The Timeless Way of Building

[Guest guest]

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Nosce te ipsum

 

 

Greetings to all on this beautiful May evening,

 

A member of the list, Jani, just sent me these

beautiful and very interesting quotes from

a book on western architecture theory called

"The Timeless Way of Building".

 

It looked to me to be a Tao Te Qing for architects,

and was quite inspirational to me, so I thought I

should forward it to the list, with green

light from Jani.

 

Please thank Jani's healthy wrist tendons and

patience for typing up this quote.

 

I keep being reminded of the Taoist quote

saying that the value of a house lies both in its

walls and the empty spaces the walls create.

 

I hope you will enjoy the quotes as much as I did.

 

Love,

 

Amanda.

 

--------- Forwarded Message ---------

 

DATE: Sun, 14 May 2000 22:18:21

Jani Mattsson <jmattsso

 

The book itself is written in a sort of patternish way and

the author stresses the importance of the whole above the

parts, so the detailed table of contents is in essence a short

synopsis of the book. Additionally, each chapter of the most

essential things typeset in italics; if you are in a hurry you

can read only the italic portions and if you have more time,

you can read all. But you still get the whole picture even if you

only read the italics.

 

Alexander, Christopher, 1979. The Timeless Way of

Building. Oxford University Press, New York. 552 pages.

 

 

"DETAILED TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

THE TIMELESS WAY

 

 

"A building or a town will only be alive to the extent that

it is governed by the timeless way.

 

1. It is a process which brings order out of nothing but

ourselves; it cannot be attained, but it will happen on its

own accord, if we will only let it.

 

THE QUALITY

 

To seek the timeless way we must first know the quality

without a name.

 

2. There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life

and spirit in man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This

quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.

 

3. The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives,

is the central search of any person, and the crux of any individual

person's story. It is the search for those moments and situations

when we are most alive.

 

4. In order to define this quality in buildings and in towns, we must

begin by understanding that every place is given its character by

certain patterns of events that keep on happening there.

 

5. These patterns of events are always interlocked with certain

geometric patterns in space. Indeed, as we shall see, each building

and each town is ultimately made out of these patterns in the space,

and out of nothing else: they are the atoms and the molecules from

which a bulding or a town is made.

 

6. The specific patterns out of which a building or a town is made

may be alive or dead. To the extent they are alive, they let our

inner forces loose, and set us free; but when they are dead, they

keep us locked in inner conflict.

 

7. The more living patterns there are in a place - a room, a building,

or a town - the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it

glows, the more it has that self-maintaining fire which is the

quality without a name.

 

8. And when a building has this fire, then it becomse a part of nature.

Like ocean waves, or blades of grass, its parts are governed by the

endless play of repetition and variety created in the presence of the

fact that all things pass. This is the quality itself.

 

THE GATE

 

To reach the quality without a name we must then build a living

pattern language as a gate.

 

9. This quality in buildings and in towns cannot be made, but only

generated, indirectly, by the ordinary actions of the people, just as

a flower cannot be made, but only generated from the seed.

 

10. The people can shape buildings for themselves, and have done it

for centuries, by using languages which I call pattern languages. A

pattern language gives each person who uses it the power to create

an infinite variety of new and unique buildings, just as his ordinary

language gives him the power to create an infinite variety of

sentences.

 

11. These pattern languages are not confined to villages and farm

society. All acts of building are governed by a pattern language

of some sort, and the patterns in the world are there, entirely

because they are created by the pattern languages which people use.

 

12. And, beyond that, it is not just the shape of towns and buildings

which comes from pattern languages - it is their quality as well. Even

the life and beauty of the most awe-inspiring great religious buildings

came from the languages their builders user.

 

13. But in our time the languages have broken down. Since they are no

longer shared, the processes which keep them deep have broken down;

and it is therefore virtually impossible for anybody, in our time,

to make a building live.

 

14. To work our way towards a shared and living language once again,

we must first learn how to discover patterns which are deep, and

capable of generating life.

 

15. We may then gradually improve these patterns which we share, by

testing them against experience: we can determine, very simply, whether

these patterns make our surroundings live, or not, by recognizing how

they make us feel.

 

16. Once we have understood how to discover individual patterns which

are alive, we may then make a language for ourselves for any building

task we face. The structure of the language is created by the network

of connections among individual patterns: and the language lives,

or not, as a totality, to the degree these patterns form a whole.

 

17. The finally, from separate languages for different building tasks,

we can create a larger structure still, a structure of structures,

evolving constantly, which is the common language for a town. This

is the gate.

 

THE WAY

 

Once we have built the gate, we can pass through it to the practice

of the timeless way.

 

18. Now we shall begin to see in detail how the rich and complex

order of a town can grow from thousands of creative acts. For once

we have a common pattern language in our town, we shall all have the

power to make our streets and buildings live, through our most

ordinary acts. The language, like a seed, is the genetic system

which gives our millions of small acts the power to form a whole.

 

19. Within this process, every individual act of building is a

process in which space gets differentiated. It is not a process

of addition, in which preformed parts are combined to create a whole,

but a process of unfolding, like the evolution of an embryo, in

which the whole precedes the parts, and actually gives birth to

them, by splitting.

 

20. The process of unfolding goes step by step, one pattern at a time.

Each step brings just one pattern to life; and the intensity of the

result depends on the intensity of each one of these individual

steps.

 

21. From a sequence of these individual patterns, whole buildings

with the character of nature will form themselves within your

thoughts, as easily as sentences.

 

22. In the same way, groups of people can conceive their larger

public buildings, on the ground, by following a common pattern

language, almost as if they had a single mind.

 

23. Once the buildings are conceived like this, they can be built,

directly, from a few simple marks made in the ground - again within

a common language, but directly, and without the use of drawings.

 

24. Next, several acts of building, each one done to repair and

magnify the product of previous acts, will slowly generate a larger

and more complex whole than any single act can generate.

 

25. Finally, within the framework of a common language, millions

of individual acts of building will together generate a town which

is alive, and whole, and unpredictable, without control. This is the

slow emergence of the quality without a name, as if from nothing.

 

26. And as the whole emerges, we shall see it take that ageless

character which gives the timeless way its name. This character

is a specific, morphological character, sharp and precise, which

must come into being any time a building or a town becomes alive:

it is the physical embodiment, in buildings, of the quality

without a name.

 

THE KERNEL OF THE WAY

 

And yet the timeless way is not complete, and will not fully

generate the quality without a name, until we leave the gate behind.

 

27. Indeed this ageless character has nothing, in the end, to do

with languages. The language, and the processes which stem from it,

merely release the fundamental order which is native to us. They

do not teach us, they only remind us of what we know already, and

of what we shall discover time and time again, when we give up our

ideas and opinions, and do exactly what emerges from ourselves."

 

--------- End Forwarded Message ---------

 

 

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