stumbling back online eyes blinking. gloomy afternoon a few days after christmas, everyone slumbering or away. things seemed more natural and right in spain. i was chilling out, drinking too much and reading a lot of books there for a week, with my parents. i was reading disappointing novels by stephen fry and kurt vonnegut, and christopher alexander (et al), a pattern language, and notes on the synthesis of form.
i bought the alexander books in san francisco, and haven't had time to read them since i got back. i met a german architecture student there who'd heard the name, who smiled dismissively 'he's just theory, yes?'
i had no idea of the scope of the theory, the richness of the pattern language. it describes in manageable form, at levels of abstraction schemes from creating a city of a million people to arranging your chairs on your porch.
and inthe way takes on all sorts of social theories; of a world governmaent comprised of a thousand inedependent regions; of small, self-sufficient work groups comprising no more than 15, networked together on somthing as big as the apollo project; detailed diagrams and instructions for recycling your own shit. carnivalesque visions, economic theories, all centered upon humans' right and need to live better, more realistically. self-completeing, self-describing.
notes on the synthesis of for m is a much tighter, more graspable book. it predates the concept of patterns. what seemed at first a light philosophical ramble dives into a complex of set theory symbols i could barely follow, a problem-solving methodology.
it aims for an 'exhaustive set of variables' which are part of a particular problem
if, therefore, we break the problm apart in such a way that its clusters of avriables are as richly connected, internally, as possible, we shall have clues to thoses physical aspects of the problem which play the most important fucntional part in the problem and are therefore most likely to furnish handles for the designers's comprehension. these are the sets which will be the easiest to diagram
the stern language is a world away from the assuring fludity of a pattern language written with many conributors amd with, i suspect, a fair amount of drugs and sex in between ;-)
anyway, the implications of a lot of this stuff didn't start sinking in til i got back home....