Subject: Christopher Day and Christopher Alexander

From: [email-masked] (RMunger891)
Date: 26 Oct 1995 21:02:22 -0400

Alexander, Christopher, 1979.  The Timeless Way of Building.  New York:
Oxford University Press.  552 pages.

Day, Christopher.  1990.  Places of the Soul.  San Francisco, CA:
HarperCollins.  192 Pages.

     In the last fifty years the architects and planners have created vast
purgatories of shopping malls and parking lots, leaving the abandoned
cores of our urban areas to rot.  As this concrete environment expands
people want to go to more and more remote locations for escape from the
noise and visual violence of these landscapes.  The developers follow with
more cookie cutter fast food joints, more parking lots, more malls, and we
flee again and on and on.
     The intentional community movement has the opportunity to create an
alternative to these destructive development patterns.  I would like to
recommend the two books listed above to anyone wanting to learn how to
build places that will bring people back together again, places that won't
create the need to escape and ruin still more places.
     The books are more about the process of building than buildings
themselves.  They bring to architecture the client-centered listening
based approach that Carl Rogers brought to counseling.  Day describes how
to listen.

>     At the heart of the process is listening -- one of the most
difficult things in the world to do!  For to listen you must put your
thoughts and opinions aside and listen acutely to what the other person
means but is perhaps unable to say properly -- even if you don't like what
you hear (Day,  99). <  
     
     Alexander goes so far as to include a transcript of part of a session
with a client, showing us how he listens.  But he doesn't leave us looking
for a skilled listener to help us articulate our dreams.  He shows how we
can create "a pattern language" that will help us design, build, and
repair the structures in our lives.  Alexander shows us why we need this
language, describes the grammar, introduces some of the vocabulary, and
describes what he thinks we can achieve with it. 
     Both stress the importance of relationships, showing the importance
of relationships between structural elements and between people and the
built environment.  Alexander clearly places the house in a relationship
with the neighborhood, the neighborhood in a relationship with the city,
and the city in a relationship with the surrounding countryside.
     What do "Places of the Soul" look like?  Both authors reject the idea
of styles in architecture.  Rather than designing in a particular style,
they say each building should respond to a particular situation and place.
 Nevertheless, Day does describe a few elements that, to me, suggest a
style.  Transitions mark this 'style'.  The most obvious in the
photographs of Day's (and his clients') work:
 walls that widen slightly at the base.  Day uses this geometry to soften
the transition from the horizontal ground or floor to the vertical wall. 
Similarly, he would put a curve between the wall and ceiling, instead of
having them meet at an abrupt right angle.  He wouldn't put a rectangular
window anywhere near a sloping roof.  Instead he would have at least one
side of the window run approximately parallel to the roof line.  Both
prefer a hand tooled surface to a perfectly flat one.  But these aren't
just stylistic flourishes, they are ways of making buildings that seem to
belong where they are.  Strictly rectangular shapes, so common in the
commercial landscape, look like boxes with no particular reason to be one
place rather than another.  
     Here is a sampling of Day's suggestions for creating a mood of
"healing silence":

>. . . for silence, the indoor color I use is white.  White, justifiably
has a bad reputation; it's the colour people use when they can't think of
anything else.  But it is the colour I use when I don't want anything
else, when I want silence.
>     I try to make silent sacred rooms plain.  These rooms need to be
somehow above any more specific mo