Recently I've been reading about design patterns. The thing I really like about them is that they provide guidance in finding successful ways to solve problems with workable models. In my reading so far I kept running across the name Christopher Alexander, and I decided to pick up his book The Timeless Way of Building. Alexander is an architect and mathematician, whose ideas about pattern languages largely inspired the design pattern movement in computer programming. I really enjoyed reading jplindstrom's notes about the Mythical Man Month, so I thought I could post some of my notes about the Timeless Way of Building here.
When I first began seeing myself as a professional programmer I was working in New York City. On my way to and from work I would often pass all sorts of construction projects. Sometimes I would see workmen assembling scaffolding to make structural repairs to a building, or drilling into the road revealing a vast network of cables and pipes. The act of creating new structures, and fixing existing ones in the city's complexity somehow reminded me of programming. For some reason I enjoyed thinking about programming as a type of building...especially all the craft that goes into it. So it wasn't a stretch for me to pick up a Timeless Way of Building.
The Timeless Way of Building has an interesting format. It is broken down into three parts: The Quality, The Gate, The Way. Each section is then broken down into chapters, and each chapter is made up of brief sections, each section having it's own 'headline'. Alexander designed the book this way so you can read large chunks quickly to get the feeling of the book as a whole.
The title says the book is about building, but as you might guess from three parts, and the "timeless" adjective there is a lot of philosophy thrown into the mix. This is especially true in the first few chapters where Alexander starts out talking about the elusive "quality without a name"; which is present in those moments we experience when things just seem "right". He is able to talk about this quality by approximating it with words like "alive", "whole", "comfortable", "free", "exact", and "eternal"; while showing how the approximations don't completely describe the quality without a name. He goes on to examine how places can exhibit this same quality, and how each place and building is actually a collection of elements and relationships among those elements...which he calls patterns. For example:
Consider a typical mid-twentieth-century American metropolitan region. Somewhere towards the center of the region, there is a central business district, which contains a very hig density office block; near these there are high density apartments. The overall density of the region slopes off with distance from the center, according to an exponential law; periodically there are again peaks of higer density, but smaller than the central ones; and subsidiary to these smaller peaks, there are still smaller peaks. Each of theses peaks of density contains stores and offices surrounded by higher density housing. Towards the outer fringe of the metropolis there are large areas of freestanding one family houses; the farther out from the center they are, the larger their gardens. The region is served by a network of freeways. These freeways are closer together at the center. Independent of the freeways, there is a roughly regular two dimensional network of streets. Every five or ten streets, there is a larger one, which functions as n artery. A few other arteries are even bigger than the others: these tend to be arranged radially, branching out from the center in a star-shaped fashion. Where an artery meets a freeway, there is a characteristic cloverleaf arrangement of connecting lanes. Where two arteries intersect, there is a traffic light; where a local street meets an artery, there is a stop sign. The major commercial areas, which coincide with the high density peaks in the density distribution, all fall on the major arteries. Industrial areas all fall within half a mile of a freeway; and the older ones are also close to at least one major artery.In much of the early chapters Alexander is training the reader to look for patterns. He also begins to examine patterns that are 'alive', or self sustaining, and those that are 'dead' or destructive. What's more the patterns of a place are inextricably bound up with the activities that take place there.
The town which is alive, and beautiful, for me, shows, in a thousand ways, how all its institutions work together to make people comfortable, and deep seated in respect for themselves.
Places outdoors where people eat, and dance; old people sitting in the street, watching the world go by; places where teenage boys and girls hang out, within the neighborhood, free enough of their parents that they feel themselves alive, and stay there; car places where cars are kept, shielded, if there are many of them, so that they don't oppress us by their presence; work going on among the families, children playing where work is going on, and learning from it.
And finally the quality without a name appears, not when an isolated pattern lives, but when an entire system of patterns, interdependent at many levels, is stable and alive.
A building or town becomes alive when every pattern in it is alive: when it allows each person in it, and each plant and animal, and every stream, and bridge, and wall and roof, and every human group and every road, to become alive in its own terms.
And as that happens, the whole town reaches the state that individual people sometimes reach at their best and happiest moments, when they are most free.
It is very difficult for me to describe the effect that this first section "The Quality" had on me. Near to the end of the section I found myself being reminded of what I enjoy so much about the Perl programming language: the vibrant community, diversity of interests, the wealth of CPAN where programmers can share work together...all of these just seem very full of life. I'm looking forward to the next section "The Gate" where Alexander asks:
Is there a fluid code, which generates the quality without a name in buildings, and makes things live? Is there some process which takes place inside a person's mind, when she allows herself to generate a building or a place which is alive? And is there indeed a process which is so simple too, that all the people of society can use it, and so generate not only individual buildings, but whole neighborhoods and towns? It turns out there is. It takes the form of language.
The most refreshing thing about this book so far is that it provides a lens for thinking about programming and design that is outside of the ordinary realm of computer science. I can't wait to get on to the next section.
