Christopher Alexander...Domestic Architecture...Doors2
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But it doesn't come automatically. For example, we built some student housing for the University of Oregon. It looks rather nice. It has quite a sweet, pleasant appearance. Not as good as the other example I mentioned, but the quality of belonging is present to a degree. However, the apartments in those buildings that look so pleasant from the outside have a very stark character. The reason for that is the administrative procedures involved in building a building of that sort in a public situation, for a public company or institution. The contracting and other procedures have an unbelievable ability to kill every joy. The central thing to understand here is that the micro-structure of the process, although it produced superficially good results on the outside of this particular building, is unable to deal with the problem of creating that rich, adaptive environment that is really needed in order for somebody to say: this is my home, I belong to this, this belongs to me.
During construction, rather than making up a complete set of drawings in advance and then building them, we spend a great deal of time making mark-ups, modifying things, preferably with the family, if we are not building for an unknown client. Cardboard, paper, sticks and so forth are used to gradually approximate the nature of the space that will really create that comfortable feeling as opposed to what one thought at the time of making the drawings. One of the things that I've discovered is that while making the drawings, no matter how much experience you have, you are wrong about an immense number of things. These become visible during construction. In a more adaptive process, you can correct these things and achieve reasonably good results with these kind of mark-ups.
However, my experience is that that process alone is by no means enough. Appearances can sometimes be deceiving, even when one feels one has made great progress by the involvement of the users, changing contracting methods and so forth. The really profound connection that allows a spontaneous life to spring forth does not come easily.
There are some circumstances that give rise to the feelings I'm speaking about. They have nothing to do with user design and contracting procedures. The beach is an obvious example of a classic place where people feel that joyful freedom in themselves. It is possible for places to have this quality independently of the modifications and processes I mentioned earlier.
There is a third thing I believe to be very important. That is that it is characteristics of the actual space itself that create a luminous simplicity in which the human spirit can take hold and make it mine. That quality exists independently of what may be produced by the other two methods.
As a civilisation, we are very uptight. Even my wife gasped when I mentioned that I was going to show a slide of part of our house with the cracks in the plaster, the disarray of the stone and so forth. Yet, in her eyes, character has arisen in that place. It didn't need the perfect, plastic table of the suburban tract. Not only that--it could not have existed there. That situation depends on the junk. It depends on the raw roughness of the situation
No architect will look at a family sitting on a broken-down jetty and proudly say: I did this. And yet, this is where that inner something starts to live and breathe.
Occasionally, I've managed to get that thing to happen because the people I was working with were deeply conscious of the need for it and somehow understood it from the inside. One example is a campus I built in Japan. The people who asked me to build this place for them had a profound awareness that they were building a world in which they could be free. Because of their actions, immense patience and continual effort, something like that actually did begin to occur in conjunction with all the other processes I've mentioned.
There was a family who came and asked me if I could diagnose what was wrong with their house. Their family life was not working and they wanted to know if I could help them to understand what had to be done. I spent some time with them and I told them that I thought I could, if I was able to rebuild the whole house from the inside out. I discovered very early on that Steve, the man of this family, was a little more passionate on a daily basis about this thing. He and his wife actually had no idea what it meant to be comfortable. He knew something was wrong with his house, but as we began working on it I realised that he just did not understand his own, his wife's, or his children's comfort. He was in a complete muddle of images of $2000 naugahyde sofas and certain kinds of TV sets and this and that and the other. His mind was filled with these things. It took a year or two of working together before he began, very gradually, to understand what his own comfort actually was.
In my work, I've become aware that progress towards that blissful state cannot be accomplished except by a large and conscious effort by people themselves, interacting with their environment through time. The two major things I've mentioned are the participation of people in their own house design and a drastic modification of construction procedures. But the kind of process that I'm talking about now is much more drastic than that. To create that kind of process is a huge undertaking. After 20 years work, even though I have achieved something, I feel I'm really only at the beginning of a very different kind of journey. One aimed at finding the ways that more conscious process is taking place. One of the ways I've begun to explore it is simply through painting. Trying to paint the kind of world in which this blissful state might or can exist.
Honestly, this is a immense task. Very easy to describe, but there is almost nothing in our contemporary society that can produce this spiritual, ordinary world. That's my quest. I hope that in some fashion, even though you might not be builders or architects, this concern means something to you and may help you in what ever particular thing you are doing.
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