Organic Design

This article by Kiko Denzer was published in RAIN Volume VI No. 10, August/September 1980. It was written while RAIN was still published in Portland, Oregon, and just a year after the release of Christopher Alexander's third Oxford book published in the Center for Environmental Structure series, The Timeless Way of Building. It was referenced in Greg Bryant's first essay on The Oregon Experiment in 1991, which was in turn mentioned in his second essay on the topic in 1994.

Below: the above building now, in 2015. Directly inspired by the Oregon Experiment, which was still drawing attention at the time, it was designed to be in harmony with the older buildings in this courtyard. Built by Will Martin, this is the best structure and space created on the University of Oregon campus since World War II. Like the older buildings it echoes, the new structures make excellent public use of the building exteriors. -- GB

The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander, 552 pp., 1979, $19.50;
A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander et al., 1977, 1171 pp., $39.50;
The Oregon Experiment, Chrisfopher Alexander et al., 1975, 191 pp., $17.95.
Available from: Oxford University Press . 200 Madison Avenue New York, NY10016 

ORGANIC DESIGN 

Facilitating Community Planning

These three volumes are undeniably valuable -- as tools, as inspiration, as a way of making connections between the way we live and the buildings that we live in. "Language" is the tool for all our work -- it is only through words that the "designer" can tell the carpenter where to put the bathroom. But our common knowledge of design has been usurped by a technical vocabulary and an elite grammar which are beyond the reach of most folks. Alexander and the people he works with at the Center for Environmental Structure, in Berkeley, CA, are trying to save that aspect of our common wealth that has nearly been lost. In homes, in workspaces, in communities the work of designing our own environments is invariably handed over to ''professionals" -- but planners, architects and designers need to be able to work with the people whom, in conventional terms, they are working for.

Volume I, The Timeless Way of Building, describes the global heritage of man-made environments. The "Timeless Way" is an architecture without ego -- it is what I make, added to what you make, each one allowing for the other's presence. When we build, we should do so according to the real needs that we feel every day (we need sunny places, quiet places, places to work, to play, to make noise, to make love ... ). If we can build with this in mind we may discover what Alexander calls a "pattern which lives": This discovery "is not different from the discovery of any profound thing. It is a slow deliberate process, tentative, in which we seek to discover something profound, and where we recognize that we shall usually be wrong to start with, and that we may only approach a proper formulation slowly."

The second volume of the series, A Pattern Language, is the meat of the series. It describes in detail 250 or so "patterns" each of which examines a problem and a solution. The work is unusual in that each pattern is inextricably connected to all the others. It is this richness of connections that, in the end, satisfies our basic needs and our desires for "community." Take, for example, Pattern 21, Four Story Limit: There is abundant evidence to show that high buildings make people crazy. The evidence is extensively documented. The pattern itself is cross-referenced to many others that concern urban environments and the people that live in them. The children of Glasgow have a song about tenements that they can't live in because they can't get their daily snack when it's thrown from a 20-story window: 

The Jeely Piece Song
by Adam McNaughton (from A Pattern Language)

Oh, ye canny fling pieces oot a twenty-storey flat,
Seven hundred hungry weans will testify tae that,
If it's butter, cheese or jeely, if the breid is plain or pan,
The odds against it reachin' us. is nintey-nine tae wan.

Volume Ill, The Oregon Experiment, is the slimmest of the books and describes Alexander's vision for a process by which the University of Oregon at Eugene could avoid haphazard, ill-planned and out-of-scale "growth." 

These books have been out for several years now and they have been extensively reviewed. But what is in the books is theory -- at the U of 0 in Eugene, people have been attempting to put the theory into practice. Several projects have gone forward, despite problems, and their success is visible. To the campus planners, the experiment has been "proven" now, for some time. 

In the early '70s the university's planning staff became dissatisfied with their "Master Plan." Typically, it was a set of maps that showed existing buildings and then a future "planned" campus that would consist of an orderly "whole" -- large, new structures built according to the standard cast concrete and glass formula with little or no consideration for the land, the community, the users of the building, or the relationships between them. 

The university made known its desires for a new "plan" and Alexander was chosen, from a competing group of design consultants, to help formulate one that would respond to expressed needs and that would create a cooperative way of meeting those needs. Language is the key he uses to open up the process of design. Alexander's particular language depends on differentiating between two kinds of order. "Totalitarian" order (the bad kind) is a whole that exists only on paper or in the minds of the planners -- it is a simplified answer to bureaucratically defined problems such as "statistical need," "projected growth," and "available funds." The other kind of order is "organic" (the good kind). Organic order is like a shell that grows in increments, in proportion, and according to the shape of preceding sections. And like a shell, growth does not go on forever. 

The school has created channels so that faculty, students and community members can become involved, but these integrated "committees" inevitably find their creativity and efficacy hampered, not only by a bureaucratic, "big is better" funding process but also by the split structure of the "community." 

Universities, however, are towns; they have economies, they have a politically organized, diverse population (consider the supporting staff and maintenance crew; the college town that depends on college dollars; and the increasing number of older people who are going back to school part-time). Such places offer a broadly supported, well funded and universally recognized opportunity to grow truly organic communities, but the effort will require not only a renewed interest on the part of "apathetic" students, but also new spaces for "learning," that won't separate it from "real world" activities. It will also require a change in our concept of "school" as a camp in which youth are trained for entry into "useful" society. 

As is true of most residential universities and colleges, the university population is fragmented into a transient student body and the more permanent faculty and administration. Students don't normally put too much emphasis on "making where they live a paradise" since they are only there for four years and since they also have to pay to be there. You pay, you expect to be served; that's the way that the "free" market works, right? The architecture student I talked to noted a trend that has received lots of attention lately, in the media and in educational institutions themselves: students seem to be more concerned with getting saleable skills and a marketable degree than they are with the qualities of a living and learning community. Students who "get involved" often become frustrated and "burn out," as this one did, when they see their work in the community conflicting with the "education" they are paying for. Burn out fosters cynicism. "Involved" students find that their "interests," as defined by narrow-minded curriculums and credit requirements, are at odds w!th the interests of the faculty and administration, who have longer-term concerns at stake, who are paid for their community efforts and who have the continuing support of their peers in working towards a well-defined set of goals. Within the student body itself, another division occurs -- student "representatives" and the students they represent find that concerns of "community" and concerns of credit requirements rarely coincide on a day-to-day basis. 

The planning committees continue to work despite various hindrances and have, in spots, succeeded admirably. The new addition to the School of Education is the best example of the whole process of diagnosis, problem solving, coordination and construction. That the building is satisfying, and that it works, both inside and outside, is not due to the control and "vision" of an artistic "genius." In fact, the architect for the School of Education yielded his own professional vision to a method that allowed the "user" group to work with the "designers." They created not only a beautiful (and passively heated and cooled) building, but also a charming courtyard and a pleasantly warm atmosphere to work in. Individuals are very important. This architect was important because of his own long experience in "user-initiated design." 

The concept itself, as I learned, does not originate with Alexander's books. However, Alexander's work with language, and the effort to put it into practice at Eugene, are significant steps in a broader effort to nurture the qualities that could make an "organic" civilization out of "totalitarian" societies. -- KD