Sorry that is a closed group in Facebook, so I post my comments below:

Alexander is a man not God, so we cannot take every one of his sentences
as a truth. I suggest we read his works as a whole rather than
fragmented pieces; see this presentation:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299337109_A_Mathematical_Model_of_Beauty_for_Sustainable_Urban_Design

This way of reading Alexander is also in line with his theory of
centers, in which wholeness is a key concept. Having said so, I would
not name this facebook community as "pattern science community". Instead
I would name it as "wholeness science community", as indicated
previously. Alexander has gone beyond his pattern language work a long
ago (since early 1980s) and shifted to wholeness or living structure.
This book review by Saunders is unfair to Alexander, since by then
Alexander has already published The Nature of Order; why not focusing on
the newly published book. In this book review, Saunders did not read
Alexander's works as a whole - even not treated A Pattern Language as a
whole - but treated it as fragmented pieces. There is no doubt that NOT
every word that Alexander said is correct, not to say that words should
be put in their contexts. He explicitly admitted that A Pattern Language
is a failure, which triggered him to see the underlying geometry on
which he spent 30 years on the making of The Nature of Order.

As far as I understand, it is not patterns, but the whole or wholeness
beyond patterns is the most important. Or it is the quality without a
name (QWAN) that is the most important. By patterns, I refer them to
infinite number of patterns rather than the 253 in the book. The 253
patterns are just examples of the infinite set. To use an analogue, the
English book entitled "English 900" is just a small subset of infinite
number of English sentences. Without doubt, the book "English 900"
cannot be equal to English as a language. To master English, there are
much more to learn beyond the 900 sentences. Even though one can
construct all infinite number of sentences, it does not mean that he/she
can write a meaningful paper. To write a nice paper, we need logic and
structural thinking which is far beyond sentences. It implies logic
between sentences, logic between paragraphs, and logic between sections,
and logic between your paper and other papers; see one slide in the
above cited presentation. All in all, Alexander's life work is NOT to
teach us how to construct individual patterns in a fragmented manner,
BUT patterns at different scales under one coherent whole or wholeness.
In other words, Alexander wanted to teach us how to write a paper rather
than sentences. I welcome your comments and criticisms in particular.


On 8/27/2016 10:25 AM, Bin Jiang wrote:
> For those interested in design, this thread of discussions, or the
> community in general, might be of your interest:
>
> https://www.facebook.com/groups/1717511025189767/permalink/1736986839908852/
>
>
> Thanks and cheers.
>
> Bin
>
>

--
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Bin Jiang
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Phone: +46-26-64 8901    Fax: +46-26-64 8758
Email: [log in to unmask]  Web: http://fromto.hig.se/~bjg/
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Academic Editor: PLOS ONE
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