Jim asked an excellent and penetrating question. For all the examples I’ve given of Christopher Alexander’s theory of ‘The Nature of Order,’ what is it really? What claim to truth does it really make — and is that claim scientifically testable? Or is it, like insights of psychoanalysis, an interesting subjective vision of subjective experience that we can simply view as another of many possible ways of thinking about what makes things attractive, and to whom?
This question, in fact, gets to the very heart of what Alexander is trying to do. The idea that all design choices are fundamentally subjective, are matters of taste, with none more valid than any other, has led, he believes, precisely to the world of more and more individualistic star architecture in which strangeness is competed for — and in which there’s no basis for saying one type of design is ‘better’ than another.
So, he is making a case that there are in fact fundamental design principles, ways of organizing space, that govern nature, and that humans can choose to follow, or choose to ignore, which have deep impacts on us.
The first proposition — that there are fundamental organizing and structuring ways of shaping space in nature — I think is objectively verifiable and measurable. The ubiquitous presence of fractals at all levels of natural organization is one example. There have been powerful scientific arguments that the results of evolution are fundamentally shaped and constrained by the limits of certain bodily plans and structures, not all types of evolutionary outcomes are possible.
The second question is whether Alexander has correctly identified these — e.g. are there a limitless number of potential ways of identifying such patterns and the geometric forces that shape them, and so Alexander’s list is just one of thousands of possible ways of thinking about this. I don’t know enough about design in nature to speak to the validity of his conclusions. However the way he elaborates his ideas by showing the underlying connection between these forces and the patterns they result in, and how they are all forms of the same central process — how transformations in nature operate in ways that preserve structure — provides a common explanatory vehicle, much as Darwin did. In other words, it explains why natural forces should result in the patterns and products that we see. In some cases, like his explanation for the split-electron field effect, he has put forth original and verifiable solutions to what have been fundamental scientific mysteries.
So I think it’s quite possible that with more or less refinement he is really providing a valid way to look at how space is organized by nature, and the idea that there are only a limited number of fundamental principles or forces that shape such patterns certainly seems valid or likely from what we know of thermodynamic principles for example.
The third question is whether there is a value in recognizing and using these principles in the way we design and organize space and in the ways we see the world. His argument is an empiric one and one that should be objectively testable: do spaces designed in a certain way predictably and statistically elicit certain types of reactions in people that result in their experiencing and behaving in ways that meet certain criteria? This question of the psychology of design — of the study of the psychological impacts of design — is one I’ve been fascinated with since planning school. I worked with Kevin Lynch whose Image of the City, a pioneering analysis of the patterns by which city dwellers mentally map the cities they live in, seemed to me very powerful. But I’m not sure how far this has really led, and if there are agreed findings and they correspond to what Alexander is proposing.
So, what validity do I think you should give to the principles I’ve been laying out? I don’t claim that they provide a fully valid set of principles that have been tested. Like Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities, they provide what I think are actually a set of small, modest, organized ways of looking at the world that can lead to profound insights — precisely because the whole idea that there are such principles has been almost entirely dismissed by standard, Cartesian-based thinking.
We have operated under an intellectual set of assumptions that are in fact enormously wide-ranging, influential and dismissive, and based on what I think are highly arbitrary ways of separating objectivity and subjectivity. Valera’s book The Embodied Mind explores the fallacies of Cartesian thinking, of believing that a mind can see the world in ways that aren’t shaped by the mind being part of a flesh and blood body and therefore shaped in its thoughts and perceptions precisely by deep emotional and subjective reactions. Cartesian thinking assumes that the mind and the world are separable, as if the mind simply happens to exist in this world, rather than deeply belongs to and is part of and a product of it. This seems to me fundamentally impossible. But it then requires whole new ways of reconstructing and recognizing the ways in which — like the ways the cells of the eye construct the world of our experience rather than simply passively receive it — we construct the world we experience and that experiential world shapes us. This includes the ways and reasons we are deeply drawn by certain types of spaces. There is nothing arbitrary about our responses, such as why we are drawn to the void and infinity of water in the midst of other surroundings, as I’ll talk about tonight in terms of Felt Lake. Such reactions spring from the fundamental connections between our nervous systems and the world in which they evolved.
Therefore it seems to me that we have a great need for ways of recognizing such connections, of seeing across what has been divided by our intellectual heritage. Alexander’s work seems to me one positive and productive way of doing so. It is a bridge, as was Kevin Lynch’s or Jane Jacobs or Eric Kandel’s, toward connecting subjectivity and objectivity and not seeing them as existing on continents that have become separated by vast oceans and eons.
It thus offers a way of seeing, a way of opening up the possibility and the power of doing what I think we’ve been learning to do in this class. Namely to become attuned to really looking, at finding small patterns both in nature and in what makes us stop and recognize that pattern and thinking, ah, here’s a story, a subject, a photograph that will purely show it to myself and others. This is the key, our recognition of a subject.
Therefore, ask ourselves what is that makes me stop and see a story in what is after all a wholly interconnected world in time and space, in which things stand out only because we engage in the act of noticing them. What makes us stop, both in the field or in looking at each other’s work, and say wow, yes, this connects to me? If you recognize that there’s a truth involved here, that there’s a reason why you stop and frame and that what you photograph and process that the rest of us react to it so powerfully — if there’s a truth here, and there must be, since we all experience it and are using it, what is that truth?
That truth — what makes us see the story, recognize a subject — is at the heart of what connects our subjectivity with the world outside. We experience the moment of connection and we use photography to capture and record that truth.
But isn’t this precisely what Alexander is doing — isn’t he trying to identify, define, test, articulate the reasons and principles that enable us to see these things, to connect something inside our deeply emotionally based minds as being out there in the world. And vice versa perhaps even more powerfully, to recognize what we see out there in the world — what we construct in our vision of that world — as being inside us.
So I think my real response to Jim is to ask of him, of myself, of each of us, are our ways of finding a connection in our own and others photographs, an objective truth? Is the phenomena we experience and communicate and share real? Is it therefore useful and powerful to deeply interrogate that phenomena, to ask what are the patterns we are drawn to and why those patterns, and to find in our way of seeing the type of connections that Alexander is making.
I think his effort is parallel to our own and that he is providing a potential road map for us in asking ourselves this question. His ideas thus open up a way of seeing — into our own way of seeing.
– Gene Slater
