Notes on the Synthesis of Form

by Christopher W. Alexander

These diagrams, which, in my more recent work, I have been calling patterns, are the key to the process of creating form.

The idea that it is possible to create such abstract relationships one at a time, and to create designs which are whole by fusing these relationships—this amazingly simple idea is, for me, the most important discovery of the book.

Composition

But once the book was written, I discovered that it is quite unnecessary to use such a complicated and formal way of getting at the independent diagrams.

Really underselling

that I reject the whole idea of design methods as a subject of study, since I think it is absurd to separate the study of designing from the practice of design.

people who study design methods without also practicing design are almost always frustrated designers

“First, the taking in of scattered particulars under one Idea, so that everyone understands what is being talked about… Second, the separation of the Idea into parts, by dividing it at the joints, as nature directs, not breaking any limb in half as a bad carver might.

But if we look at the lack of organization and lack of clarity of the forms around us, it is plain that their design has often taxed their designer’s cognitive capacity well beyond the limit.

There is a good deal of superstition among designers as to the deathly effect of analysis on their intuitions — with the unfortunate result that very few designers have tried to understand the process of design analytically.

Enormous resistance to the idea of systematic processes of design is coming from people who recognize correctly the importance of intuition, but then make a fetish of it which excludes the possibility of asking reasonable questions.

The modern designer relies more and more on his position as an “artist,” on catchwords, personal idiom, and intuition — for all these relieve him of some of the burden of decision, and make his cognitive problems manageable. Driven on his own resources, unable to cope with the complicated information he is supposed to organize, he hides his incompetence in a frenzy of artistic individuality.

What is worse, in an era that badly needs designers with a synthetic grasp of the organization of the physical world, the real work has to be done by less gifted engineers, because the designers hide their gift in irresponsible pretension to genius.

The following argument is based on the assumption that physical clarity cannot be achieved in a form until there is first some programmatic clarity in the designer’s mind and actions; and that for this to be possible, in turn, the designer must first trace his design problem to its earliest functional origins and be able to find some sort of pattern in them.

First principles

There are two sides to this tendency designers have to change the definition of the problem. On the one hand, the impractical idealism of designers who want to redesign entire cities and whole processes of manufacture when they are asked to design simple objects is often only an attempt to loosen difficult constraints by stretching the form-context boundary.

The form is a part of the world over which we have control, and which we decide to shape while leaving the rest of the world as it is. The context is that part of the world which puts demands on this form; anything in the world that makes demands of the form is context. Fitness is a relation of mutual acceptability between these two. In a problem of design we want to satisfy the mutual demands which the two make on one another. We want to put the context and the form into effortless contact or frictionless coexistence.

There is as yet no theory of ensembles capable of expressing a unitary description of the varied phenomena we encounter in the urban context of a dwelling, for example, or in a sonata, or a production cycle.

Let us observe, first of all, that we should not really expect to be able to give a unitary description of the context for complex cases: if we could do so, there would be no problems of design.

What does make design a problem in real world cases is that we are trying to make a diagram for forces whose field we do not understand.

It has often been claimed in architectural circles that the houses of simpler civilizations than our own are in some sense better than our own houses.

Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes have solved the weight problem of spanning space, but you can hardly put doors in them.

Laymen like to charge sometimes that these designers have sacrificed function for the sake of clarity, because they are out of touch with the practical details of the housewife’s world, and preoccupied with their own interests. This is a misleading charge. What is true is that designers do often develop one part of a functional program at the expense of another. But they do it because the only way they seem able to organize form clearly is to design under the driving force of some comparatively simple concept.

When we admire the simple situation for its good qualities, this doesn’t mean that we wish we were back in the same situation.

If forms in an unselfconscious culture fit now, the chances are that they always did.

What

We decided in the last chapter that to describe fit and misfit between form and context, we must make a list of binary variables, each naming some one potential misfit which may occur.

Still sus

At any moment in a form-making process, whether the form is in use, a prototype, as yet only a sketch, or obsolete, each of the variables is in a state of either fit or misfit.

Not nuanced enough

No complex adaptive system will succeed in adapting in a reasonable amount of time unless the adaptation can proceed subsystem by subsystem, each subsystem relatively independent of the others.

The key of composition

On the other hand, since not all the variables are equally strongly connected (in other words there are not only dependences among the variables, but also independences), there will always be subsystems like those circled below, which can, in principle, operate fairly independently.

The greatest clue to the inner structure of any dynamic process lies in its reaction to change.

Let us return now to the question of adaptation. The basic principle of adaptation depends on the simple fact that the process toward equilibrium is irreversible. Misfit provides an incentive to change; good fit provides none.

is just the fast reaction to single failures, complemented by resistance to all other change, which allows the process to make series of minor adjustments instead of spasmodic global ones:

Even the most aimless changes will eventually lead to well-fitting forms, because of the tendency to equilibrium inherent in the organization of the process.

Local maxima

For although only few men have sufficient integrative ability to invent form of any clarity, we are all able to criticize existing forms.

The development of architectural individualism is the clearest manifestation of the moment when architecture first turns into a selfconscious discipline. And the selfconscious architect’s individualism is not entirely willful either. It is a natural consequence of a man’s decision to devote his life exclusively to the one activity called “architecture.”

But in practice, as a rule, concepts are not generated or defined in extension; they are generated in intension. That is, we fit new concepts into the pattern of everyday language by relating their meanings to those of other words at present available in English.

The Parthenon could only have been created during a time of preoccupation with aesthetic problems, after the earlier Greek invention of the concept “beauty.” England’s nineteenth century low-cost slums were conceived only after monetary values had explicitly been given great importance through the concept “economics,” invented not long before.

In the unselfconscious situation this occurs automatically, because the individual craftsman has too little control over the process to upset the pattern of adaptation implicit in the ensemble.

Seems odd

There are certain kinds of problems, like some of those that occur in economics, checkers, logic, or administration, which can be clarified and solved mechanically.1 They can be solved mechanically, because they are well enough understood for us to turn them into selection problems.2

Indeed, we might almost claim that a problem only calls for design (in the widest sense of that word) when selection cannot be used to solve it.

Though design is by nature imaginative and intuitive, and we could easily trust it if the designer’s intuition were reliable, as it is it inspires very little confidence.

Burn

A requirement diagram becomes useful only if it contains physical implications,

The constructive diagram is the bridge between requirements and form.

Every form can be described in two ways: from the point of view of what it is, and from the point of view of what it does. What it is is sometimes called the formal description. What it does, when it is put in contact with other things, is sometimes called the functional description.

Denotational and operational semantics

one of the designer’s first tasks will be to strip the problem of the preconceptions which such names introduce.

This is a strictly binary situation.

Thats surprising

How can we get an exhaustive set of variables M for a given problem; in other words, how can we be sure we haven’t left out some important issue?

For any specific variable, how do we decide at what point misfit occurs; or if it is a continuous variable, how do we know what value to set as a performance standard?

It is only after first including this link in L, and in the very act of asking himself whether two variables really do interact, and why they do, that the designer sees the possibility of avoiding the conflict and so sees further into the problem.

I dont know if this is true

What this amounts to, in common-sense language, is that all the variables should be roughly comparable in their scope and significance.

In practice, of course, the preciseness of this mathematical expression is meaningless, since we judge the correlations “by eye,” and do not obtain them numerically.

If we are to solve the problem M by working our way through the program, solving various subproblems separately, it must obviously be possible to put the resulting diagrams together somehow when we have them.