Cultural Context: Making Good Places

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Cultural Context Making Good Places Modern
Culture and the Search for a New Paradigm
Michael Mehaffy Director of Education The
Princes Foundation, London
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Modernism's alchemistic promise to transform
quantity into quality through abstraction and
repetition has been a failure, a hoax magic
that didn't work. Its ideas, aesthetics,
strategies are finished. Together, all attempts
to make a new beginning have only discredited the
idea of a new beginning. A collective shame in
the wake of this fiasco has left a massive crater
in our understanding of modernity and
modernization.   - Rem Koolhaas,
Whatever Happened to Urbanism?
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Cellular Automata
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The New Paradigm?
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What is the real structure of nature? How does
morphogenesis occur?
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The Death and Life of Great American Cities The
Kind of Problem a City Is Jane Jacobs
Among the many revolutionary changes of this
century, perhaps those that go deepest are the
changes in the mental methods we can use for
probing the world. Speaking roughly, one may
say that the seventeenth, eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries formed the period in which
physical science learned how to analyze
two-variable problems. During that three hundred
years, science developed the experimental and
analytical techniques for handling problems in
which one quantity--say a gas pressure--depends
primarily upon a second quantity--say, the volume
of the gas.
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The Death and Life of Great American Cities The
Kind of Problem a City Is Jane Jacobs
It was not until after 1900 that a second
method of analyzing problems was developed by the
physical sciences. the physical scientists (with
the mathematicians often in the vanguard)
developed powerful techniques of probability
theory and of statistical mechanics which can
deal with what we may call problems of
disorganized complexity... A wide range of
experience comes under this label of disorganized
complexity... It applies with entirely useful
precision to the experience of a large telephone
exchange, predicting the average frequency of
calls, the probability of overlapping calls of
the same number, etc. It makes possible the
financial stability of a life insurance
company... The motions of the atoms which form
all matter, as well as the motions of the stars
which form the universe, all come under the range
of these new techniques.
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The Death and Life of Great American Cities The
Kind of Problem a City Is Jane Jacobs
One is tempted to oversimplify and say that
scientific methodology went from one extreme to
the other... and left untouched a great middle
region. The importance of this middle region,
moreover, does not depend primarily on the fact
that the number of variables involved is moderate
large compared to two, but small compared to the
number of atoms in a pinch of salt... Much more
important than the mere number of variables is
the fact that these variables are all
interrelated... These problems, as contrasted
with the disorganized situations with which
statistics can cope, show the essential feature
of organization. We will therefore refer to this
group of problems as those of organized
complexity.
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The Death and Life of Great American Cities The
Kind of Problem a City Is Jane Jacobs
What makes an evening primrose open when it
does? Why does salt water fail to satisfy
thirst?... What is the description of aging in
biochemical terms?... What is a gene, and how
does the original genetic constitution of a
living organism express itself in the developed
characteristics of the adult? . . . All these
are certainly complex problems. But they are not
problems of disorganized complexity, to which
statistical methods hold the key. They are all
problems which involve dealing simultaneously
with a sizable number of factors which are
interrelated into an organic whole.
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The Death and Life of Great American Cities The
Kind of Problem a City Is Jane Jacobs
In the (last) quarter-century the life
sciences have indeed made immense and brilliant
progress. They have accumulated, with
extraordinary swiftness, an extraordinary
quantity of hitherto hidden knowledge. They have
also acquired vastly improved bodies of theory
and procedure--enough to open up great new
questions, and to show that only a start has been
made on what there is to know. But this
progress has been possible only because the life
sciences were recognized to be problems in
organized complexity, and were thought of and
attacked in ways suitable to understanding that
kind of problem. The recent progress of the
life sciences tells us something tremendously
important about other problems of organized
complexity. It tells us that problems of this
kind can be analyzed--that it is only sensible to
regard them as capable of being understood,
instead of considering them, as Dr. Weaver puts
it, to be "in some dark and foreboding way,
irrational."
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The Death and Life of Great American Cities The
Kind of Problem a City Is Jane Jacobs
Why have cities not, long since, been
identified, understood and treated as problems of
organized complexity? If the people concerned
with the life sciences were able to identify
their difficult problems as problems of organized
complexity, why have people professionally
concerned with cities not identified the kind of
problem they had? The history of modern
thought about cities is unfortunately very
different from the history of modern thought
about the life sciences. The theorists of
conventional modern city planning have
consistently mistaken cities as problems of
simplicity and of disorganized complexity, and
have tried to analyze and treat them thus.
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The Death and Life of Great American Cities The
Kind of Problem a City Is Jane Jacobs
Today's plans show little if any perceptible
progress in comparison with plans devised a
generation ago. In transportation, either
regional or local, nothing is offered which was
not already offered and popularized in 1938 in
the General Motors diorama at the New York
World's Fair, and before that by Le Corbusier. In
some respects, there is outright retrogression.
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1948
2004
1939
1924
2004
2004
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Lessons of the New Science
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Transect-based Coding
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Christopher Alexanders New Paradigm and the
New Science
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• Christopher Alexander
• Notes on the Synthesis of Form
• (Nearly-decomposable Hierarchies)
• A City is Not A Tree
• (Networks)
• A Pattern Language
• (Networking Tool)
• A New Theory of Urban Design
• .
• .
• .

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1. Nature adapts and transforms from
existing conditions (Structure-preserving
transformations).
How does nature achieve the order that we see
everywhere around us?

• These are transformations of wholes. These
• transformations can be coded.

3. The resulting structures are a class of
life.
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Characteristics of a Dynamic Code
1. The code specifies a step-wise,
generative process.
2.  It specifies that in that process, human
beings will take certain rule- based
actions, in combination with evaluations based
upon feeling, and in adaptation to what
came before.
3.  At each step, it acts upon the then-existing
condition as a whole.
4.  At each step, it identifies the weakest parts
of the structure and acts to improve and
amplify them.
5.  At each step, it may apply previously-coded
solutions and patterns, and adapt them to
the novel conditions.
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Characteristics of a Dynamic Code
6.  At each step, it differentiates the space by
specifying new centres
7.  The centres are differentiated via 15
structure-preserving transformations
8.  Infrastructure follows. As with the
morphogenesis of organisms, where the
tissues come first, and the veins and ducts
follow, the human patterns and human spaces
come first, and then transport, sewers and
the like follow not the reverse.
9.   Similarly, visual expression follows. The
human patterns come first, and then the
visual ideas and signifiers follow not the
reverse. Otherwise we are simply making
people live in disconnected sculptures.
10. At the end of each cycle, the result is
evaluated and the cycle is repeated.
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Space as a Field of Centres
                            
                              
A relatively simple system of centres a
cathedral plan
A much more complex system -  the urban fabric
of Rome
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Geometries Emergent from Adaptive Processes
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Structure-Preserving Transformations
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Structure-Preserving Transformations
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Structure-Preserving Transformations
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15 Properties of Natural Morphology
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www.katarxis3.com
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Projects by Christopher Alexander and his
Associates at the Center for Environmental
Structure Berkeley, California, USA
Not Style or Image but Rule-based
Morphogenesis
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Sequences Hulls of Public Space
Eishin, Amazon Housing
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Hulls of Public Space
Eishin, Amazon Housing
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Hulls of Public Space
Eishin, Amazon Housing
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Uniqueness of Every Private Individual Place
Back of the Moon, Mexicali
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Uniqueness of Every Private Individual Place
Back of the Moon, Mexicali
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Uniqueness of Every Private Individual Place
Back of the Moon, Mexicali
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Uniqueness of Every Private Individual Place
Back of the Moon, Mexicali
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Uniqueness of Every Private Individual Place
Back of the Moon, Mexicali
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Public Building/Intimacy of Scale Mary Rose,
Eishin, West Dean
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Public Building/Intimacy of Scale Mary Rose,
Eishin, West Dean
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Public Building/Intimacy of Scale Mary Rose,
Eishin, West Dean
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Public Building/Intimacy of Scale Mary Rose,
Eishin, West Dean
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Character of Gardens
Israel, Berkeley
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Character of Gardens
Israel, Berkeley
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Character of Gardens
Israel, Berkeley
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Character of Gardens
Israel, Berkeley
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Character of Gardens
Israel, Berkeley
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Character of Rooms
Austin, Berkeley, etc
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Character of Rooms
Austin, Berkeley, etc
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Character of Rooms
Austin, Berkeley, etc
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The Collective Vision of the Whole
Nagoya, Ft Lauderdale? Plans stakes.. Students
Eishin
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The Collective Vision of the Whole
Nagoya, Ft Lauderdale? Plans stakes.. Students
Eishin
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The Careful Interleaving of Pedestrians and Cars
Ft Lauderdale and??
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The Reconstruction of an Existing Neighbourhood
Ft Lauderdale
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Construction of a High Density Neighbourhood Nago
ya, Sapporo, Parkstadt xx

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Each Building Placed and Shaped to Form a
Positive Pattern of Space and Volume in Three
Dimensions Eishin plan, Mary Rose?

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Each Building Placed and Shaped to Form a
Positive Pattern of Space and Volume in Three
Dimensions Eishin plan, Mary Rose?

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Engineering as Spatial Interlock
San Jose truss, Bay Bridge etc
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Quality of Centres in Building Structure
More examples of same
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The Man-Made Wilderness
Berkeley Bill McClung
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Building Elements as Living Centres
Details San Jose etc
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Building Elements as Living Centres
Details San Jose etc
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Building Elements as Living Centres
Details San Jose etc
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Building As Making
Mexicali
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Continuous Invention of New Techniques
Beam mock ups etc
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Poetic Element I Ornament Arising Naturally
from Unfolding
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Poetic Element I Ornament Arising Naturally
from Unfolding
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Poetic Element II Colour Arising from Light
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Poetic Element II Colour Arising from Light
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www.katarxis3.com