Chapter XX: An ethnographer’s ear: Re-routing

and re-rooting ourselves

Dr. Jenny Quillien

School of Business and Media Arts

New Mexico Highlands University

1005 Diamond St, Las Vegas, NM 87701

jquillien@nmhu.edu

Abstract

A force de sacrifier l’essentiel pour l’urgence,

On finit par oublier l’urgence de l’essentiel. . .

La vraie nouveauté nait toujours dans le retour aux sources.

[As we continue to sacrifice the essential in favor of urgency,

We end up forgetting the urgency of the essential . . .

True innovation is always born through a return to the wellspring.]

Edgar Morin

This essay suggests that what we crave in our built surrounds is

‘culturally-attuned comfort’ and attempts a broad brush discussion

of just what that might mean. Three independent investigations in

that direction, American, Japanese, and Middle-Eastern are chosen

to illustrate the differences in how we might want to live―and these

same three endeavors simultaneously imply a shared ground of

human and humane discourse. Equally significant, all three forays

― largely by skirting ‘Here Be Dragons’― also suggest that re-

discovering roots will be easier than re-routing the Darth Vadars of

modern construction.

Re-rooting

The hearing reveals the visible entirely through interpretation, while sight

announces the audible entirely through description.

Claudius Ptolemy, Harmonics III. 3 [150 CE]

Our built environment is no longer ours. We find ourselves submitting passively

to formidable forces of industry, financial speculation, and regulatory codes

imposed from on high. When we do attempt to re-possess our habitat, we find we

don’t have the necessary know-how to effectively engage in either actual

construction or debate. It is even difficult for us to articulate what it is we want.

Although we may appreciate the proven qualities of vernacular architecture of

days gone by, we’re aware that making look-alike copies of nice old-fashioned

buildings isn’t the answer. This essay suggests that what we want is ‘culturally-

attuned comfort.’ What might that mean in the present?

Christopher Alexander was often accused of being on a nostalgia trip. His

typical hip-holster response was to fire back,” I don’t like old because it is old but

because it is better.” The nostalgia accusations were neither warranted nor helpful

but unless we can unpack for ourselves (in a practical sort of way) the meaning of

‘better,’ the answer doesn’t help much either. So, what did traditional

architectures have that we’ve lost?

Vernacular buildings were deeply rooted in local ways of being, local

building materials, local tools and local methodologies. They were, if you will,

culturally-attuned. ‘Mining’ these buildings for the pattern languages inherent

within gives us a mode of discourse for talking about where we come from and

how we care to live now. Re-rooting ourselves is certainly not about saccharine

and sycophantic copy-catting of old stuff (that is retro-vintage tripping) but about

rediscovering our fecund and generative cultural wellsprings.

Three forays into ethnographic listening offer us a taste of the kinds of

things we might learn. The first, home-grown American, looks at what two of the

co-authors of A Pattern Language did in the decades that followed the Berkeley

pattern languaging days. Second, a team of pattern language practitioners (but not

architects) from Tokyo conduct a curious form of library research which yields a

dozen patterns for ‘good old future’ comfort in Japanese buildings. Third,

historian-sleuthers listen to ancient legal texts and old stones of Islamic cities

around the Mediterranean for their wisdom. All three endeavors required an

ethnographer’s ear and since human universals are never directly accessible but

come through the specific cultures which give them ‘voice,’ all three offer

pathways toward our shared ‘timeless way’ humanity.

The Ethnographer’s Ear: America

Patterns are the rules

through which our culture maintains itself, keeps itself alive.

Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

No one denies that A Pattern Language constitutes a watershed in our cognitive

topography. Nor does anyone deny that we have needed to move on from that

accomplishment. Christopher Alexander, himself disappointed with the more-

funky-than-profound construction that hailed APL as the mother lode, took off on

a thirty year solo journey of reflection to finally publish between 2002 and 2005

The Nature of Order. Two of his co-authors, Max Jacobson and Murray

Silverstein (along with their new partner Barbara Winslow) chose to run an

architectural firm in California for those same decades and then published in the

same year (2002) Patterns of Home: The Ten Essentials of Enduring Design.

While Alexander’s Nature of Order may deter readers through the sheer weight

of its 2000 pages, Patterns of Home may deter readers by its deceptive

appearance─it looks like just another glossy coffee table book with pretty pictures.

However, underneath a first impression of their vast difference, the convergence

in these two independent evolutions of the original pattern language perspective

warrants attention.

Jacobson, Silverstein, and Winslow, after listening to their American clients

for thirty years (translating the audible into the visible) and reviewing work of

other architects, decide to filter and boil down their pattern work to identify a tiny

handful of patterns that really really matter. Ten patterns [each a chapter:

Inhabiting the Site, Creating Rooms, Sheltering Roof, Capturing Light, Parts in

Proportion, Flow Through Rooms, Private Edges, Common Core, Refuge and

Outlook, Places in Between, Composing with Materials] take on heft. They

become scalable, addressing the small as well as the large. They’re demonstrably

poetic and that’s significant. The introductory material in APL set out poetry of

space as germane to what was at stake:

. . . In an ordinary English sentence, each word has one meaning, and the

sentence too, has one simple meaning. In a poem, the meaning is far

more dense. Each word carries several meanings; and the sentence as a

whole carries an enormous density of interlocking meanings, which

together illuminate the whole.

The same is true for pattern languages. It is possible to make

buildings by stringing together patterns, in a rather loose way. A

building made like this, is an assembly of patterns. It is not dense. It is

not profound. But it is also possible to put patterns together in such a

way that many patterns overlap in the same physical space; the building

is very dense; it has many meanings captured in a small space and

through this density, it becomes profound.

(A Pattern Language, pages xli-xlii)

APL was short on explicit instructions about building poetically and laymen

advocates of APL rarely achieved it. Patterns of Home is a clear step forward

since it lucidly informs us on just how patterns can overlap more densely―how

the capturing of light, for example, works hand in hand to poetically underscore

overall structure as well as smaller structures.

As for what surfaces as an essential, pattern language aficionados will not be

overly surprised (Inhabiting the Site, Capturing Light, Composing with

Materials―well of course!) although, personally, I was not expecting Refuge and

Outlook (Figure 1) to be a final winner and I was intrigued by the quintessentially

American art of living finding its most articulate expression in Places in Between

(Figure 2).

Figure1. REFUGE AND OUTLOOK. “The house,” say J, S, and W, “should

incorporate a range of spaces that simultaneously permit holding back for

protection and reaching out for observation. . .” Indeed there is something

primordial in the cliff dwelling and tree house, but I wonder if the gated

communities and ‘refuge patterns’ of such affluent clients couldn’t stem from a

heightened need to feel protected from the very world that they helped create. The

balcony from Patterns of Home in photo D curiously calls to mind a pulpit as

well as the elite viewing box at the opera.

(Sources: A (left) sketch in Patterns of Home. B (center) 12th

century cliff

dwellings in Bandelier, New Mexico, photo from Wikipedia.com, C (right) sketch

from justaddfather.com., D photo from ArchitectureWeek.com.)

Figure 2. PLACES IN BETWEEN. “Their defining quality” say J, S, and W, “is the

sense that they exist in addition to the major rooms of the house; they are not

essential to the function of the house but complement it.“ In another project of

listening to clients through the medium of pattern languages, Mexacali, Refuge

and Outlook didn’t surface as important but Places in Between did and, we must

note, in the low-income population of Mexacali there was little money and room

to spare. And, what could be more American than the front porch on the street, a

space which dissolves the boundary between safety and danger.

(Sources: A (left) sketch in Patterns of Home. B (center) 15th century window

seat in Cardoness Castle, Scotland. Photograph from bike-love Scotland

blogspot.com. C (right) Mexicali. Photograph from www.patternlanguage.com.

D. American front porches in Lawrence, Kansas. Photograph by Charles Adams.)

By writing a concise communication to practitioners rather than a treatise on

the cosmology of the universe as is The Nature of Order, Jacobson, Silverstein,

and Winslow interestingly wind up at the end of their journey with similar

generalizations. They discover the same meta-qualities that emerge out of a

successful pattern language as does Alexander: levels of scale, centers, good

shape, positive space, echoes, symmetries, boundary, contrast. [Twelve years

earlier (1990) the trio produced The Good House: Contrast as a Design Tool.]

Without attempting Nature of Order vocabularies of ‘structure-preservation’ and

‘God,’ they offer up unpretentious comments on how standard blueprint planning

yields to a process of unfolding where whole influences part and part, in turn,

influences whole.

I can imagine my architect buddies from the Building Process Network

looking through Patterns of Homes or ambling through the actual houses, feeling

the pain of a jealousy attack and then muttering, “too easy.” There are limits to

this work in the sense that the architects are not being asked to make a silk purse

out of a sow’s ear. Their clients obviously have money, time, education,

outstanding building sites, and a willingness to devote real resources to

articulating their values and re-rooting them in the physical world. One imagines

this clientele on diets of organic foods, good-samaritanly donating to PBS, and

graciously dialoging about pattern languages. Just too good to be true or to have

wider applicability―but we’ll see about that.

The Ethnographer’s Ear: Japan

In a railroad car at nightfall, when the natural light outside has

diminished until it is even with the artificial light inside, the passenger

facing forward sees in his window two images at once: the dim

landscape rushing toward him out of a pit of darkness, and the interior of

the car, reflected with its more or less motionless occupants. At this hour

most passengers unconsciously give allegiance to one of these two

polarities of vision; and the individual momentarily aware of both may

be struck by the profound, almost tragic duality between outer and inner

worlds, between the rush of experience and the immobility of awareness.

The uneasy contrast implied by this image is to my mind one of the

special marks of our condition, one of the tragic divorces between our

lonely humanity and the pulse of nature.

(Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living, page 1)

The sequence of movement through and around the house determines

whether we feel welcomed, invited to move farther, or encouraged to

linger at a threshold, settled and comfortable within a space.

(Jacobson, Silverstein, and Winslow, from the pattern Flow through

Rooms in Patterns of Home: The Ten Essentials of Enduring Design.)

…The furniture fades into the dark. The shadows belong there; by

candlelight they become deep rather than dreary. Little objects off in the

corners sparkle. The ceilings and the windows are no longer too low

because we are sitting down. The eighteenth-century interior lives at

night. That is when it is meant to be seen. And the outside is meant to be

seen by day.

Jonathan Hale, The Old Way of Seeing, page 90-91)

These passages should serve to remind us that it is not only the Japanese who

have an aesthetic sensitivity to time and shadow but there is no doubt that it is the

Japanese predilection which stands out as a cultural marker and that is where we

head next.

A team of pattern language practitioners from the Policy Management and

Environment and Information Studies Departments in Tokyo’s Keio University

are up to creative mischief. Not architects but researchers, they look to pattern

languages as a general methodology. They use them to help the public prepare for

and survive earthquakes. They use them to assist the cosmetics industry interested

in how the young perceive questions of beauty. The study of interest here

involves the habitat.

This investigation suggests that the Japanese have a general impression that

since World War II they have sold their essential soul to join the high tech

western world and now (to refer back to our beginning quote) the urgency of the

essential and innovative rebirth through a return to the wellspring in is order. The

results also state upfront that nobody wants to give up their cell phones,

computers, or washing machines. They want to have their cake and eat it too.

A team of seven plied through over a hundred books on a wide variety of

topics―building, cooking, social justice, education, leisure―and then using a

sort of charrette (the Kawakita or KJ method), came up with fifteen patterns that

expressed the comfort of good old Japan that needed to be reborn into a good old

future Japan. The fifteen patterns are named: Reverse Void and Full, Innermost

and Extraordinary, Chain of Stylishness, Comparison by Shape, Micro-cosmos

Reproduction, Blank and Imagination, Awe, Yin and Yang, Power of Infinity,

Listen to Materials, Personal Unit, Broken Premise, Original Form, Warmth in

Hand, and Ambiguity and Co-existence. A few comments are in order.

One can easily start to match up these patterns with the ten essentials of

Jacobson, Silverstein and Winslow and that kind of exercise might be an

excellent avenue for further reflection. The Japanese patterns do not demonstrate

the dense overlap that yields poetic space but the potential is certainly there. The

red thread is this peculiar Japanese sense of time passing and shadow. Rather than

fight impermanence and demise they choose to wistfully celebrate it―and so the

famous cherry blossoms are prized beyond all others precisely because they are

so fleeting. As Donald Richie describes it in A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics: a

look “into a mirror, seeing one more gray hair, discerning one more wrinkle, and

then saying to oneself: “Good, all is well with the world, things are proceeding as

they must.”

When we look at patterns Reverse Void and Full (Figures 3 and 4) and Blank

and Imagination the goal is a desirable open-endedness of rooms which can

change function with minimal moving of objects and change size and shape with

sliding screens. The patterns Listen to Materials, Warmth in Hand, and A Broken

Premise refer to the preference for natural materials such as wood, paper or

clay―all given to imperfections, patina, deterioration and recurrent need for

repair. Yin and Yang and Innermost and Extraordinary look at how

shadow―rather than light as in Patterns of Home―provides meaning, depth, and

direction to overall structures and the smaller structures within.

It has come to be that the beauty of a Japanese room depends on a

variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows―it has

nothing else. Westerners are amazed at the simplicity of Japanese rooms,

perceiving them no more than ashen walls bereft of ornament. Their

reaction is understandable, but it betrays a failure to comprehend the

mystery of shadows.

(Source: Jun’ichirō Tanizaki , In Praise of Shadows)

Figure 3. REVERSE VOID AND FULL. Traditional Japanese construction,

(Source: A architecturalmyart.blogspot.com,)

Figure 4. REVERSE VOID AND FULL. Pulitzer Building by architect Tadao Ando.

(Source: B blog.archpaper.com )

Perhaps even more heuristic than comparing ‘cultural twists’ (American

permanence/Japanese impermanence or American light/Japanese shadow) is how

much more poignantly the Japanese speak to cultural attunement, i.e., how

architecture supports or impedes the art of living. One short illustration of my

own may be enough to bring home the point.

Serendipity had it that at the same that I was helping to edit the English

version of the Keio University paper I was at St. John’s College in Santa Fe

studying the 11th

century Japanese novel, The Tale of Genji. The novel’s

protagonist, Genji, is a refined Don Juan and relentless tomcat. Out and about one

night Genji passes the house of a woman he had been seeing in secret and, from

his retinue, sends in a man of good voice to chant a poem:

Lost though I seem to be in the mists of dawn,

I see your gate and cannot pass it by.

The woman Genji hopes to seduce sends out an ordinary maid but one of some

sensibility who responds:

So difficult to pass? Then do come in.

No obstacle at all, this gate of grass.

There is a diaphanous quality to shoji screens, lattice fences, reed blinds, and

inconsequential ‘gates of grass’ in traditional Japanese building. It is the

psychological solidity of the rules of polite conduct which lend weight to

otherwise non-serious physical obstacles and, in turn, the light-weightedness of

the spatial markers bolsters the significance of individual responsibility and social

liability.

The 11th

century was long ago but the persistence of Japanese cultural roots

and―germane to our discussion―this indivisibility of architectural patterns and

rules for social conduct cannot but mesmerize. The patterns Power of Infinity,

Original Form, Ambiguity and Co-existence refer to human boundary and

sanctuary, the sensing of the other’s intention, and the gentle ability to live and let

live. The patterns Listen to Materials, Innermost and Extraordinary, Yin and Yan,

and Original Form are hollow without inhabitants and, in turn, inhabitants cannot

manifest themselves as Japanese, so to speak, without the ‘props’ of their built

environment.

The Ethnographer’s Ear: Islamic Cities of the Mediterranean

Today the traditional human habitat around the Mediterranean basin

exhibits sophisticated livable qualities as it is evident in the proximity of

uses to each other, spatial and built form attributes which are admired by

the large number of tourists from around the world and the United States

who visit numerous Mediterranean towns to experience those qualities.

We can recreate, without copying, those wonderful human scales, spatial,

and built form attributes in our contemporary and future neighborhoods,

towns, and cities if we are willing to understand, learn, and creatively

apply the lessons. (Besim S. Hakim, historiccitiesrules.com)

Besim Hakim reminds me of Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark deep in

long lost manuscripts tucked away in dark castle chambers of Arab emirs. Hakim

emerges from his quest not with mere gold but the elixir. [Maybe if he looked like

Harrison Ford we could get PBS to feature him in a series and the world would

pay attention.] Old Alger, Fez, Marrakech, Istanbul, Sana’a, Cordova, or the

Alhambra: all different, fabulous, dense, vibrant―and Hakim’s got the secret. It’s

the law, guys, it’s the law. And levels of abstraction.

One of biggest bugaboos with modern construction has got to be the

constraints of code which kill life. To be fair, most code is at least well-

intentioned (keep smelly factories away from residential areas) but, to say the

least, authoritarian. It pushes universal uniformity and ‘rational’ mechanical

thinking. As a classic example, take some sort of simple ‘set-back of ten feet’ rule

and think about how it condemns us to tying our shoelaces together and tripping

over ourselves. [Alexander tells a story of how he conned some inspector into

signing off on a set-back by cheating on the measuring tape―but this can hardly

be the way we want to proceed.]

The Muslims of the ‘good old’ days had more sense. Cultural values were

identified and left, as they should be, as abstract values to be interpreted

according to the concrete details of the case at hand. The Muslim building code

was based on laws of intention. A brilliant move! Spirit of the Law but no Letter!

Figure 5: The built environment in traditional Algeria. Respect of Privacy. (Source: A The Kasbah. Painting by Mounjia Abdeltif.

Take one very obvious value in this part of the world, privacy. If you built a

new house or remodeled an existing one you had to have the intention of

respecting the privacy of those around you. Just how you executed that intention

depended on the specifics of the site. The legal authority to decide resided in

those directly involved. Magic! Patterns, our honed solutions to recurring

problems, emerge naturally. Just walk down any alley of any Kasbah and look at

window placement. Each building gets light but windows never directly face each

other. We get rhythm. We get surprise. We get a ‘just-rightness.’ We get

innovation. And, since the decision-makers are those involved, we get community.

A detailed case study of Islamic architecture is provided by another author

(and in this case architect) Mounjia Abdeltif in a book, Dar Abdeltif, which like

Patterns of Home, has pretty photographs along with very serious ideas. The

family estate, Dar Abdeltif, was taken over by the French (clueless and rather

uncaring of course) and then later abandoned when they high-tailed it out of there

during the Algerian war. Restoration now slowly proceeds.

We can easily, as with the Japanese patterns, map the Dar Abdeltif case onto

the ten essential patterns of J, S, and W. That mapping would take us into deeper

and more significant territory. Here, Inhabiting the Site is not just about

respecting and enhancing some lovely bluff overlooking the ocean; rather it leads

to an understanding of a more vital arrangement―of how the Kasbah worked

hand in hand with the fahs, the productive agriculture holdings which fed their

urban counterpart. Capturing Light (and using it ‘poetically’ to give depth and

sensuality to the overall structure and the smaller places within) is certainly

present. In Algeria there is too much light so the patterns of execution are

instructively different.

As I mentally map the ‘ten essentials’ onto Dar Abdeltif, the theme of the

Algerian book takes on additional heft. The theme is interiority in the habitat: a

sort of privacy multiplied by the power of ten. The building faces inward and the

parts within the building face inward and those within those face inward: fractal,

holistic, holographic, poetic, profound.

Figure 6: A fractal ‘Russian Doll’ system of interiority within interiority. (Source: Photo of interior courtyard at Dar Abdeltif by Mounjia Abdeltif.)

Re-routing

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Pogo

I take these three investigations as illustrations of our ability to think and

experiment our way to the ‘culturally-attuned comfort’ which we so ardently

desire and need. We can re-root. It’s the re-routing problem which looms larger.

If I am willing to defend Alexandrine thinkers against nostalgia trippers, I am less

willing to defend the line of ‘you can’t get there from here’ so prevalent in

Alexander’s latest, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle

Between Two World-Systems. After all, There (culturally-attuned modern

comfort) is where we want to go. Here is where we are.

Although the three ethnographical investigations are, in many ways, apples

and oranges they do share a significant quality: that of framing the dialogue

around genuine living. Taking every possible opportunity to reframe discourse

will be my chosen strategy for re-routing (what else is there?). Here are some of

the tactical moves to consider.

I’m interested in NEW TECHNOLOGIES. Crude dinosaur-esque industrial

processes are now yielding to songbird-esque high precision processes. At very

low cost and within twenty hours, a small 3D printer can print a prosthetic hand,

the ultimate in ‘uniquely crafted to its context’ and then the printer can be re-

programmed to adapt, in those tiny but critical ways, to the next patient’s need.

The Chinese are now printing entire buildings. Wouldn’t this be a sort of ground-

floor opportunity? What does the building process network have to offer this new

technology? (Figures 7 and 8)

Figure 7. Model printed with a 3 D printer.

(Source: International Business Times. Friday, September 12, 2014.)

Figure 8. The Chinese printing ten houses a day.

(Source /www.gizmag.com.)

I’m interested in identifying LEVERAGE POINTS. Besim Hakim’s work strikes

me as significant because of the obvious potential for positive, bottom-up, self-

regulating, and open-ended change by providing abstract guidance above and

allowing hands-on freedom below. Indeed much of the power of patterns lies in

their being what Robert Merton called ‘mid-level abstractions. The general idea

of any given pattern is clear enough but the possible concrete implementations are

endlessly adaptable to the specifics of time and place.

Another leverage point comes out of The Nature of Order. A sequence

moves a structure forward from the inside out, so to speak. The test of any one

move will be no need to backtrack, so early moves are all the more important.

Consider a developer (they aren’t all dastardly) who might be persuaded to have

his engineers step aside and place houses on a site using criteria such as land

repair, existing beauty, sun, rather than using an eye to saving every possible

nickel on pipes, which actually don’t cost much. The end result might not be

nirvana, but certainly less bad, and life, as we are repeatedly told in The Nature of

Order, is a matter of degree.

I’m interested in SHORT CUTS. Somewhat lost in the pages of The Nature of

Order are handy-dandy shortcuts. For example, the average layperson messing

with a fixer-upper isn’t going to get very far trying to figure out which of the

fifteen geometric properties should come next, but the simple idea of ‘find the

next most simple move to bring more life to the site’ might actually work well

enough―again, probably not nirvana, but better. I remember one conversation

where Alexander said, “Well, if we just limited building to the materials already

present within, say, a ten mile radius, then good things would happen.“ That

would work in my part of the world. I live in an old mud house (très chic in Santa

Fe) and fabulous creations are possible with mud. In fact, half the human race

lives in mud dwellings (often not so très chic). Significant improvements for the

mud end of planet are really quite simple (Figure 9).

Figure 9. Construction in mud. A (left) The home of Simone Swan. B. At work.

(Source: adobealliance. org)

I’m interested in the MARGINS where new ideas get worked out within the

safety of unimportance. Cliff Island, a whopping mile long, lies off the coast of

Portland, Maine. A few hardy families call it home year-round and others call it

summer home. Cliff Island is never in the news. The islanders quietly opted for

no cars and make do with a path that accommodates walkers, bikers, and an

occasional golf cart. Hence, no bulldozers or big equipment. A bit like an

automatic shortcut and leverage point, this leads to different building practices

with good results. I see nothing lofty or idealistic going on in peoples’ heads on

Cliff Island but, ever so simply, with the available tools it’s just too much work to

destroy the terrain and vegetation. The structure and centers in the land are

preserved, the buildings ‘marry in.’ The resulting quality of roughness is, in fact,

a charming built environment of exquisite precision (Figure 10).

Figure 11. The grace of leaving the land alone. Cliff Island, Maine.

(Sources: Photo by Charles Adams)

I’m interested in LEARNING FROM OTHERS. The New Urbanism movement is

on a fundamentally different track and I think we can legitimately argue a

misguided one in that their whole approach is top down rather than bottom up.

Still, we have things to learn. I was involved in one failed consultation where

Duncanville, Texas (a bedroom community of Dallas) wanted to re-root itself.

They called in Chris Alexander and we ran a workshop. However, in the end,

they hired a New Urbanism team. Why? Street smarts. The New Urbanists knew

how to listen politely to people, work the ropes, draft the grant proposals for the

town to get the funding to – of course – get them hired for the job. The

Duncanville city council was happy with them, did not fully grasp the difference

between unfolding and cosmetic code, but the New Urbanists, in a feasible and

affordable set of moves, raised the bar and consciousness within the town.

Figure 11. New Urbanist drawing for Duncanville’s Main Street.

(Source: contextsensitivesolutions.org.)

I’m interested in bringing more intelligent PATTERN CONVERSATIONS to

other groups already sensitive to the built environment. The historic preservation

community in Santa Fe does some fine restoration work, but in many ways they

don’t ‘get it.’ It is against code to change out old single window panes for better

glass but they do not understand why the old windows work. The tall narrow

windows (no longer to be found anywhere) used little glass (expensive back then)

and gave marvelous light all throughout the day. Local architects attempt to ‘ape’

the traditional southwest Great Room without understanding the pattern. A visit

to many of the upscale homes will take you to a Great Room that feels like a

bowling alley. A visit to the restored buildings shows how the Great Room

pattern achieve both generosity and intimacy by subtly subdividing the big space

(window placement, beams, partial dividers, floor and ceiling heights) into a

series of small ones (Figure 12). For a second example, the sustainability

movement could support better building if they understood the age-old adage of

Lao Tze, “Lopsidedness is no advantage.” A successful pattern is a resolution of

all forces, not a giving in to just one parameter (Figure 13).

Figure 12. The Great Room at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s house in Taos, New Mexico.

(Source: Photo by Charles Adams).

Figure 13. A (left) Lopsided solar building in South Wales. B (right) Balancing of

forces in a traditional cooling system: the badgir of Iran.

(Sources: A. unknown. B. http://flickrhivemind.net)

I’m interested in more ETHNOGRAPHIC WORK WITH PATTERNS and expanding

our understanding of culturally-attuned comfort. Consider this cringe-worthy

image-drive model home from a HUD marketing brochure showing how the

government wants the Native American to live (Figure 14). Surely, we can do

better than that. Jacobson, Silverstein and Winslow may be on the demographic

sidelines with their client sample but they are moving pattern work forward. I find

it useful to remember that the original idea in the 1970’s was to keep the patterns

in a loose leaf binder constantly adding, deleting, and honing a work-in-progress

rather than hunkering down with a sort of Bible of 253 and fervent adherents of

the Word.

Figure 14. The ideal HUD home for American Indians.

(Source: HUD housing brochure).

I’m interested in RELATIONSHIPS OF POWER. The traditional pattern languages

allowed the folk to both own and hone the process. The Japanese at Keio

University are writing pattern languages right, left, and center, for all kinds of

issues and empowering larger audiences with creative commons licenses and

public websites to converse and spread pattern work. One of their future projects

will be the change patterns that can achieve the ‘good old future’ in Japan. Yes!

This is what we need.

And, finally, I’m interested in ANTI-PATTERNS. After all, our Darth Vadars

are also patterns―anti-patterns―but still a way of making things through a

balance of forces at play. We might discover more leverage points for change and

wholeness through a pattern-esque analysis and dismantling of current building

practices. That would be confronting Darth Vadar head on.

May the force be with you.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank her kindred spirits for on-going conversations

about the magic of spaces, and for this essay in particular thanks go to Mounjia

Abdeltif, Charles Adams, Besim Hakim, David Seamon, and the writer

workshops of PloP with Megumi Kadotani and Takashi Iba.

References

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About the author

Jenny Quillien, an anthropologist by training, worked for six years with

Christopher Alexander on the manuscript of The Nature of Order. She currently

lives and teaches in Santa Fe, New Mexico.