The small amount of Christopher Alexander’s work which I have look at has given my a huge amount of respect for him. He does not hide behind a pretentious vocabulary trying to hide the fact that he has nothing useful to say. Instead he is clear, he is precise, and he only says and focuses on things that help him create better designs. He also understands what it means to truly understand something. “If you really understand what a fine piece of architecture is – really, thoroughly understand it – you will be able to specify a step by step process which will always lead to the creation of such a thing. Anything short of that means you don’t really know what is going on.” To me this is a challenge because there are very very few things that I can say I fully, truly understand. Just to stop some of the inevitable reactions against this statement partial understanding is still useful, more than half of our world is run on partial understanding and fully understanding something is not always, if seldom, necessary. The issues come when people claim that they do fully understand something when they don’t.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Monday, June 2, 2008
essay
I’m looking now into more articles on methods of design in particular methods which in some way react to science either borrowing ideas and method or rationally rejecting them.
H. A. Simon. The Sciences of the artificial. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969.
C. Alexander, “The State of the art in design methods”. DMG Newsletter 5:3. 1971
J. C.Jones. "How My thoughts About Design Have Changed During the Years". Design Methods and Theories. 11:1. 1977
Alexander, Christopher.Notes on the synthesis of form.Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1964.
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