The Timeless Way of Building

“There is one timeless way of building. It is thousands of years old, and the same today as it has always been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way. It is not possible to make great buildings, or great towns, beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way. And, as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form, as the trees and hills, and as our faces are.”

Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

Early on in my career in software in the late 90s I encountered Christopher Alexander’s book The Timeless Way of Building and shortly after my transition from Germany to the US. It was written for architects and city planners in a reaction to what Alexander felt was a generation or more of construction that did not support life well. Alexander believed there was a quality and a method to creating life-giving and by ordinary people. The same principles can be applied to building any complex system including software systems. Commercial software had become very large, very brittle, functional but not usually considered life-giving user experiences. Alexander’s method without a method was a breath of fresh air in the software world and a philosophical foundation of the Agile movement of the early 00s and continuing to this day.

I had also just begun to take another serious look at faith traditions and was more than a little bit put off by the certainty and uncompromising language that marked the most public representatives of US Christianity who also claimed to know THE way. I realized as I’m writing this that the book was published in 1979, the same year the Moral Majority was founded, the leadership at the Southern Baptist Convention was replaced and an alliance was formed between conservative evangelicals and the Republican party to an extent previously unheard of in US history.

The conservative resurgence movement and Alexander were reacting to different signs of decline they saw in US culture and by extension the built environment. Each is correct in noticing that something is amiss in US culture. Each references ancient patterns they deem life-giving. How differently these patterns are used in each approach to create a change is instructive.

Both approaches use a kind of pattern language to create complex systems and improve lives but in the conservative evangelical way of building the patterns are fixed and all who want to participate in the building process have to shed part of their uniqueness be accepted. There are membership classes, creeds, baptisms and commitments to certain patterns of behavior and denials of certain other patterns of behavior. If a behavior or mental model does not align with the selected pattern set, it is punished or expelled.

The Timeless Way uses patterns differently, the system emerges from the patterns and forces within and grows by naturally expanding to accommodate new patterns and forces until equilibrium is achieved again. There can be a multitude of pattern combinations that are life-giving and there can be a multitude of methods to implement the patterns of building and community life. They combine to a variety of cultures that all share the life-giving quality but are as unique in their expressions as their participants.

My preference is clearly for Alexander’s approach. It seems to match up better with how landscapes and living beings and ecosystems grow. However, the certainty of evangelical Christians and the potential consequences if they had it right, gave me pause.