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Christopher Alexander's pattern language:an alternative exploration of space-makingpracticesRitu Bhatt aa School of Architecture, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, 55455,USA

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To cite this article: Ritu Bhatt (2010): Christopher Alexander's pattern language: an alternative explorationof space-making practices, The Journal of Architecture, 15:6, 711-729

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Christopher Alexander’s patternlanguage: an alternativeexploration of space-makingpractices

Ritu Bhatt School of Architecture, University of Minnesota,

Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA

While Christopher Alexander’s pattern language has been widely accepted by building

contractors and do-it-yourself homeowners, academics have often rejected it for being

deterministic and authoritarian. This paper argues for a balanced re-evaluation of Alexan-

der’s work, arguing that its importance lies in its recognition that life patterns allow for

unconscious cognitive relationships with space that can be discerned and actively improved.

When reading A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (1977) and The Timeless

Way of Building (1979), it becomes apparent that Alexander’s aim is not just to produce

diagrammatic patterns, but to provide a broad critique of the alienated modern condition.

Alexander calls for a shift in knowledge that would allow for an holistic attitude wherein

buildings could be experienced without conscious attention. Herein, I argue, Alexander’s

philosophical concerns can be more fully understood in the context of recently growing

interests in philosophy, the cognitive sciences and emerging somatic practices that argue

for an integration of mind and body. Furthermore, I propose that Alexander’s insights

about how and when physical settings become cognitive can provide some insights for

dissolving the limits of both empiricism and relativism.

Introduction

Christopher Alexander’s pattern language,

embraced by both building contractors and do-

it-yourself homeowners, is often rejected in the

academy for being deterministic and authoritarian.

The critiques of pattern language have been varied

and have pointed to its essentialism, its reduction

of the design process into a diagrammatic language

and its emphasis on comfort, ease, and pleasure,

which many critics see as bourgeois and encoura-

ging of complacency. This paper argues for a more

balanced re-evaluation of Alexander’s work in the

history and theory of architecture, arguing that its

importance lies in its recognition that life patterns

allow for unconscious cognitive relationships with

space that can be discerned and actively improved.

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construc-

tion (1977) and The Timeless Way of Building

(1979), which I will refer to from now on as A

Pattern Language and The Timeless Way, were

written as two halves of a single work, and in

these works, Alexander aimed not just to produce

diagrammatic patterns, but also to provide a

broader philosophical critique of the alienated

modern condition.1 Throughout his writings,

Alexander calls for a shift in the conception of

knowledge that would involve letting go of the

existing modes of perception, and an acquisition

of an holistic attitude wherein buildings could be

experienced without conscious attention.2 Herein,

I argue, Alexander’s philosophical concerns can be

more fully understood in the context of recently

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growing interests in philosophy, the cognitive

sciences and emerging somatic practices that

argue for an integration of mind and body. Further-

more, I propose that Alexander’s insights about how

and when physical settings become cognitive can

provide some insights for dissolving the limits of

both empiricism and relativism.

In A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander

and his colleagues provide 253 patterns for spaces

ranging from living areas to kitchens, bathrooms,

secret alcoves, staircases, workplaces, neighbour-

hoods, ideal universities and pathways.3 A Pattern

Language aims to bring conscious awareness to

the patterns through which human beings uncon-

sciously relate to space, providing a practical

language for everyday users.4 The book consists of

suggestive diagrams, which Alexander introduces

as elements of a practical language that ‘describes

the core of the solution to the problem, in such a

way that you can use this solution a million times

over, without ever doing it the same way twice.’5

This assures readers of a flexible, open-ended

language that will allow them actively to engage

in the design process.

According to Alexander, the rise of a modern aes-

thetic and a specialised architectural profession had

contributed to the failure of modern architecture to

relate to the deep psychological needs of users. In

seeking insights from pre-modern traditional

environments, A Pattern Language aimed to create

a system of knowledge that would help to blur the

distance between professional designers and every-

day users. When Alexander wrote A Pattern

Language and The Timeless Way, critiques of mod-

ernism were emerging from an understanding that

pre-modern traditional environments employed

knowledge and shared techniques that largely func-

tioned unconsciously. Bernard Rodofsky’s Architec-

ture without Architects (1964), as well as Amos

Rapoport’s influential books, House Form and

Culture (1969) and The Meaning of the Built

Environment (1982), had underscored the role that

‘unconscious’ and intuitive processes play in the

design of traditional environments.6

Around the same time, other influential critiques

such as Robert Venturi’s books, Complexity and

Contradiction in Architecture (1966) and Learning

from Las Vegas (1972), which had emphasised the

role of the ordinary in making architecture more

communicable, played a key part in the theorisation

of postmodernism.7 Kevin Lynch’s seminal work

Image of City (1960) drew attention to the experi-

ences of users, showing how everyday users per-

ceive and organise spatial information as they

navigate through cities. Architectural culture of the

1960s and 1970s was potent with critiques of mod-

ernism, including Jane Jacobs’ influential study The

Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). By

giving impetus and encouragement to grassroots

efforts at the local level, Jacobs’ study attacked the

urban renewal policies of the 1950s in the USA

that were in the process of destroying neighbour-

hoods. Even some later critiques of modernism,

such as Kenneth Frampton’s critical regionalism,

shared an appreciation for traditional knowledge

and cultural meaning in architecture. In Modern

Architecture: A Critical History, Frampton argues

for recognition of the particularities of a local

context, including topography, climate and tactile

qualities, over visual properties.

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Within such an intellectual climate, a surge of

interest in Alexander’s pattern language transpired

in academia, focusing on user empowerment, the

use of patterns in the design process, and commu-

nity participatory design, in addition to the phenom-

enological leanings of Alexander’s theories. Later,

however, this interest leveled off to a quiet punctu-

ated by the occasional laudatory or disparaging

review, mainly criticizing Alexander’s work for its

determinism and authoritarianism.8 Since its publi-

cation, however, A Pattern Language has continued

to find enduring success with builders and contrac-

tors as well as do-it-yourself homeowners who use it

mainly as a self-help practice.

Herein, I will first provide a brief overview of

the reception of Alexander’s work to show the

extreme variation within academic writing on the

subject, ranging from disparaging reviews to posi-

tive reception to a general silence in recent

scholarship. Then I will analyse A Pattern Language

and The Timeless Way to shed light on their key

arguments and philosophical insights in order to

show how they connect with emerging inquiries in

somatics, the cognitive sciences and the neuro-

sciences. I will then outline how Alexander’s insights

about how and when physical settings become

cognitive can provide insights for dissolving the

limits of both empiricism and relativism.

Scholarly debates about pattern language

In an essay entitled ‘The Poverty of Pattern

Language’, J.P. Protzen criticises Alexander for

presenting evidence through what Protzen calls a

‘consensus theory of truth’.9 The idea that ‘many

people will agree’ represents a pervasive mode of

presenting evidence in A Pattern Language, and

statements like ‘Nobody wants fast through traffic

going by their homes’ are used to generate agree-

ment because of their appeal to what Alexander

perceives as common sense. Protzen writes,

While some of these statements are readily accep-

table as common sense (whether they are empiri-

cally substantiated or not), I certainly object to the

logic which would conclude that because every-

body wants something we ought to have it, or,

conversely, that because everybody hates some-

thing we ought to do away with it. History is

witness to the fact that people can agree to do

the stupidest and most horrendous things, and

that they have been reinforced in that precisely

because they all have been in agreement.10

For Protzen, pattern language ultimately becomes an

all-encompassing theory, and he argues that readers

should ‘refute the whole’ because it ‘enforces an

unenlightened conformism’ and ‘leads to deterio-

ration of intellectual capabilities, and of the power

of imagination’.11 In another publication, entitled

‘Discord over Harmony in Architecture’, which is a

transcript of a conversation between Peter Eisenman

and Christopher Alexander at the Harvard School of

Design, Eisenman criticises the values of ‘comfort,

ease, legibility, sociability, pleasure, mental health,

peacefulness, [and] opportunities for both solitude

and participation in family and community life’

as values that can easily be seen as bourgeois

and encouraging of complacency, passivity and

parochialism.12 Throughout the conversation,

Alexander defends his work while striving to distance

it from theories of postmodernism and post-

structuralism, arguing that they are disharmonious

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and explaining that he had been searching for a

conception of knowledge in architecture that

makes use of a different cosmology. Both Protzen

and Eisenman’s critiques fail to demonstrate an

understanding of key issues that Alexander is

addressing; Protzen, in examining Alexander’s work

through the keen eye of an empiricist, fails to see

the limitations of a purely empirical approach in

understanding knowledge based on deep human

feelings, and in the Eisenman-Alexander debate,

Eisenman’s continuous referencing of structuralist

and poststructuralist thought as the only critiques

of western epistemology fails to see the particular

kind of shift in knowledge that Alexander is pointing

toward.

Kim Dovey’s article ‘The Pattern Language and Its

Enemies’ addresses this idea, arguing that the

pattern language approach calls for a marked shift

in environmental epistemology. According to

Dovey, patterns are derived from the lived world of

everyday experience, and they gain their power

‘not by being proven empirically correct, but by

showing us a direct connection between the

pattern and our experience of the built environ-

ment.’13 In other words, by resonating with the

user on a personal, intuitive level, patterns of spatial

use often emerge at an unconscious level, can be

shared collectively by people and come to be seen

as a source of knowledge without being easily or

necessarily empirically verifiable. More recently,

William Saunders has made the point that readers

who dismiss Alexander’s work are depriving them-

selves of the chance to savour its bounty of delightful

details and insights, such as its ‘acute seeing’ of

the built environment, as well as its contributions to

phenomenology. Describing Alexander’s work as

‘New Age flower-child wishfulness’, Saunders argues,

‘if only because Pattern Language is a perennial

best-seller, architectural curricula have some

obligation to study it as a cultural phenomenon’.14

On the other hand, the success of Alexander’s

theories has often been attributed to the direct

links they draw between users and the process of

design, aiding in design without requiring the user

to have comprehensive, professional knowledge.

In ‘Lingua Francas for Design: Sacred Places and

Pattern Languages’, Tom Erickson speaks to A

Pattern Language’s accessible diagrams and rich,

vivid descriptions, which he argues have the

capacity to evoke a response of ‘I see’ from the

user.15 Unlike abstract principles that require users

to understand a conceptual framework and then

map the principles onto their own domain of con-

cerns, Erickson argues that Alexander’s patterns

function as concrete prototypes. Grounded in rich,

concrete experiences, patterns find immediate con-

nection with users (Fig. 1). In fact, A Pattern

Language has found its most compelling success

not so much in architectural design but in computer

science, within software and object-oriented design,

wherein patterns are now recognised as a concrete

framework upon which complex design decisions

involving highly abstract concepts can be anchored.

The term ‘pattern’ is described by Doug Lea in

‘Christopher Alexander: An Introduction for

Object-Oriented Designers’ as a pre-formal con-

struct describing sets of forces in the world and

relations among them.16

Each pattern entry is seen as a link of forces, and

the format of each pattern is easy to understand,

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comprised of three different spatial layers—that of a

problem, solution and construction—allowing the

layers to evolve concurrently. Such formatting

allows for a common vocabulary to express key con-

cepts, and a language for relating them together; in

doing so, pattern language allows a designer to for-

malise optimum solutions and improve the quality of

the resulting systems. In ‘The Timeless Way: Making

Living Cooperative Buildings with Design Patterns’,

Pemberton and Griffiths write:

Patterns could enable designers to benefit from

the knowledge and experience of creators of suc-

cessful systems, providing reusable templates

adapted to fit the particular issues which the

designer is addressing. Above all, patterns,

because they are themselves alive and engaging,

provide a means of communicating either

between designers of similar artifacts, e.g. one

architect to another, or designers looking at

reshaping the environment at quite different

levels, e.g. furniture designer to interface

designer.17

Pattern construction involves an iterative social

process of collecting, sharing and amplifying distrib-

uted experience and knowledge. Because the forms

of patterns and their relationships are only loosely

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Figure 1. ‘What the

user wanted’.

Alexander’s diagram

shows how architects

typically have a hard

time connecting with

‘what the user wanted’.

The success of pattern

language, however, has

been attributed to its

accessible diagrams and

rich, vivid descriptions,

which have the capacity

to function as concrete

prototypes, projecting a

reality grounded in

concrete experiences to

which users can

immediately relate and

use to reconfigure the

most intimate of their

spaces. (Christopher

Alexander et al., The

Oregon Experiment

(New York, Oxford

University Press, 1975),

p. 44.

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constrained and written in a language that evolves

naturally, it is argued that they allow for infinite

nondeterministic generativity.18 Some of these

claims attest to pattern language’s influence on

innovations such as Wiki, as well as its influence

on many grassroots programming communities.

However, the applications of pattern language in

computer science have failed to engage with the

philosophical critique of modern thought that is

central to Alexander’s work. In his keynote address

at the 1996 ACM conference, ‘Object-Oriented Pro-

grams, Systems, Languages, and Applications’,

Alexander addresses this issue, stating that the

ability of patterns to reconfigure and facilitate

design processes usually does not fully represent

the potential of the arguments that sought to

create ‘good’ and ‘nurturing’ environments.19

Such claims, and the uneven reception that Alexan-

der’s work has received, suggest a re-evaluation of

his work, particularly its relevance to architecture.

Re-reading A Pattern LanguageA Pattern Language andand TheThe

Timeless WayTimeless Way

A closer review of A Pattern Language and The

Timeless Way reveals that Alexander does not just

aim to produce a pattern language for design.

Rather, his work provides a far-reaching philosophi-

cal critique of the modern alienated condition,

which is characterised by separation of humans

from nature, regimented divisions between work

and home, and separation of professional architec-

tural knowledge from its everyday users. A Pattern

Language argues for an ideal balance between

work and family life, suitable public institutions,

mixed use of space in neighbourhoods, and rich

public spaces for carnivals and other expressions of

irrationality. According to Alexander, when human

beings share a rich community life, spaces transform

from being merely functional to being social and

vital, and in such settings lie possibilities for learning

and cognition that are spatial, emotional and affec-

tive. Alexander’s descriptions of patterns discuss

how to transform a specific space from being

merely functional to being socially interactive. In

doing so, the patterns often challenge conventional

ways of seeing.

For instance, in the pattern that discusses stair-

cases (Pattern 133: ‘Staircase as a Stage’), Alexander

writes, ‘A staircase is not just a way of getting from

one floor to another [Fig. 2]. The stair is itself a

space, a volume, a part of the building; and unless

this space is made to live, it will be a dead spot,

and work to disconnect the building and to tear its

processes apart.’20 He argues that one should

design stairs in such a way that they become fully

integrated with the rest of the building, providing

a gradual and natural transition to the next level.

He suggests flaring out the bottom of the stairs

and widening them, as well as making the stairs

part of the outer perimeter of the room, if possible,

so the steps can be used as seats. Stairs then would

not remain merely stairs, but would be transformed

into social spaces where people would feel naturally

inclined to sit and chat. Through such critiques

of modern functionalism, Alexander continually

draws attention to the potential of architecture to

facilitate and increase the intuitive tendencies of

human beings to gather socially and to move

around. Furthermore, by delving into the seemingly

mundane aspects of everyday life that the

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Figure 2. Patterns for

stairs. Alexander argues

that stairs that merely

connect two levels of a

building work further to

disconnect the building

and tear its processes

apart. In the patterns

for stairs, he suggests

flaring out the bottom

and widening them as

well as, if possible,

making the stairs part of

the outer perimeter of

the room so the steps

can be used as seats.

Such patterns

transform stairs into

social spaces where

people would be

naturally inclined to sit,

chat or engage in other

activities. (Pattern 133:

‘Staircase as a Stage’, A

Pattern Language,

pp. 637–40.)Dow

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disciplinary knowledge in architecture in general

tends to overlook, pattern language creates a rich

dialogue that has the potential to encourage a

user to reconfigure his or her most intimate spaces.

For instance, in a pattern that focuses on sleeping

(Pattern 186: ‘Communal Sleeping’), Alexander

points out that ‘in many traditional and primitive

cultures, sleep is a communal activity without

the sexual overtones it has in the West today’

(Fig. 3).21 In these societies, he explains, communal

sleeping between adults, or between adults and

children in large family-size groups, plays a vital

part in building and intensifying relationships to

the degree that its social role is perceived as being

similar to the easier-to-cite positive social and

psychological benefits of communal eating.22 He

says that we may not accept this idea so easily in

contemporary societies, wherein we tend to over-

compartmentalise everyday life and associate sleep-

ing with privacy and sexuality. In his critique of how

we view sleeping, he offers an amusing anecdote:

The pattern may seem strange at first, but when

our typist read it, she was fascinated and

decided to try it one Saturday night with her

family. They spread a big mat across the living

room. They all got up together and helped the

youngest son on his paper route; then they had

some breakfast.

Ed: ‘Are they still doing it?’

Au: ‘No, after 2 weeks they were arrested.’23

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Figure 3. Communal

Sleeping. In this

pattern, Alexander

points to the positive

effects of communal

sleeping, which is

perceived in many

traditional societies to

play a vital role in

intensifying social

relationships. He

critiques the modern

associations of sleeping

with privacy and

suggests a pattern that

places beds ‘within

sight and sound of

other beds’. (Pattern

186: ‘Communal

Sleeping’, A Pattern

Language, p. 863.)

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Such humorous anecdotes are common in the book

and work well with its overall theme of making

architectural knowledge accessible to the everyday

user. Often through self-mockery, they critique

modern ways of living and often work to facilitate

an understanding of knowledge that differs dra-

matically from modern cultural norms. In this

pattern, Alexander recommends the practice of

communal sleeping for the positive psycho-social

benefits that it may have, and suggests a space

that would allow children and adults to have their

beds ‘within the sight and sound of other beds.’24

However, pattern language abounds in sweeping

generalisations about human nature, and Alexan-

der’s critics have often become angered when anec-

dotes or generalisations are taken to an extreme. For

instance, in a section on bathing (Pattern 144:

‘Bathing Room’), Alexander claims that a recent

study has shown that ‘cross-culturally there is a cor-

relation between the degree to which society places

restrictions on bodily pleasures (such as co-

bathing)—particularly in childhood—and the

degree to which society engages in the glorification

of warfare and sadistic practices.’25 William Saun-

ders points to the frequent use of such adages in

A Pattern Language, writing ‘While we can under-

stand and generally agree with these adages, it is

their extremism—“No people . . . no human

group”—that seems not just shrill but also nutty

as this preposterous sentence: “There is abundant

evidence to show that high rise buildings make

people crazy.” ’26 While it is important to refute

these sweeping, direct causal links that Alexander

sometimes draws between human behaviour and

architectural spaces, in doing so, the debates

about Alexander’s work often miss the merits of

what Alexander is arguing for. In Pattern 144 on

bathing, for instance, the critics’ focus on determin-

ism overshadows his argument for broadening the

definition of bathing, which shows how physical

cleansing represents only a small aspect of the

ritual of bathing and highlights the larger thera-

peutic and social benefits of communal bathing’s

shared pleasure (Fig. 4).27

Critics have also noted that while Alexander

rightly points to the positive aspects of socially

inhabited spaces, he seldom takes into consider-

ation the idea that user responses can be diverse,

and that for some users, socially inhabited spaces

can also be oppressive because of the discomfort

they cause. Another evident inconsistency in Alex-

ander’s work involves how he argues throughout

his writings for a break from rational, compartmen-

talised thinking, while reconciling himself often

uncritically with scientific studies that overly ration-

alise human behaviour and reduce it to singular

dimensions. Ambiguities abound in Alexander’s

work, and reconciling its valuable insights with its

serious flaws and contradictions poses quite a chal-

lenge. The larger, more important issue, however, is

that Alexander’s occasional dogmatic and unsub-

stantiated determinism, as well as the level of

criticism that determinism has received, has under-

mined the larger, more important arguments

about broader holistic modes of knowing for

which Alexander is arguing.

In a later book entitled Christopher Alexander:

The Search for a New Paradigm in Architecture

(1983), written by Stephen Grabow, Alexander

puts forth some clear explanations of what he

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Figure 4. Pattern for

Bathing. In the pattern

on bathing, Alexander

argues that cleansing is

only a small part of the

larger therapeutic,

social and pleasurable

benefits that bathing

can bring, and that

designs of bathing

spaces should

accommodate such

needs. (Pattern 144:

‘Bathing Room’, A

Pattern Language,

pp. 681–6.)

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means by holistic knowledge and what that might

imply both for architectural design and for interdis-

ciplinary synergies of knowledge in general. In the

foreword, Alexander describes his work as a search

for a new paradigm: a paradigm that ‘would not

only make it necessary to modify our view of archi-

tecture, but also modify our picture of the world . . .

so that what we know as physics, biology, chemistry

. . . and other related fields, will all have to take on a

different cast.’28 This call for a shift in epistemology

across disciplines, when understood in the context

of the arguments proposed in A Pattern Language

and The Timeless Way, provides a rich, cohesive

theory that extends beyond emphasising day-

to-day experiences of living, developing into a

nuanced exploration of how and when physical,

spatial settings become cognitive.

The following argument emerges: Life patterns,

at multiple levels of complexity, allow for uncon-

scious cognitive relationships with space. Alexander

argues that these relationships can be consciously

recognised to some degree, and actively improved.

For Alexander, traditional pre-modern built environ-

ments serve as excellent examples of such unself-

conscious methods of construction.29 They possess

what Alexander calls the ‘quality without a name’

that ‘cannot be made, but only generated indirectly,

by the ordinary actions of people.’30

To seek this understanding and knowledge, Alex-

ander argues that architects should let go of all the

methods of architecture they know, and move away

from paying conscious attention to buildings. This

process, he states ‘will happen on its own accord,

if we let it’ and ‘will enhance innate human

capacities for intuitive learning.’31 In this framework

of knowledge, objectivity and subjectivity are not

mutually opposed. Alexander calls for dissolution

of the binary framework of knowledge, describing

his work as ‘a search for the quality of things that

is subjective, cannot be named, and yet has an

objectivity and precision to it.’32 This precision, he

clarifies, cannot be attained mechanically; it is

based on deep human feelings and needs.

Somatics and cognition

In the emerging field of somatics, deep feelings as

well as unconscious processes and patterns of

thought and movement are seen as an important

source of knowledge. Somatics is a broad term

that is used to signify a variety of approaches,

such as the Feldenkrais method, the Alexander tech-

nique, body-mind centring, eutony, yoga, martial

arts and dance movement therapy; these practices

argue for mind-body cognition and place a great

deal of emphasis on the student or client’s active

participation. Practitioners claim that in modern

medicine, the body has been approached as an

object and studied as something external and separ-

ate from the self. Somatic practitioners, in contrast,

approach the body as a subject, experienced from

within rather than from without. In dissolving the

object-subject split, somatic practitioners argue for

the recognition (‘re-cognition’) of the fact that the

human body is the ground from which one needs

to explore experience.

The key issue that somatic practitioners often

focus on is patterns—or rather, on the re-patterning

of thought, movement and behaviour, arguing

that unconscious patterns held within the body

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can affect functioning at all levels: physiological,

psychological, social and spiritual. Somatics argues

against the objectified, static view of the body and

argues that the body, like the mind, remains in con-

stant flux, changing from moment to moment in

response to underlying processes of which it is an

expression. Somatic therapies attend to this subtle

flux within the body-mind, using various techniques

such as touch, tissue manipulation, sensory aware-

ness, body imagery and movement. Through the

use of specific techniques, these therapies bring

awareness to unconscious patterns, introduce new

sensations and choices of response, and support

changes leading to greater integration, health and

wellbeing.

In Performing Live: Aesthetic Renewals to the

Ends of Art, Richard Shusterman argues that

somatic practices of ‘self-help’ not only free us

from bodily habits and defects that tend to impair

cognitive performance, but also enrich our lives

through integrating a rich aesthetic experience

into our everyday lives.33 In doing so, Shusterman

argues, these everyday practices reinvent the post-

modern subject. Unlike the Foucauldian subject

under a constant panoptic gaze, there emerges an

agent who—through a focus on self-knowledge

and self-interpretation—is capable of challenging

the repressive power relationships encoded in our

bodies.34 Somatics allows the development of the

body’s capacities for direct sensory experience and

human intuitions. This awareness of the body’s

feelings and movement, Shusterman points out,

has been long criticised in western philosophical

traditions as a harmful distraction that corrupts

our ethics through fostering self-absorption.35

Along a similar vein, in their powerful and influen-

tial critique of western philosophical traditions, Phil-

osophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its

Challenge to Western Thought, George Lakoff and

Mark Johnson challenge western conceptions of

rationality, arguing that our bodies, brains and inter-

actions with our environments provide the primarily

unconscious basis for our everyday metaphysics;

that is, our sense of what is real. Reason and

reality, they argue, are not dispassionate or disem-

bodied, but grow out of bodily capacities; they are

emotionally engaged and fundamentally embo-

died.36

The idea that objectivity is not dispassionate and

can evolve from deeply embodied subjective feel-

ings is an argument that pervades much of Alexan-

der’s work. In A Pattern Language, his discussion of

a pattern for sleeping (Pattern 138: ‘Sleeping to the

East’) serves as a particularly strong illustration of

how subjective feelings can be argued to have an

objective basis (Fig. 5). In this pattern, Alexander

argues that when deciding which space is most

appropriate for sleeping, one must pay attention

to the needs of the human body when waking

from sleep. He begins by saying that this is one of

the patterns that people most often disagree with,

for, they argue, ‘What if one had an intention to

sleep late? Why would someone want to be

woken up by the sun?’ In expressing such concerns,

Alexander points out, people often assume that

such decisions are only a matter of personal prefer-

ence. On the contrary, he argues, sensitive biological

clocks within the human body work in conjunction

with natural rhythms and cycles. The human body

is attuned to its own needs for rest, and light will

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affect it differently depending on how much rest it

needs. The description of the pattern reads:

Since the sun warms you, increases the light,

gently nudges you, you are likely to wake up at

a moment which serves you the best. Therefore,

the right place for sleeping is one which provides

morning light—consequently a window in the

room that lets in eastern light—and a bed that

provides a view of the light without being directly

in the light shaft.37

Often Alexander suggests a ‘right place’, or ‘a more

or less correct way’, and he argues that this concept

of rightness is based on deep human sensations and

needs. Such connections between individual human

feelings and their normative basis are also increas-

ingly being explored by emerging somatic practices.

For instance, in a recent book called The Chair:

Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design, Galen Cranz

has challenged accepted notions of chair design.

She explores the needs of the body by drawing

upon how somatic practitioners understand them.

Cranz points out how chair designers have misun-

derstood the needs of the human body. The

human body, she says, is inherently in a state of

flux and instability, and our conventionally accepted

‘seated posture’ on the chair often causes a host of

health-related concerns. And yet, she points out, we

continue intuitively to seek comfort through the act

of sitting in a chair. She explains this discord in the

following passage:

We currently live in a society where for an average

person, because of years of faulty alignment

an idea of what feels right may have taken

precedence over the direct bodily sensation of

what feels right. And, this means that for most

people an anatomically efficient posture no

longer feels ‘right’ or ‘comfortable’, to the

degree that we reject it in favor of a collapsed

slump.38

Cranz asserts that our intuitive tendency to seek

comfort in a collapsed slump reflects our disturbed

relationship with our bodies, wherein our concept

of what feels right does not necessarily correspond

with our internal sensory experience, and she

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Figure 5. Sleeping to

the East. Alexander

writes ‘Give those parts

of the house where

people sleep, an eastern

orientation, so that they

wake up with the sun

and light. This means,

typically, that the

sleeping area needs to

be on the eastern side

of the house; but it can

also be on the western

side provided there is a

courtyard or a terrace to

the east of it.’ (Pattern

138: ‘Sleeping to the

East’, A Pattern

Language, pp. 656–9.)

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argues for ‘unlearning the cultural conditioning that

ignores internal sensory experience in favor of

abstract thought.’ Furthermore, Cranz points out

that such concepts as ‘comfort’ are not adequately

taken into account as an integral part of design

even in approaches that do take the human body

into account, such as ergonomic design. Asserting

that faulty sensory awareness has caused people

to give unreliable reports to ergonomic researchers

regarding what feels comfortable to them, Cranz

writes:

They [ergonomic researchers] have observed that

people cannot consistently describe what is com-

fortable, but they don’t know why; they just chalk

it up to the annoying unreliability or variability of

human subjects, rather than asking why such pro-

found variation should exist. This much variation

points to a profound disturbance in our relation-

ship to our bodies. Rather than try to restore

that relationship, as somatic practitioners do,

ergonomic science has ignored the realm of kines-

thetic reeducation. For designers, somatics

creates an unsettling demand to make chairs

that might feel uncomfortable until people’s

bodies and minds unlearn the poor sitting

posture learned from conventional chairs.39

Herein lie some distinctions between Cartesian

rationalism and conceptions of holistic knowledge.

In the rationalist object-subject relationship, objec-

tivity and subjectivity are mutually opposed and sub-

jectivity becomes a highly variable concept that is

based on ‘mere’ human feelings. These feelings

are not seen as a reliable source of knowledge. In

holistic conceptions, on the other hand, wherein

the human body is seen as the fundamental

ground through which to understand experiences,

subjectivity emerges from an understanding of inter-

relationships within the body as well as its larger

relationships with the environment, and remains in

a state of constant flux. In this perspective, the dis-

tinctions between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ are

blurred, and they are no longer defined as mutual

opposites. For instance, Cranz explains that

somatic practitioners do not define comfort as the

opposite of ‘no work’. Rather, they define comfort

as balanced work throughout the whole system,

explaining that the subjective counterpart to this

‘balanced work’ would be a feeling of vitality and

ease.40 Likewise, Alexander continually draws corre-

lations between when things are ‘just right’ and ‘in

balance’, and the concurrent feeling of vitality and

ease. For Alexander too, physical spaces affect quali-

tative aspects of life, and to understand how and

when that happens, we need to shift our perception

of knowledge from Cartesian rationalism to an hol-

istic understanding of spaces.

As part of developing an holistic understanding,

Alexander asks us to become aware of how build-

ings affect us cognitively. He frequently comments

about paying attention to the moments when build-

ings come ‘alive’, and about how and when build-

ings could be argued to be ‘more real’ or ‘less

real’. This emphasis on ‘when’ is similar to Nelson

Goodman’s arguments for aesthetic cognition in

his Languages of Art (1968). Goodman stresses

that the question to ask is not ‘What is Art?’ but

‘When is Art?’ In doing so, Goodman shifts the

emphasis from the ‘art object’ to an understanding

of aesthetic experience as a temporal occurrence

when some form of transformation or cognition

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takes place. ‘When art happens’ Goodman asks us

to pay attention to moments of non-judgement

and disinterest that allow the subject to experience

the deeply transformative potential of aesthetics.41

The more important point for Goodman, however,

is that in such moments, emotions function cogni-

tively and can be seen as a source of knowledge

or a form of knowing. Furthermore, aesthetic

experiences are not limited just to art, but can

happen at any time in our everyday lives, and fully

to benefit from them, we must draw distinctions

between when works of art function cognitively

and when they do not.

Drawing distinctions between ‘less’ and ‘more’

real, Alexander argues that holistic perception

allows for an experience of a more ‘real world’:

one that is radically different from the physical

world as seen. Alexander writes ‘When I say some-

thing is real, I mean that the fundamental neurologi-

cal processes and deep-seated cognitive processes

going on in the brain are actually taking place in a

holistic way. . . . and the person who is seeing a

thing holistically is actually seeing what is congruent

within it instead of just its physical geometry.’42 The

viewer is then experiencing the building instead of

merely looking at it. And, Alexander argues, cultivat-

ing an awareness of our responses to buildings will

allow us to design environments that are better for

us as individuals and communities.

Such thinking is consistent with somatic philos-

ophies that argue for an integration of the mind

and body, and explore how and when experiences

can be seen to be cognitive, as well as what that

may imply for the physical, emotional and affective

growth of human beings. In recent years, the

emergence of the concept of neuroplasticity in

neuroscience has pointed to the extraordinary

adaptive capabilities of the human brain, and the

continual restructuring and reorganisation that

neural circuits are capable of in response to

both internal and external stimuli, in a dramatic

shift from the earlier belief that the nervous

system remains fixed throughout adulthood. Such

possibilities, yet again, provoke further inquiry into

the possible correlations that might exist between

qualitative aspects of physical environments and

human wellbeing.

Conclusion

In the last decade, debates inarchitectural theoryhave

emerged around what might be termed a ‘post-

critical’ or a ‘projective’ turn that attempts to

surpass ‘criticality’ by fundamentally destabilising

architectural autonomy and acknowledging architec-

ture’s inherent multiplicity and many contingencies.43

Positing to impact culture in new non-oppositional

ways, through exploring the potentialities of ‘the

diagram’, post-critical architecture argues for a

‘quality of sensibility’ that is ‘non-dissenting’ and

‘non-utopian’, and thus accommodative of socio-cul-

tural norms in a discipline that remains constantly in

flux. The ‘post-critical’ turn has opened provocative

interrogation about the operative role of theory, rel-

evance of ‘critical’ or ‘neo-critical’ positions in archi-

tecture, and architecture’s active agency to play a

broader social and cultural role.44 While these

debates have rightly questioned the limitations of

autonomous quests and narrow epistemic constructs,

they have shed limited light on agency, intentionality,

aesthetics, phenomenology and cognition: constructs

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that continue to remain under-studied and under-

served in architectural theory.

Human agency and intentionality have emerged

as central concepts in recent debates in philosophy

as well—especially regarding how phenomenology,

the newly emerging neuro-phenomenology, ana-

lytic philosophy of the mind and the cognitive

sciences have fundamentally re-thought and re-

shaped our understanding of knowledge and the

role that the human body plays in it.45 In the light

of these developments, despite its many contradic-

tions and inconsistencies, Alexander’s oeuvre

emerges as an insightful experiment that merits rec-

ognition for its sustained attention to the relevance

of everyday experience in understanding and struc-

turing the built environment. But, most importantly,

A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way’s argu-

ment—that normative frameworks of knowledge

arising from the body can often support human

agency and self-knowledge—provides insights for

rethinking the limitations of both empiricism and

relativism.

Further, Alexander’s focus on the everyday user

offers much insight for understanding the self-

determinism that is becoming increasingly promi-

nent in post-traditional societies. These societies,

wherein tradition no longer constitutes the basis

for our actions, Anthony Giddens postulates,

evolve a modern reflexivity wherein agents begin

to choose and control parts of their everyday lives.

Giddens points to the phenomenon of ‘self-help’

as a modern reflexive project in which ‘we are not

what we are, but what we make ourselves into’.46

In critiquing modern alienated spatial conditions,

Alexander’s pattern language, ironically, also

engages in the modern reflexive project, granting

everyday users the agency to choose how to

design their own spaces.

Notes and references1. Alexander introduces the two books in the following

way: ‘Volume I, The Timeless Way of Building, and

Volume II, A Pattern Language are two halves of a

single work. This book [A Pattern Language] provides

a language, for building and planning; the other pro-

vides theory and instruction for the use of the langua-

ge.. . .We have been forced by practical considerations,

to publish these two books under separate covers; but

in fact, they form an indivisible whole. It is possible to

read them separately. But to gain insight which we

have tried to communicate in them, it is essential

that you read them both.’; A Pattern Language:

Towns, Buildings, Construction (New York, Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1977), p. ix.

2. In The Timeless Way, Alexander writes ‘In fact, the con-

scious effort to attain this quality, or to be free, or to be

anything, the glance which this creates, will always

spoil it.’; The Timeless Way of Building (New York,

Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 52 (also see

pp. 14–15).

3. C. Alexander, S. Ishikawa, M. Silverstein, M. Jacobson,

I. Fiksdahl-King, S. Angel, A Pattern Language, op. cit.

4. Ibid., p. xvii.

5. Ibid., p. x.

6. See Bernard Rodofsky, Architecture without Archi-

tects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architec-

ture (New York, The Museum of Modern Art Press,

1964). See also, Amos Rapoport, House Form and

Culture (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice Hall,

1969); Amos Rapoport, Human Aspects of Urban

Form (Elkins Park, PA, Franklin Book Co., 1977);

and Amos Rapoport, The Meaning of the Built-

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Environment: A Non-Verbal Approach (Tucson,

Arizona University Press, 1990). B8

7. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Archi-

tecture (New York, The Museum of Modern Art Press,

1966), and Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and

Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge,

Mass., The MIT Press, 1972; revised 1977).

8. See K. Dovey, ‘The Pattern Language and Its Enemies’,

Design Studies, II, no. 1 (January, 1990), pp. 3–9. For a

reading that highlights the phenomenological leanings

of Alexander’s work, see D. Seamon, ‘Concretizing

Heidegger’s Notion of Dwelling: The Contributions of

Thomas Thiis Evenson and Christopher Alexander’,

in Building and Dwelling, ed., E. Fuhr (Munich,

Waxmann Verlag GmbH; New York, Waxmann,

2000), pp. 189–202.

9. J.P. Protzen, ‘The Poverty of Pattern Language’, Design

Methods and Theories, 12, no. 3/4 (September–

December, 1978), p. 194.

10. Ibid., p. 194.

11. Ibid.

12. ‘Discord over Harmony in Architecture: Peter Eisenman

and Christopher Alexander in Discussion’, Studio

Works, 7 (2001), pp. 50–57. William Saunders pro-

vides a succinct review of Peter Eisenman’s critique

of Alexander’s work in his review of A Pattern

Language contained in Harvard Design Magazine,

no. 16 (Hard/Soft, Cool/Warm, Winter/Spring,

2002), to be found at the following link (accessed

17.06.08): http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/

publications/hdm/back/16books_saunders.html.

13. K. Dovey, ‘The Pattern Language and Its Enemies’, op.

cit., p. 4.

14. W. Saunders, review of A Pattern Language, op. cit.

His review also includes a commentary on Alexander’s

more recent four-volume series on The Nature of

Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the

Nature of the Universe (Berkeley, The Center for

Environmental Structure, 2002–2003). For a review

of Alexander’s more recent work, see R. Bhatt and

J. Brand, ‘Christopher Alexander: A Review Essay’,

Design Issues, XXIV, no. 2 (Spring, 2008), pp. 93–102.

15. Tom Erickson, ‘Lingua Franca for Design: Sacred Places

and Pattern Languages’, The Proceedings of DIS 2000

(New York, ACM Press, 2000), pp 357–368.

16. D. Lea, ‘Christopher Alexander: An Introduction for

Object-Oriented Designers’, SUNY Oswego, NY CASE

Center, http://g.oswego.edu/dl/ca/ca/ca.html (accessed

25.06.08).

17. L. Pemberton and R.N. Griffiths, ‘The Timeless Way:

Making Living Cooperative Buildings with Design

Patterns’, in Cooperative Buildings: Integrating

Information, Organization, and Architecture, eds,

N. Streitz et al. (Darmstadt, Springer, 1998). Also see

‘Lecture Notes in Computer Science’ (Heidelberg,

Springer, 1998), pp. 142–53.

18. D. Lea, ‘Christopher Alexander: An Introduction for

Object-Oriented Designers’, op. cit. See also: N. A.

Salingaros, ‘The Structure of Pattern Languages’,

Architectural Research Quarterly, 4 (2000),

pp. 149–61.

19. C. Alexander, ‘The Origins of Pattern Theory: The Future

of the Theory and the Generation of a Living World’,

IEEE Software (September/October, 1999), pp. 71–82.

20. C.Alexander, A Pattern Language, p. 638.

21. Ibid., p. 861.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., p. 863.

24. Ibid., p. 833.

25. Alexander cites Philip Slater, Pursuit of Loneliness

(Boston, Beacon Press, 1970), pp. 89–90 (A Pattern

Language, p. 682).

26. Saunders, op. cit., http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/

research/publications/hdm/back/16books_saunders.

html (accessed 17.06.08).

27. Ibid., pp. 681–6.

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28. C. Alexander, foreword to Stephen Grabow’s Christo-

pher Alexander: The Search for a New Paradigm in

Architecture (London, Oriel Press, 1983), p. x.

29. C. Alexander, The Timeless Way, op. cit., pp. 10–11.

30. Ibid., p. xi.

31. Ibid., p. ix (also see p. 546).

32. Ibid., pp.12 and 25.

33. R. Shusterman, ‘Somaesthetics and the Body/Media

Issue’, Performing Live: Aesthetic Renewals to the

Ends of Art (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2000),

pp. 137–53.

34. R.Shusterman, ‘Somaesthetics: A Disciplinary Propo-

sal’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 57:3

(Summer, 1999), pp. 299–313. In this proposal, Shus-

terman also argues that Michel Foucault’s seminal

vision of the body as a docile, malleable site for inscrib-

ing social power reveals the crucial role somatics can

play for political philosophy (pp. 303–4).

35. R. Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of

Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (New York, Cam-

bridge University Press, 2008), pp. ix–14.

36. G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The

Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought

(New York, Basic Books, 1999), p. 17. Lakoff and

Johnson also argue that metaphors are not mere poe-

tical or rhetorical embellishments; instead, they are

part of everyday speech that affect the ways in

which we perceive, think and act. In doing so, Lakoff

and Johnson argue that metaphorical thought pro-

vides a principal insight for understanding reality.

37. Alexander cites a study by Dr London at the

San Francisco Medical School that claims that our

whole day depends critically on the conditions in

which we wake up. If we wake up immediately after

a period of dreaming (REM sleep), we will feel ebulli-

ent, energetic and refreshed for the whole day,

because certain critical hormones are injected into

the bloodstream immediately after REM sleep. If,

however, we wake up during delta sleep (another

type of sleep, which happens in between periods of

dreaming) we feel irritable, drowsy, flat and lethargic

all day long because the necessary hormones are not

in the bloodstream at the critical moment of awaken-

ing (A Pattern Language, op. cit., p. 658).

38. Ibid., p. 136.

39. Galen Cranz, The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and

Design (New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1998),

p. 136.

40. In The Timeless Way, Alexander makes a similar point,

stating that genuine comfort ‘goes far beyond its

simply understood meaning’ and describing comforta-

ble places as places without inner contradictions and

with no or little disturbance. On the other hand, ‘a

bed which is too soft’ and ‘a room which always has

even room temperature’ are examples of comforts

that can be stultifying and deadening (op. cit.,

pp. 32–33).

41. N. Goodman, ‘Art and Understanding’, in Languages

of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indiana-

polis, Hackett Publishing Company, 1976), pp. 225–

265.

42. Alexander was highly influenced by Jerome Bruner,

one of the pioneers of cognitive psychology at Har-

vard’s Center for Cognitive Studies. The actual quota-

tion reads as follows:

There is a certain sense in which the holistic percep-

tion actually corresponds more closely to the real

structure of the thing being perceived. But just

saying that raises a very interesting topic. I know

that this is one of the reasons why some people

dislike my work. They say he’s so dogmatic; or

what does he mean by ‘real’ or ‘not real?’ After

all, we have people seeing this thing in such and

such a way and how could he dare say that what

they are seeing is not real? And this is the sort of

typical kind of criticism, which is often levelled at

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my work. However, we happen to be caught in this

weird sort of nominalist period of philosophical

history at the moment where someone will say

that however you choose to see something is the

way you see it; or however you choose to name it

is the way you name it. And of course that coincides

with pluralism and is a genuine reaction against

positivism. So what do I mean when I say that

there is a certain perception of this that is more

real? I am actually making two different statements:

one of them is psychological and one of them has to

do with physics. The psychological statement that I

am making is that the fundamental neurological

processes and deep-seated cognitive processes

going on in the brain are actually taking place in

the holistic way and that the sequential way is sec-

ondary and constructed out of it. That’s the first

thing that I mean when I say that one is more real

than the other.. . .Now the second thing is that

when I say it corresponds to physics, I mean that

the holistic perception is congruent with the behav-

ior of the reality being perceived.. . .the person who

is seeing the thing holistically is actually seeing what

is congruent with the behavior of the thing and not

just its physical geometry.

C. Alexander, from Stephen Grabow’s Christopher

Alexander: The Search for a New Paradigm in Archi-

tecture, op. cit., pp. 195–196. Also see R. Bhatt and

J. Brand, ‘Christopher Alexander: A Review Essay’,

op. cit., pp. 93–102.

43. Advocates of the post-critical position include Robert

Somol and Sarah Whiting, ‘Notes Around the

Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism’, in,

eds, Michael Osman, Adan Ruedig, Matthew Seidel

and Lisa Tinley, Mining Autonomy, a special issue of

Perspecta, 33 (2002), pp. 72–7; Michael Speaks,

‘Design Intelligence, Part 1: Introduction’, A + U:

Architecture and Urbanism (December, 2002),

pp.10–18. See also George Baird, ‘ “Criticality” and

its Discontents’, Harvard Design Magazine, 21 (Fall/

Winter, 2004), pp. 16–21; and Reinhold Martin,

‘Critical of What? Toward a Utopian Realism’,

Harvard Design Magazine, 22 (Spring/Summer,

2005), pp. 104–9.

44. For debates about ‘critical’ versus ‘neo-critical’ and the

operative role of theory, see a compendium of essays

published in Critical Architecture, eds, Jane Rendell,

Jonathan Hill, Murray Fraser and Mark Dorrian

(London, Routledge, 2007). The essays as a whole

provide an important critique of the post-critical turn

in architecture.

45. See David Woodruff Smith and Amie L. Thomasson,

Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind (Oxford,

Oxford University Press, 2005), pp.1–15; J. Petitot,

F. Varela, B. Pachoud and J. M. Roy, Naturalizing Phe-

nomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology

and Cognitive Science (Palo Alto, Stanford University

Press, 1999), pp. 1–81.

46. Lars Bo Kaspersen, ‘The Analysis of Modernity: Globa-

lization, the Transformation of Intimacy, and the Post-

Traditional Society’, in Anthony Giddens: An Introduc-

tion to a Social Theorist, trs., Steven Sampson (Oxford,

Blackwell Publishers, 2000), pp. 106–9. Giddens

argues that self-identity in post-traditional societies

must be understood as a reflexive project for which

the individual is responsible. By using knowledge

developed by expert systems, we are able to control a

part of our everyday lives and we therefore become

re-skilled. However, the expert system also de-skills us

(p. 109). Also see Anthony Giddens, Modernity and

Self-Identity: Self and Society in Late Modern Age

(Palo Alto, Stanford University Press, 1991).

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