I agree with the criticisms of Alexander’s “mirror of the self” test and have always wished he had not included it in THE NATURE OF ORDER because is subjective and subjectivist. Mostly, it works for the comparison/contrast examples that Alexander provides via photographic examples in NATURE OF ORDER, but these examples are so obviously better and worse that few would argue differently (though even that could happen today in our relativist, post-truth world). The impotency of this test is realized, for example, when one looks at the stunning early-Turkish carpets that Alexander draws from (in his earlier 1993 book, A FORESHADOWING OF 21^ST CENTURY ART)  to derive much of his geometric theory in THE NATURE OF ORDER. These carpets are uniformly superb, and it is impossible to say one is somehow more beautiful than another. Ultimately one may be able to generate a list of his or her most favorite carpets, but this list is personal and subjective. Another person’s list may be entirely different.

 

What one can say, however, that there is a density to all these carpets that inhabits the appearance of the thing. In terms of places and lifeworlds, Alexander’s central point is that the environments with a greater degree of density—a kind of appropriate, folding over and interconnectedness of parts—have a stronger atmosphere and ambience and probably work better as places for people. Yes, it’s an extremely inexact way of understanding quality but, ultimately, life and quality are inexact. The key point is in philosopher Jeff Malpas’s phrasing of place, which he says is “constituted through a gathering of elements that are themselves mutually defined only through the way in which they are gathered together within the place they also constitute.”

 

Alexander’s burning question has always been how making and design might intensify this gathering quality and thereby facilitate healing, wholeness, and a sturdier sense of place. I would argue that Alexander’s earlier work on pattern languages is a much more accurate and useful way of thinking through, identifying, and designing for any kind of environmental wholeness, whether it be a single building or an entire urban neighborhood. And even the pattern language is flawed in the sense that the original PATTERN LANGUAGE includes no awareness of the crucial role of pathway configuration in contributing to workable places and sense of place. This is the huge, huge contribution of space syntax.

 

 

David Seamon