Bin,

I didn't mean to suggest that Alexander's quality without a name was a direct result of Jacobs' thinking. Their way of understanding is parallel--a way of understanding that might be called a "synergistic relationally"--but Alexander was and is unique. He had studied Jacobs and respected her understanding of the city (as I remember, there are a number of pattern explications in PATTERN LANGUAGE that make reference to Jacobs' argument) but his conceptual perspective is unique and superlatively creative--like Jacobs'. And the best thing is that both ways of seeing and making are grounded in REAL THINGS.

I've always wondered why, in the 1960s, there was such a flurry of creative work in "environment-behavior" research. Jacobs, Alexander, Lynch, A. Strauss, Sommer, Hall. Then, other than the development of space syntax (and Oscar Newman and William Whyte's work), very little. For example, EDRA meetings today are a ghost of the energy and excitement they were back in the 1970s and early 1980s. All discouraging!

David Seamon​