Christopher Alexander...Domestic Architecture...Doors2
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I'll show you examples of process innovations I've been carrying out during the last 15 to 20 years. Increasingly, during the last year or two, I've become convinced that these proposals that I've made and to some extent succeeded in implementing are nowhere radical enough. And that the deep connection that would allow a place to be a real home requires innovations that I think I have not yet even dreamed of and that I don't fully understand. But what I am aware of is the enormity of the change needed for us to have even a hope of doing these things.
What I hope to make clear is that our existence in its openness, clearness and limpidity depends to an immense degree on very minute traces in the physical environment.
So when I say: you don't have a sense of belonging in that place outside this hall, I mean much more than that. I mean that it's very difficult to be yourself in that place. Places have the capacity to allow or to deny us to be ourselves, even an apartment or house we furnished and where we put stuff that belongs to us and so forth. Just because we put that stuff there and arranged it does not mean that it will create the potential for this kind of blissful being. The adaptation of all kinds of subtle minutiae in the environment allows that to emerge in us. Although it's very subtle, it has a huge effect. The sort of simple happiness I mean comes about because of something that we largely do not know how to attain.
This is where I want you to share my understanding of my task. You may say: well, I think I know how to do that in my own house. But as an architect and builder, I feel it's my responsibility to try to allow these processes to exist in society at large, to show how they can exist and to create circumstances which will indeed permit them to exist on a large scale. So it's not merely the problem of how can it be done in the small that I'm asking you to carry about with me, it's the problem of how can it be done in the large.
A certain kind of post-modern house embodies the opposite of what I'm talking about (it's not so funny, because many members of my profession consider this kind of thing to be a goal). When I compare it to a house in Bangkok that is considered a slum, a remarkable thing becomes apparent: there is poverty in the house in Bangkok, maybe even miserable conditions, but it is actually a home. But, of course, our understanding of architecture today has nothing to do with the creation of that kind of house. In a sense, it actually tries to get away from this and produce housing like the post-modern example. I view that as absurd.
My question is: what does it really take to build up a world in which our houses sustain and enlarge childish, innocent life in us? One of the most obvious things that comes to mind when one compares mass housing, tract developers' suburban homes, public housing and expensive architect design houses, for example, is the question: what if people did this for themselves? If they really got involved in making, shaping the environment? Things would be a lot better. Of course, this is what happened for centuries at virtually all times in most cultures.
One of our projects was mass housing for the city of Nagoya in Japan. Each separate dwelling was 2 1/2 stories, two stories and then one story in the roof. The building was about 6 meters wide. There were lots of windows because the building was long and thin. Each family got on the order of 70 square meters: a rectangle 6 meters wide and 12 meters long.
We invited many families in the community in Nagoya, gave them a piece of graph paper--6 meters wide by 12 meters long in scale--and told them to draw the house they wanted. We told them to put whatever they wanted in there, that we weren't going to bother them at all. I had the necessary contractual and construction ability to put that into effect without increasing the price.
In each case, a formal architectural drawing was produced from something that a particular person drew for or with their family. Of course, these two things are immensely different. They are very particular to each individual family. I had a remarkable experience with some of the families in Cheekasadia, the area in Nagoya where this was going on. I gave a group of about 7 or 8 people a piece of paper and told them: Here's 6 meters by 12 meters. Put what you want in it. It didn't take very long for them to put down what they thought would be an ideal world. This was not for the real thing--it was just to make sure it would work out comfortably for people. Two of them were openly weeping while they did it. These were people who had been living in mass housing in Nagoya. It was unthinkable to them that their ordinary necessities could be put into a building in such a direct way, because they had assumed, in effect, that it was something that the municipality would give them. I was surprised that it had such a direct impact: there were tears in these people's eyes and they were overcome with emotion, just at being able to draw what they thought was the ideal apartment for their family. So that tells you in a way what a tremendous well spring is being touched just be this sort of issue.
In the project that we're building at the moment in Texas, families simply laid
out the houses in a small neighbourhood. We have a very fast way of doing this.
Even though each house takes on a beautiful character of its own according to
the particular wishes that that family has, it's not expensive. It doesn't take
any more time to build. This does get good results up to a point. I know that
from experience. One gets what I suppose could be called a more true kind of
character. People do feel happy and there are some beginnings of that sense of
belonging I was speaking about.
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