atharva's internet place

A Pattern Language is a beautiful tome on architecture and urban design that I found in my company's physical library. It had a pale yellow minimalist cover, a small form, and some blotchy typography accompanied by evocative photographs and lively doodles explaining the essence of its ideas. I always judge a book by its cover. How was I not going to borrow this book.

This book is a dense thousand pages. I haven't read it cover-to-cover. But I have read through enough of it to perceive a certain quality that has transformed how I see the world. The patterns in this book reveal how space and architecture shape culture and human behaviour.

The book has a simple structure. It describes 253 patterns that flow into each other to form a language. The patterns start at a high level that, for instance, may talk about the distribution of towns and population densities, then descend into lower granularities, like how roads must be laid out and what must exist within a community, eventually working its way down to patterns concerning individual homes, interiors and construction materials. Each pattern makes sense and is enhanced by the relationships to other patterns. The ones at a smaller level are what most people are able to influence, and it's where change must start.

Why were these 253 patterns chosen? Turns out, this is just one of many possible patterns—it's A Pattern Language, not The Pattern Language after all. The language published in this book is, according to the authors, a practical and timeless one—and includes patterns that are so deeply rooted in the nature of people and things that they will always be relevant. That said, their ideal view is that people will use this as a starting point to create their own language to shape society.

The structure of this book is unusual and quite groundbreaking for its time. I'd say it has aged really well.

Every pattern starts with a photograph that shows an example of a pattern. This is followed by a preamble about how other patterns (usually those at a higher level) are completed by this pattern. Three diamond marks follow.

A common problem (note how I didn't say architectural problem) is then described in bold type. This is followed by multiple paragraphs that elaborate on the problem more with its various manifestations. Arguments are presented in favour of a solution. This is followed by a paragraph in bold that describes and summarises the solution. Then three diamond marks the end of this section.

We get a final paragraph that talks about other (often lower level) patterns that help complete the current pattern. The pattern is then further distilled with a diagram squiggled by hand that visually captures the essence of the idea.

What I love about this format is that it emphasises the connections between the patterns as much as it does the pattern in isolation itself. Through this elaborate weaving of patterns, the book generates this abstract, almost elusive quality that's vastly greater than the sum of its parts. The book exudes warmth and humanity, much like the tapestry of patterns it describes.

Without needing to resort to explicit persuasion, the philosophy comes through clearly—architecture and urban design has to come from the common folk—it needs to nourish their fundamental needs and support the life and culture that makes us collectively tick. Society-building must be done with reverence to the land and local ecology. Design is an invisible force that shapes society and culture—getting this wrong is how we end up in the mess we are in. This book was written in 1979, but many of its ideas are more needed than ever. The problems it describes have in many ways become worse since then. Many of its ideas to this day seem extremely radical and progressive.

Excerpts

In a futile attempt to convince you to read this book, I'll rather shamelessly lift quotes and passages in this book to give you an idea of its deep insight into the human condition.

No one enjoys his work if he is a cog in a machine.

A man enjoys his work when he understands the whole and is responsible for the quality of the whole. [...]

From the Buddhist point of view, there are therefore two types of mechanization which must be clearly distinguished: one that enhances a man's skill and power and one that turns the work of man over to a mechanical slave, leaving man in a position of having to serve the slave. How to tell the one from the other? “The craftsman himself,” says Ananda Coomaraswamy, a man equally competent to talk about the Modern West as the Ancient East, “the craftsman himself can always, if allowed to, draw the delicate distinction between the machine and the tool. The carpet loom is a tool, a contrivance for holding warp threads at a stretch for the pile to be woven round them by the craftsmen's fingers; but the power loom is a machine, and its significance as a destroyer of culture lies in the fact that it does the essentially human part of the work.” It is clear, therefore, that Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilization not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character. Character, at the same time, is formed primarily by a man's work. And work, properly conducted in conditions of human dignity and freedom, blesses those who do it and equally their products. The Indian philosopher and economist J. C. Kumarappa sums the matter up as follows: “If the nature of the work is properly appreciated and applied, it will stand in the same relation to the higher faculties as food is to the physical body. It nourishes and enlivens the higher man and urges him to produce the best he is capable of. It directs his free will along the proper course and disciplines the animal in him into progressive channels. It furnishes an excellent scale of values and background for man to display his develop his personality.”

[...] Encourage the formation of self-governing workshops and offices of 5 to 20 workers. Make each group autonomous—with respect to organization, style, relation to other groups, hiring and firing, work schedule. [...]

Note the parallels between this passage and today's algorithm-driven gig economy work [Fairwork Report India, 2023]. There's so much work to do here:

The organisation of platform work has been labelled Taylorism 2.0 or “Taylorism on steroids.” The division of labour on platforms obscures “the purpose of the specific activity” and ensures “that the labour process in its entirety is unknown to any single worker.” For workers, this alienation from the production process is reflected in many ways, none more so than during work allocation, a process which is increasingly organised through automated algorithms that structure the worker’s day.

At one level, workers are told that their tasks, such as delivering a food order, or picking up and dropping off a passenger, can be performed by any licensed worker who signs up on the platform. This means they are easily replaced and substitutable. For instance, a logistics and grocery delivery worker, who was participating in a strike protesting changes in his rate card in Bengaluru, recalled being reminded that “we are free to leave if we don’t want to work, there are always more people willing to work.” In practice, however, workers are not treated as substitutable; rather, they are graded by algorithms using a range of parameters to decide who is to be allotted which task. More often than not, workers are unaware of these parameters, never mind how the parameters are given different weights in response to shifting demand. The resulting opacity leads to a sense of powerlessness and alienation in workers, transcending their financial vulnerability.

The authors make their distaste for cars dominating roads and high-rise apartments clear, both of which are trademark characteristics of every metropolitan area in India.

Take the discussion of cars in Local Transport Areas.

Cars give people wonderful freedom and increase their opportunities. But they also destroy the environment, to an extent so drastic that they kill all social life.

The fact that cars are large is, in the end, the most serious aspect of a transportation system based on the use of cars, since it is inherent in the very nature of cars. Let us state this problem in its most pungent form. A man occupies about 5 square feet of space when he is standing still, and perhaps 10 square feet when he is walking. A car occupies about 350 square feet when it is standing still (if we include access), and at 30 miles an hour, when cars are 3 car lengths apart, it occupies about 1000 square feet. As we know, most of the time cars have a single occupant. This means that when people use cars, each person occupies almost 100 times as much space as he does when he is a pedestrian.

If each person driving occupies an area 100 times as large as he does when he is on his feet, this means that people are 10 times as far apart. In other words, the use of cars has the overall effect of spreading people out, and keeping them apart.

[...] The effect of this particular feature of cars on the social fabric is clear. People are drawn away from each other; densities and corresponding frequencies of interaction decrease substantially. [...] It is quite possible that the collective cohesion people need to form a viable society just cannot develop when the vehicles which people use force them to be 10 times farther apart, on the average, than they have to be. This states the possible social cost of cars in its strongest form. It may be that cars cause the breakdown of society, simply because of their geometry.

What I have left out is that this and other patterns are that the authors do not wholly reject cars—they recognise their virtues too and propose how they can be integrated into society in healthier ways.

Here's an argument against high-rise apartment complexes and buildings, stating the dehumanisation that occurs at those heights. Unlike cars, this is a blunt rejection.

There is abundant evidence to show that high buildings make people crazy.

High buildings have no genuine advantages, except in speculative gains for banks and land owners. They are not cheaper, they do not help create open space, they destroy the townscape, they destroy social life, they promote crime, they make life difficult for children, they are expensive to maintain, they wreck the open spaces near them, and they damage light and air and view. But quite apart from all of this, which shows that they aren't very sensible, empirical evidence shows that they can actually damage people's minds and feelings.

The strongest evidence comes from D. M. Fanning (“Families in Flats,” British Medical Journal, November 18, 1967, p. 382- 86). Fanning shows a direct correlation between incidence of mental disorder and the height of people's apartments. The higher people live of the ground, the more likely are they to suffer mental illness. And it is not simply a case of people prone to mental illness choosing high-rise apartments. Fanning shows that the correlation is strongest for the people who spend the most time in their apartments. Among the families he studied, the correlation was strongest for women, who spend the most time in their apartments; it was less strong for children, who spend less time in the apartments; and it was weakest for men, who spend the least amount of time in their apartments. This strongly suggests that sheer time spent in the high-rise is itself what causes the effect.

A simple mechanism may explain this: high-rise living takes people away from the ground, and away from the casual, everyday society that occurs on the sidewalks and streets and on the gardens and porches. It leaves them alone in their apartments. The decision to go out for some public life becomes formal and awkward; and unless there is some specific task which brings people out in the world, the tendency is to stay home, alone. The forced isolation then causes individual breakdowns.

At three or four stories, one can still walk comfortably down to the street, and from a window you can still feel part of the street scene: you can see details in the street—the people, their faces, foliage, shops. From three stories you can yell out, and catch the attention of someone below. Above four stories these connections break down. The visual detail is lost; people speak of the scene below as if it were a game, from which they are completely detached. The connection to the ground and to the fabric of the town becomes tenuous; the building becomes a world of its own: with its own elevators and cafeterias.

Finally, we give the children of Glasgow the last word. To fling a “piece,” a slice of bread and jam, from a window down to a child in the street below has been a recognised custom in Glasgow's tenement housing. . . .

[...] We've wrote away tae Oxfam tae try an' get some aid, We've a' joined thegither an' formed a “piece” brigade, We're gonny march tae London tae demand oor Civil Rights, Like “Nae mair hooses ower piece flingin' heights.”

The pattern language is vast; it even covers the design of a traveller's inn. I like how some quaint patterns like these have been woven into the language.

A man who stays the night in a strange place is still a member of the human community, and still needs company. There is no reason why he should creep into a hole, and watch TV alone, the way he does in a roadside motel.

At all times, except our own, the inn was a wonderful place, where strangers met for a night, to eat, and drink, play cards, tell stories, and experience extraordinary adventures. But in a modern motel, every ounce of this adventure has been lost. The motel owner assumes that strangers are afraid of one another, so he caters to their fear by making each room utterly self-contained and self-sufficient.

But behind the fear, there is a deep need: the need for company for stories, and adventures, and encounters. It is the business of an inn to create an atmosphere where people can experience and satisfy this need. The most extreme version is the Indian pilgrim's inn, or the Persian caravanserai. [...]

Make the traveler's inn a place where travelers can take rooms for the night, but where-unlike most hotels and motels—the inn draws all its energy from the community of travelers that are there any given evening. The scale is small—3 or 40 guests to an inn; meals are offered communally; there is even a large space ringed round with beds in alcoves.

I'll use this example to show how at the end of each pattern, there is a great emphasis on connecting it to the other patterns to create this hard-to-describe warmth of humanity in the language:

The heart of the conviviality is the central area, where everyone can meet and talk and dance and drink—Common Areas At The Heart (129), Dancing in the Street (65), and Beer Hall (90). Provide the opportunity for communal eating, not a restaurant, but common food around a common table—Communal Eating (147); and, over and above the individual rooms there are at least some areas where people can lie down and sleep in public unafraid—Sleeping In Public (94), Communal Sleeping (186). For the overall shape of the inn, its gardens, parking, and surroundings, begin with Building Complex (95). . . .

There are also patterns that cover people from all walks of life, and how they must be represented in the city—Old People Everywhere, Teenage Society and Children in the City. Seeing all these patterns pieced together makes it easy for me to understand why I don't connect at all with my part of the ooru. I can intuit why the roads outside feel inhospitable or why the large amphitheatre in my apartment complex is always empty and lifeless, rather than being the heart of the community.

There is plenty of representation for lower-level patterns and fine details that can enhance the lives of common people—how gardens should be maintained, how bedrooms should be laid out (or, rather, how they shouldn't really exist at all in their current form), what colours of light to use, etc. I like to open this book and flip through the pages to read about any random pattern that catches my eye in the moment. And nearly every time, I am always pleased by the nuggets of insight in this work. It's an enjoyable, almost meditative experience.

That said, there's one aspect of this book that slightly disappoints. I think you can already anticipate what I'll say—a lot of the book, especially the higher-level patterns are highly impractical or nearly impossible to implement—it will never happen in my lifetime (as much as I'd like it to). Moreover, a lot of the patterns are theoretical or speculative (although it's nice that there's a star-rating system that differentiates the essential ones from the more speculative ones).

The primary author, Christopher Alexander is aware of how this pattern language is not sufficient to bring that je ne sais quoi he's seeking with urban design. Here is what he said when he tried to put his ideas to practice in a low-cost housing project in Mexico:

But what I am saying now is that, given all that work (or at least insofar as it came together in the Mexican situation) and even with us doing it (so there is no excuse that someone who doesn’t understand it is doing it), it only works partially. Although the pattern language worked beautifully—in the sense that the families designed very nice houses with lovely spaces and which are completely out of the rubric of modern architecture—this very magical quality is only faintly showing through here and there.

Somehow, this failure does not invalidate this work for me. It's still a brilliant example of how an elaborate tapestry of ideas can create a magical quality. And why the practice of design and architecture shapes society. And we must be participants in this endeavour.

Appendix: Relevance to computer nerds

Why was a book on urban design in my software coop, ie, nilenso's library there in the first place?

Well for one, the people at nilenso have great taste, and take to things like design and architecture. It's not that surprising in that sense. But further reading shows that some of the agilistas adopted the style of it, with little of its substance. There's Ward Cunningham's c2 wiki, the world's first wiki, and then the “Gang of Four” design patterns, which are now famous for being applied without thought by certain classes of developers. No doubt these works were influential and important for the industry, but they lack what makes A Pattern Language beautiful. They only provide solutions to some common problems but they do not emphasise how they flow and connect with each other. Contrast this with the emphasis on the connections between these patterns in Alexander et al's work—it ends up making it greater than the sum of its parts and creates a cohesive language that evokes a hard-to-describe warmth and humanity running throughout the work. There is no such thing in the agilista interpretation.

Non-agilista Richard P Gabriel also expands on the work of this book and its application to software design. I haven't read it yet (it's in our library as well!), but my understanding is that he focuses on the principles of habitability and piecemeal growth. It appears that he better captured the substance of this book, while also indicating the limits of its applicability to software.

Appendix 2: The Timeless Way Of Building

A Pattern Language is actually the second volume of a series of works written around that period. It is complemented by the first volume that was written later, called A Timeless Way Of Building. As far as I can tell, this is a more explicitly philosophical work that provides background on the quality that the proposed pattern language is trying to bring about. I will try to update this article when I get my hands on this book.