[ASMR] - Christopher Alexander - Timeless Way of Building - Chapter #1
Channel: Elysium Echo
Date: 2013-12-16

A whispered reading from Christopher Alexander's Timeless Way of Building. The book isn't that long, so I think I might do all of it. Christopher Alexander is very unusual for an architect. At a time when the trend was towards harsh geometric abstractions, he was looking at tribal villages and even slums for inspiration. The problem he saw was that while we had made tremendous strides in making buildings more buildable, they had become that much less livable. 

His diagnosis was that we had not so much lost something, but that we had become unable to come into contact with a part of ourselves. During periods of low social change density, this part of ourselves was always and unconsciously available to us through our accumulated store of cultural archetypes. During periods of high social change density, however we become unable to tap this archetypal store because the connections between past and present break down and all we are left with is a disconnected set of images, and this led to a kind of "madness". This madness resulted in the production of buildings that were not merely less livable, but "hostile to life". I find it even more bizarre that Benoit Mandlebrot, the set theoretician said more or less the same thing.

So one of the only architects at the time with any mathematical training turned away from geometric abstraction and up-front design to develop a contextualized organic discipline of architecture, with Taoist leanings. In his earlier work, Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Alexander attempted to create a science of design. While the work was well received by his colleagues at MIT, he saw it largely as a failure. Even though he came to the conclusion that no such science was possible, he still thought that there could be a discipline, and The Timeless way of Building is his answer to that perceived failure.

The book itself has a kind of fairy tale like quality, and he does an excellent job of conveying the sensibility he is trying to portray, as the book itself embodies this sensibility. Anyway, I found it really relaxing, and edifying, when I first read it, so I hope you enjoy it. ;-)