P. 225, 'NECESSARY FEATURES OF ALL LIVING PROCESS'

     I would like the reader to consider my discussion of living process in the next ten chapters as applying to every conceivable process in society, and to every architecture-creating process, at any scale, in which the reader is herself/himself involved.

// Way ahead of you. Already doing it. These next ten chapters are going to be awesome. I thought we were done the core of the book at the fifteen transformations, but I can tell the next ten chapters are full of promise.

In Paradise I was briefly enamoured by the idea of perfection. What does it mean for something to be perfect? I thought that it was, perhaps, out of reach. But that passion has been rekindled by this section on mistakes; a perfect thing is simply something made without mistakes. And mistakes . . . mistakes are countable.

I like that Alexander's approach is not to repair mistakes that were made, but to not make them in the first place, through structure-preserving transformations. The mistakes are measured by what mistakes are made in the process of each of the transformations performed to produce the work. Did these transformations strengthen the whole, or did they weaken it? Did they respect the relationships, or did they damage or destroy them? These mistakes, these wounds, are not bugs in code. They scar, they cannot be fixed. Scars heal over, but they do not vanish. I think there can be beauty in damage which has been allowed to grow over. A structure-preserving transformation does not destroy even 'bad' structure. It grows over and around it. The damage remains, but does not remain a fresh wound.

P. 186, 'HOW TO COUNT MISTAKES'

When we examine an object, we may see that each element in the object (part, line, edge, position, color, size) represents a decision. . . . Each element has the possibility of being wrong. By that I mean that the element as placed, sized, and oriented, may be well-adapted to its neighbours, to the space around it, to the conditions which exist, and to the conditions arising from the structure of the surrounding elements --- or it may be badly adapted to the neighbours, conditions, space, trees, arising from surrounding elements.
     We are going to count the number of possible mistakes, and try to estimate how many of these mistakes have been avoided, and how many have been committed, in different types of plan. It is here, that we shall see the vast superiority of generated plans. They avoid mistakes. A fabricated plan cannot avoid mistakes, and in all fabricated plans, the overwhelming majority of possible mistakes, are actually committed.

P. 223-224, 'Reprinted from William McClung, "How to Make a Meadow Following Alexander --- 1," published in THE BUFFER ZONE, 2, (1998), page 3.'

Meadows [akin to Old English mädwan to mow] may sometimes appear naturally, but I think they usually are constructed places. In fire mitigation work, we make meadows by cutting and reducing vegetation, from weeds to grass to excessive tree and brush growth. The art of the meadow is in how we apply reduction, and what we do with what we have removed.

The Fundamental Operation. We can produce life in space, according to Christopher Alexander, if we make things following a natural, slow-unfolding process, which involves these steps: (1) Observe and absorb the deep structure of the whole space. The deep structure of a potential meadow is usually formed by the shape of the land, the major trees and brush clusters, natural edges, vistas, colors, smells, shadows, the way the sky is revealed and hidden, and important animal and plant life of the place. Such things Alexander call strong centers. (2) Ask what we can do next to most intensify the life of what is before us, by strengthening the strong centers and wholeness already there. (3) Try to do it. Life-generating work always involves strengthening existing strong centers, large or small, and in such a way as to make structure-preserving transformations. (4) Evaluate the result and the new wholeness. (5) Repeat the process step by step. (6) Stop when further improvements in the feeling of the whole cannot be made.

In a one-acre meadow we might reduce and shape as much as five tons of plant and tree material, choosing what to cut and what to leave, reshaping the space, making it more alive if we are successful, while reducing fire danger by reorganizing fuels downward. The fuels near the ground decompose more rapidly and have less oxygen in a fire. The opening of good spaces where there was dense vegetation is how we make the meadow. The defining feature of the land form is better revealed when the grasses and weeds are cut, brush removed. An important vista is opened by removing dead tree debris. Insects and bugs thrive in the low debris piles, providing food for lizards, salamanders, birds and other animals. Well made, it will feel right. The feeling a place presents to us is a measure of its life. If the meadow feels safe and inviting, it probably is.

Quote from: droqenI don't know whether Emergence failed to deliver, or whether it in fact delivered but I was not so interested in what it was delivering on after all.
. . .
What is it that I love about cities? I read Emergence because I thought it would tell me. It did not, not really.

[pingback: The Nature of Order, Book Two: The Process of Creating Life]

struck out because i don't think i'm taking enough notes to justify every one of these chapter headers! things may be quoted out of order.

In Emergence, Steven Johnson identified 'five fundamental principles' of 'systems where macrointelligence and adaptability derive from local knowledge'. In short, emergence. In shorter, perhaps, Alexander's 'life'. I found this claim very interesting, but the actual execution of it . . . eh.

Whereas I feel that Alexander will deliver. I'm not sure what he's going to deliver on, exactly. That is, I don't even know what I'm looking for. I don't know whether Emergence failed to deliver, or whether it in fact delivered but I was not so interested in what it was delivering on after all.

There are a hundred mirrors in Alexander's writing to my own thinking. I have never been so interested in emergence as I have been in what comes out of it: real life.

What is it that I love about cities? I read Emergence because I thought it would tell me. It did not, not really.

I am here now.

. . . In the present way of thinking about architecture, one is supposed to design a building completely, occasionally even plan a whole neighbourhood, and then use the description (the design, with its plans and drawings) as a specification from which to build. But the essential idea of Book 2 is that it is precisely in this way that architecture has gone wrong, and that it is because of this that living structure rarely appears in contemporary buildings. Instead of using plans, designs, and so on, I shall argue that we MUST instead use generative processes. Generative processes tell us what to DO, what ACTIONS to take, step by step, to make buildings and building designs unfold beautifully, rather than detailed drawings which tell us what the END-result is supposed to be.

. . .

     So we come to the core of Book 2. In the next chapters I try to specify not only what I mean by living process in technical detail, but also what characteristics are operationally necessary to any process which is a "living" process --- in other words, what is necessary to ANY and EVERY process which is capable of generating living structure.

Oh no I keep editing my thoughts. Well, just let it be known that I re-read all my notes here, and skimmed Chapter 5 a bunch. Good stuff!

~ The Nature of Order // Book Two // MASSIVE PROCESS DIFFICULTIES, on expertise

I'm reading Mutual Aid again for how to organize meetings at Messhof. Figure I might as well write my thoughts here.

A game where you play as a generic NPC or enemy without the power to leave your screen: you're trapped in a loop, waiting for the player to arrive. However, in this world your powers come from what you carry, and you can steal what others carry... When the player arrives, you can steal the power to move between screens. Once you have this power you become, to some degree, "the player," where you were not before.

Something like that.

Had this idea a very very long time ago. I'm not sure what it's all about, but it's still appealing to me.

These are my memories of living places, living processes:

- Live musicians and comedians, in the bandshell at the CNE. The crowd there.
- In Suzhou, the gardens.
- In Tianjing, the old men playing Xiangqi, surrounded by onlookers. I stood on a bench so I could see down at the game.
- Vending machines in Tokyo, tucked away in the winding streets of a residential neighbourhood.
- FJORDS.
- Ward's Island, Toronto. The houses there, the people there.

I haven't turned the page yet. I'm not going to write anything down from this chapter, at least not until I've finished the entire thing. I need the breather and I'm going to enjoy it fully, for myself.

"If we are honest, we can still love what we are, we can find all the good there is to find, and we may find ways to enhance that good, and to find a new kind of living world which is appropriate for our time."