For me, A Pattern Language is one of the five best books that were ever written.

Which are the other four?

I grant you “The Pattern Language” as a great book, but one has to be careful in using his method. There’s a structural conservatism in it. In all his books, Alexander points out that good things can only be based on preexisting fields of influences at work, in integrating existing patterns etc. The possibility of creating something genuinely new is not granted enough space. – Already in “Notes On the Synthesis of Form” (1964), his first book, one sees what comes of this. The first variable (of 141) is “Harijans regarded as ritually impure, untouchable etc.” (p. 137) This is now meticulously integrated with a lot of other variables, like pattern 6 “Wish for temples”, and influences the basic layout proposed for an indian village (i.e. pattern D2, p. No thought is spared where the “wish for temples” or the “impurity of Harijans” comes from, these are simply taken to be there (labeled in this case as “religious needs”). Though without a doubt these needs were really felt by (most of the) villagers, the fact that a good layout might change some of these existing forces of society is discounted. The people in the community who don’t think in these terms are overruled, the structures found in the society are built in the environment. (In the book, a detailed design for an indian village is developed, which integrates all this “forces”.)

Alexander talks a lot about “life” and living structures, about good and bad design. What he means with “life” is mostly reverence for existing structures and forces found in life and society. Try to read “The Timeless Way of Building”, which gives the theory to “The Pattern Language”. I promise everyone a bar of chocolate who reads this from the first to the last sentence – and I’m confident I don’t have to pay because his endless chewing on bloodless metaphors (“Quality without a name”) and his hate for everything modern, technological, efficient, obviously human-made etc. makes this forbidding work. In “The Production of Houses”, he recommends poor Mexicans to draw the layouts of their houses on the floor, walk through them, imagine the building, then build it with their own hands, assisted by the neighbors, with certain simple methods (i.e. every room gets a little dome!). (Only thing missing is them singing together while they lift the stones.) It’s the fantasy of a Californian of the good and simple life, but not what people want.

I read “The Pattern Language” in great detail some years ago and was faszinated. Most people who read the book seem to be enchanted. But the results, as I said, are not that great. Try “A New Theory of Urban Design” (1987), it’s less well known than the others. In this, he redevelopes a whole area of San Francisco with his students (as a model), closely adhering to Pattern Language principles (not to the patterns themselves, new patterns are also introduced). The result is a very mediocre, highly eclectic-looking post-historicist architecture, with lots of “nice features” like playgrounds and fountains, but no intellectual daring or special character.

Alexander did not mean that he had predefined all reality. Note that the title is “A” pattern language and not “The” pattern language. We are called to continue this work, even in the domain of architecture. But we are also called to ground our thoughts and avoid abstract speculation.

For me, A Pattern Language is one of the five best books that were ever written.

It’s somewhat typical, to my mind, of what happens when creativity is only allowed to operate on the basis of predefined patterns. (By the way, Alexander’s new book is called “The nature of order”. Honi soit qui mal y pense!)