The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher W. Alexander

We’ll get to living software through thoughtful interface design and approaches like layering policy to avoid hard coding constraints. There is no equivalency between elementary school students practicing live shooter drills and brittle software development design, but there too I find that fear-driven prevention of rarely occurring events often leads to platforms, libraries and tools that are more focused on limiting their users than enabling them. Can spaces be livable in an atmosphere of fear? A similar fear after the September 11th attacks rendered our airports dead. In the later category, it reminded me of how the ever present threat of gun violence in the United States has increasingly deadened our churches and our schools, with fear gradually coercing them into fortresses. Reading this idea, what resonated with me most is that living spaces are typically defined by events that actually happen, and dead spaces are designed for events that folks hope or fear may take place, but rarely do.

A dead space might be a gorgeous dead end, a room or area you occasionally remember you have, but only visit after manufacturing a reason: a space that naturally decays into disuse.

Living spaces fit naturally with their defining events and dead spaces force events unnaturally.Ī living space might be a courtyard between the street and the front door, a space that you would cross naturally many times over a given day, making it feel lived in and familiar: a space you incorporate into living. This is further developed into the idea of spaces which are either alive or dead. Shaped by eventsīuilding and towns are defined best not by the materials they are constructed from, or the building codes that regulate them, but rather by the events that occur within. Habits more tightly to what we create to enable them, and a reminder that the tools we build shape folks lives in real, profound ways. What I took away from my read is a renewed focus on incorporating folks’ needs and Stylistically the book ventured a bit too far into mysticism and gnostic wisdom for my taste-almost reminiscent of reading the Tao Te Ching at times-but it was an interesting read, particularly in its context as a foundational text. I hadn’t heard of it before, and as I started poking around I realized that this was the second of a series of three books, and recommendations generally pointed me to start instead with The Timeless Way of Building.ĭelving a bit further into the context surrounding these books, I was surprised to learn that in addition to being an influential work on architecture, the genesis of the software design patterns community was from Alexander’s works as well. Some months ago, a friend recommended Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language.

The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher W. Alexander