beings or architects is to discover what that these
patterns are and then to build according to their instructions.

He mocks Modernist architecture precisely because it is centred on a single person’s ego. He says
that modernism was one of the movements that killed pattern languages, and perhaps killed
architecture. Modernism is the product of a single architect’s vision which is imposed on us. What he
says is that the people that actually occupy modernist buildings and modernist cities have no idea
what language the architect is using. The modernist is foreign to them and differs from them and their
everyday lives. They become victims to someone else’s vision for what their town should be.

This book is a difficult read. It becomes very esoteric and a little tedious when Alexander’s devotes
chapter upon chapter to the development of specific patterns. Too much searching into specific
patterns is also where it becomes most suspect to me. Also because of the confusing language and
the elaborate write-up on each pattern the reader gets cut-off from the book .Some of the things that
Alexander asserts almost as “universal truths” don’t ring true to me.

The most interesting, captivating and convincing parts of the book include when he first discerns “the
quality without a name” and then goes on to talk about how every built element has a way it wants to
be built according to its location, the culture and routines of the people who live there, the available
materials in the region and a host of other factors.

The idea that a built structure is exclusively the product of its “inner forces” – which are all the things
that affect it – is revolutionary in contemporary architecture. But Alexander’s complete surrender of
the built environment to its “inner forces” is unheard of and something that threatens the very
existence of architecture today. His philosophy that anyone can build buildings and cities in the best
way possible and that contemporary architects actually detract from the quality of buildings and cities
is extremely threatening to the practice of architecture today.

Though I wasn’t completely convinced about the actual specific patterns that Alexander lays out in the
book, I am convinced that each building project and each building element has a very specific way it
wants to be. And when it is built in this fashion that it does, indeed, feel good to inhabit.