A Pattern Language (APL) is one of my favourite books. When I first read it, I was surpriseds that it explained a bunch of things that I already found beautiful in buildings. It’s also an early example of a hypermedia text which can be read non-linearly, like an archipelago of islands connected by bridges.

But one of its most grandiose pretensions, which I really enjoy, is that it takes seriously that architecture is part of society. How seriously does it take this? Here’s the first pattern in the book:

1. Independent Regions**

Metropolitan regions will not come to balance until each one is small and autonomous enough to be an independent sphere of culture. … Therefore: wherever possible, work toward the evolution of independent regions in the worId; each with a population between 2 and 10 million; each with its own natural and geographic boundaries; each with its own economy; each one autonomous and self-governing; each with a seat in a world government, without the intervening power of larger states or countries.

(The ** after the pattern name indicates the authors believe they have discovered a truly fundamental and necessary pattern.)

Want good buildings? Start by reorganising the geopolitical framework of the entire world. Maybe it’s no wonder the pattern language proved impractical.

The book proceeds downards in scale from there, through the layout of settlements within a region and their relationship to the countryside (3. City Country Fingers), the arrangement of neighbourhoods (8. Mosaic of Subcultures) and their connections (16. Web of Public Transportation), streets (49. Looped Local Roads), blocks (38. Row Houses), buildings (107. Wings of Light), rooms (142. Sequence of Sitting Spaces), all the way on down to the details of the windowsills. Pattern 240. Half-Inch Trim** (another double star), lays out the problem thus:

Totalitarian, machine buildings do not require trim because they are precise enough to do without. But they buy their precision at a dreadful price: by killing the possibility of freedom in the building plan.

Along the way, the book detours into aged care (40. Old People Everywhere), industrial relations (80. Self-Governing Workshops And Offices), public service (149. Reception Welcomes You), religion (66. Holy Ground) and nightlife (63. Dancing In The Street). It addresses construction (218. Wall Membranes) and wildlife (74. Animals).

It’s an impossibly broad scope, and I love it. It acknowledges and confronts the interconnectedness of building - how even the smallest project will be influenced by these larger scales.

I wish APL’s imitators had tried to mimic even a fraction of this ambition.

To software:

The core idea of the pattern language which can be used to generate infinitely many works that share common structural qualities was adopted in the software world, to the extent that the most famous of the book’s authors, Christopher Alexander, was invited to speak at the OOPSLA conference in 1996 to a crowd of object-oriented programmers.

Keynote Speech to the 1996 OOPSLA Convention: The Origins of Pattern Theory, the Future of the Theory, And the Generation of a Living World.

The idea of design patterns has inspired many programming works. The most famous is probably the “gang of four” patterns book from 1994. Another is Kent Beck’s “Implementation Patterns” from 2007.

Yet another (rarely discussed as an entry in the “pattern” genre), is the original Domain-Driven Design “blue book” by Eric Evans in 2004. The book explicitly models its chapters after APL’s pattern structure, with a problem statement and solution.

But no work in software that I’m aware of tries to imitate the sheer dynamic range of APL.

• The GOF book and Implementation Patterns are concerned with the smallest details of code (functions and classes) within a single process.
• Microsoft or AWS’s “cloud design patterns” resources address the integration of multiple processes.
• The DDD book looks at the question of desinging an entire software system. It crosses over into the “rest of the business” with ideas like the universal language, and its discussions of how to work with experts to understand a domain. But it also focuses quite deep down into actual code and syntax.
• I’m not aware of a software book about organisational structure (e.g. Team Topologies) that is pattern-oriented.

No single pattern language could encompass the massive variety of software development - and despite APL’s grandeur, the authors don’t pretend it is the only pattern language that should exist for architecture.

But fundamentally I believe that the economic environment in which code is written dramatically affects the right low-level syntax that should evolve, so explicitly weaving thogether those highest and lowest levels would be fascinating.

Just one example: Alex Russell’s struggle against careless organisational slop in his Reckoning series really reminds me of Alexander et al’s fight with bureaucracy in The Oregon Experiment. A pattern language for web development should address how to generate healthy relationships between the users, the development team, management, and other stakeholders, as well as how not to get Alex to write an entire case study about you.

In software, we get plenty of advice about how to make beautiful windowsills. But we don’t realise how connected that is to the whole world order.

Filed under: christopher alexandercoding

Dorothy Day writes this about the early days of the Catholic Worker:

As fast as we gave things away people brought more. We gave away blankets to needy families, started our first house of hospitality and people gathered together what blankets we needed. We gave away food and more food came in. I can remember a haunch of venison from the Canadian Northwest, a can of oysters from Maryland, a container of honey from Illinois. Even now it comes in, a salmon from Seattle, flown across the continent; nothing is too good for the poor.

https://catholicworker.org/633-html/

It reminds me of an architectural project by Christopher Alexander, a homeless shelter in San Jose:

https://www.patternlanguage.com/projects/julian.html

It’s not the utilitarian dormitory you might expect. It is carefully designed, with a pleasant courtyard, high-ceilinged dining hall and subtle ornamentation. This might just be a result of consulting with people who might actually live in it:

To understand Christopher Alexander’s ideas about architecture, and to understand the man himself, it helps to know something about the Julian Street Inn–a shelter for the homeless in San Jose. Alexander designed the shelter in 1990, and he still drives down from his Berkeley home to talk with residents and collect their impressions of how the building works as a living space. Before even starting his design, in fact, he interviewed dozens of homeless people about what they wanted; they were, after all, going to live there.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-01-29-tm-25890-story.html

Most telling is the resident who said “This is the first time I’ve ever been in a building where absolutely everything is necessary.” This applies to ornamentation as much as its walls and ceiling. The way Alexander designed this space ensured that the courtyard wasn’t an aesthetic affectation, or a box-checking exercise to comply with site coverage ratio requirements. It was necessary for the purpose of a homeless shelter, and it was justified by properly fulfilling that need. The same must, maybe alarmingly, be concluded of the decorative column tops, the false hammerbeam truss of the dining hall, the tiles and fountain and trees.

Sydney Cohousing is trying to create a mixed-income housing development that includes those on middle and high incomes as well as those on low incomes and those in social housing:

https://crabmusket.net/2025/a-statement-of-intent-for-affordable-housing/

We’re doing this because living in urban Sydney is not too good for the poor. Being involved in designing a liveable, beautiful, functional place is not too good for the poor. Living side-by-side with the wealthy is not too good for the poor.

Filed under: housingchristopher alexander

A small fact about Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Fallingwater house:

Wright designed the home above the waterfall: Kaufmann had expected it to be below the falls to afford a view of the cascades. It has been said that he was initially very upset with this change.

Contrast this to Chrisopher Alexander’s advice in A Pattern Language 104, “Site Repair”

Buildings must always be built on those parts of the land which are in the worst condition, not the best. This idea is indeed very simple. But it is the exact opposite of what usually happens; and it takes enormous will power to follow it through.

Building the house directly on the waterfall makes for a stunning piece of architecture, and the house’s fame was surely enhanced because of it. Maybe the Kaufmans came to enjoy the unexpected placement of the house.

But it’s a reason I sometimes don’t describe Christopher Alexander as an architect. While I enjoy his buildings, what is really special about them is their relationship with their surroundings and, in a campus setting, with each other. It was his planning, his integration not just of physical spaces but of people and systems, that made his work so valuable.

Consider the site and its buildings as a single living eco-system. Leave those areas that are the most precious, beautiful, comfortable, and healthy as they are, and build new structures in those parts of the site which are least pleasant now.

I wonder… in what other parts of life do we rush to consume beauty, rather than appreciate and nurture it?

Filed under: christopher alexander