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"These notes are about the process of design: the process of inventing things which display new physical order, organization, form, in response to function." This book, opening with these words, presents an entirely new theory of the process of design.
In the first part of the book, Mr. Alexander discusses the process by which a form is adapted to the context of human needs and demands that has called it into being. He shows that such an adaptive process will be successful only if it proceeds piecemeal instead of all at once. It is for this reason that forms from traditional unselfconscious cultures, molded not by designers but by the slow pattern of changes within tradition, are so beautifully organized and adapted. When the designer, in our own self-conscious culture, is called on to create a form that is adapted to its context he is unsuccessful, because the preconceived categories out of which he builds his picture of the problem do not correspond to the inherent components of the problem, and therefore lead only to the arbitrariness, willfulness, and lack of understanding which plague the design of modern buildings and modern cities.
In the second part, Mr. Alexander presents a method by which the designer may bring his full creative imagination into play, and yet avoid the traps of irrelevant preconception. He shows that, whenever a problem is stated, it is possible to ignore existing concepts and to create new concepts, out of the structure of the problem itself, which do correspond correctly to what he calls the subsystems of the adaptive process. By treating each of these subsystems as a separate subproblem, the designer can translate the new concepts into form. The form, because of the process, will be well-adapted to its context, non-arbitrary, and correct.
The mathematics underlying this method, based mainly on set theory, is fully developed in a long appendix. Another appendix demonstrates the application of the method to the design of an Indian village.
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Alexander has an obvious soft-spot for buildings from bygone times but, in contrast to like-minded Prince Charles, he is focused on process not materials (and he makes sense). Primitive societies had no architects, but created successful designs that lasted centuries. Alexander's suggestion is that we can harness a similar approach and get similar results.
It all gets a little involved -- and a little mathematical -- towards the end. But that doesn't alter the fact that anyone interested in how to create wonderful things must read this book. And anyone who isn't should purchase a copy anyway, for those occasions when they want to look cool while waiting in a coffee shop or bar for a friend who's late.
Every design problem begins with an effort to achieve fitness between two entities: the form in question and its context. The form is the solution to the problem; the context defines the problem. We want to put the context and the form into effortless contact or frictionless coexistence, i.e., we want to find a good fit.
For a good fit to occur in practice, one vital condition must be satisfied. It must have time to happen. In slow-changing, traditional, unselfconscious cultures, a form is adjusted soon after each slight misfit occurs. If there was good fit at some stage in the past, no matter how removed, it will have persisted, because there is an active stability at work. Tradition and taboo dampen and control the rate of change in an unselfconscious culture's designs.
It is important to understand that the individual person in an unselfconscious culture needs no creative strength. He does not need to be able to improve the form, only to make some sort of change when he notices a failure. The changes may not always be for the better; but it is not necessary that they should be, since the operation of the process allows only the improvements to persist. Unselfconscious design is a process of slow adaptation and error reduction.
In the unselfconscious process there is no possibility of misconstruing the situation. Nobody makes a picture of the context, so the picture cannot be wrong. But the modern, selfconscious designer works entirely from a picture in his mind - a conceptualization of the forces at work and their interrelationships - and this picture is always incomplete and sometimes wrong.
To achieve in a few hours at the drawing board what once took centuries of adaptation and development, to invent a form suddenly which clearly fits its context - the extent of invention necessary is beyond the individual designer. A designer who sets out to achieve an adaptive good fit in a single leap is not unlike the child who shakes his glass-topped puzzle fretfully, expecting at one shake to arrange the bits inside correctly. The designer's attempt is hardly as random as the child's is; but the difficulties are the same. His chances of success are small because the number of factors which must fall simultaneously into place is so enormous.
The process of design, even when it has become selfconscious, remains a process of error-reduction. No complex system will succeed in adapting in a reasonable amount of time or effort unless the adaptation can proceed component by component, each component relatively independent of the others. The search for the right components, and the right way to build the form up from these components, is the greatest challenge faced by the modern, selfconscious designer. The culmination of the modern designer's task is to make every unit of design both a component and a system. As a component it will fit into the hierarchy of larger components that are above it; as a system it will specify the hierarchy of smaller components of which it itself is made.
While this was intentional, serendipity happened as it is wont to do and I found more parallels than I could follow. These two books come from radically different fields (Architecture and Complexity theory) and were published nearly 40 years apart yet are highly resonant with eachother.
Alexander effectively discusses the synthesis of form in the context of functional goals and/or constraints. He draws from architecture for his examples and ideas but the results are much broader.
He outlines the ideas which will eventually become his Pattern Language and "The Quality Without a Name".
Meanwhile Kauffman is speaking contemporarily of the underpinnings of "life itself" also from what is essentially a structural arguement.
Both are essentially speaking to the same thing: How form emerges from functional constraints in the context of evolving systems. In one case it is the artifacts of living spaces we build while in the other, it is the more intimate artifacts of the phenotype of a species or more generally, evolving complex systems such as our universe in all of it's glory.
Many have criticized Kauffman's work as being unoriginal in the sense that most of what he says has been said before, only separately and differently. In some sense, all works are "derivative".
I believe that the parallels between these two books are more an example of parallel evolution. Alexander was studying the essential qualities of a design discipline as old as man and therefore highly evolved. The topical area of architecture, built spaces for human work and habitation is extremely rich and complex in it's own right. It is not surprising that he would have discovered in this narrow field something as essential and interesting as Kauffman seems to be exposing if not discovering about the mathematical and structural underpinnings of "life itself".
An excellent (pair of) read(s)!
I look forward to Alexander's _Nature of Order_ whose title reminded me of Kauffman's _Origins of Order_ which in turn inspired me to read them together while awaiting Alexander's new books!
While many wring their hands about this, Alexander breaks the problem down, organizes it and then provides a framework for design that is relatively design neutral. That is a feat in deed.
By thinking about how one structures a problem space and the bias that creates -- Alexander give the practioner a powerful tool for setting up the design process and scope. He then goes on to discuss the design process and he makes important distinctions between concious and unconcious design.
Notes on Synthesis and Form are the foundation for Alexander's work on design patterns. This is the must read book before spending time on these other works.
For the practioner, this book provides a powerful and applicable framework for addressing problems in multiple disciplines.
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