Oregon Experiment – Book review

Published Categorized as Articles

I was pleased that the third book in Christopher Alexander’s series centres upon Cambridge as an example of the ‘Timeless Way of Building’. I live in Cambridge and perhaps there is no coincidence that a town as alive and beautiful as Cambridge is my home but also linked to my curiosities in this field.

Organic order

  • That the whole must develop organically – only then will the place be alive.
  • The goal is to achieve a natural or organic order instead of a Totalitarian order
  • Totalitarian order assumes what the problems to be solved in the future can b known now – they cannot) but totalitarian order imposes a solution anyway
  • The totality is too precise and not precise enough 
  • The total planned ahead in too much detail. The intricacies of the small details are not precise enough, and cannot detailed, because small details require the active participation (events that keep on happening there to shape that mini environment) for the detail to emerge, but the totalitarian design will deny that in advance by imposing a rigid unchangeable whole.
  • Thus a chaos in the whole.
  • An organic order resolves this chaos

The solution is:

  • Trusting the whole to emerge gradually
  • To use patterns to guide decisions (not a rigid pre-design plan) and ensure cohrerence across the whole and across time.
  • There is a difference between a process and following a plan
  • process: following a process to allow a quality to emerge natural (evolve)

Participation

  • Participation being the the process by which the users of an environment help to shape it. A sort of shared agency
  • Fullest participation is for people to build the buildings themselves
  • For a university (the experiment in question): medium participation is encouraged: actively designed by the users and then prepared by architects
  • Users know about their needs more than the architects do
  • The most wonderful places on earth are created by lay-people not by architects – and have been created by lay people for thousands of years.
  • But what if the users are only there for a short period of time?
  • Nonetheless, they are still users, and much more so compared to architects
  • People prefer houses built by a person even if they never know him, rather than mass-produced houses.

Suggestions

  • Users should be supported with patterns, diagnosis of the problem, and any help to do the designs. Users are therefore autonomous
  • The ‘Design’ here refers to a small part (piecemeal) of the overall whole
  • User groups (teams) no greater than 7 people, because it is difficult for everyone to play an active role in groups bigger than that
  • The project should be no bigger than the decisions that the team can make.

Piecemeal growth

Many overlaps with antifragility here

  • Notion of organic growth and repair
  • “Any living system must repair itself constantly in order to maintain its balance and coordination, its quality as a whole”
  • “Repair not only has to conserve a pre-ordained order as it does in an organism but must also adapt continuously to changing uses and activities at every level of scale”
  • “Good environments have this: whole and alive because they have grown over time”
  • Piecemeal growth counters the current trend of large initiatives of ‘large lump developments’ (LLD). The disadvantage of LLD is that they suck up all the resources into one large complex development. There are no costs or resources left to repair the rest of the town (or the whole) so these place turn into disrepair / slums
  • The whole must always be considered and repair being the main idea
  • Mindset: Continuously adding, continuously repairing (no finish date) instead of
  • LLD (start and end of project) – have limited lifespans and then entirely replaced

Approach of Repair > replacement

  • Repair (belief that environment is dynamic and continuous)
  • Replacement (belief that the environment that is static and discontinuous)
  • Large projects planned in advance: small errors are scaled to a degree that they are unrepairable at scale! Totalitarian whole
  • Piecemeal contributes to organic order
  • In the short term there would be an argument: per square meter large projects are more cost effective. Over a longer term period:
  • Piecemeal growth and continuous maintenance is more cost-effective over the long term and much more alive.

Intertemporal thinking (thinking over different time scales) and having the requisite patterns and processes to allow this thinking to manifest into an alive environment.