Michael Mehaffy: We’re seeing some astonishing things coming out of the sciences just now. Geometry seems to be the hot topic - the complex structure of proteins, the unfolding processes of embryology, the distribution of large-scale structures in the cosmos, and so on. And there has been more confirmation of the fantastic notion that life itself is a certain kind of geometric structure. From there it does not seem too big a leap to the assertion that consciousness, and the conscious experience of quality and value, are rooted in geometric structure as well. Certainly recent work in the neurosciences seems to suggest this.

Of course, you have been arguing something like this for years, and developing it as the basis for a more advanced architecture. You have criticized the kind of abstract expressionism that has bogged down modernism at the level of sculpture, and you have argued for a much broader and more adaptive architecture, one more rooted in the geometries of human life. The new sciences seem to us to provide a lot of fresh evidence for your assertions, and to point the way to some very promising new tools for evaluating and perfecting the qualities of a built environment, along the lines you have suggested.

You recently said you find these new geometrical insights of science very promising and exciting. What is it that you think is most exciting about these new developments from your point of view?

Christopher Alexander: It's the idea that, instead of talking about architecture in traditional terms, which invite all the criticism about romanticism and about being buried in the past - all of this actually just being replaced by an emerging body of fact which establishes the substantial nature of these claims.

You know, up until about 1600 it was essentially religious authority that held sway, and one did what that tradition said to do. And people were comfortable with that, and there wasn't much need to be questioning it.

Around the time of Descartes and Newton, something else happens - the authority that comes from things is the observations of our own senses. We're going to pay attention to what we can see and what we can identify and what we can know. And the criterion for knowing it is, that whatever we hold to be true can be put in some kind of experimental form, that another person can then be convinced of. And that unless something meets the standard of being sharable in that kind of sense, it isn't going to pass muster.

Now that's an incredibly powerful thing that's been running now for about 400 years. It's really swept the world. And it has made the world what we know it to be today. But the thing is, value has not been included in this approach.

So you've got all this stuff which has this wonderful way of being shared, by observation, experiment, you own eyes, your own fingers, and so forth. But all the matters of value that we're fundamentally concerned with as architects - they slip through the net, they're just not dealt with. They're all seen as arbitrary.

Now, if we successfully put forth the idea that value can be discovered through an experimental procedure which gets results, which helps people to reach agreement, and therefore is sharable, this suddenly puts value in and among that huge movement that began around 1600. Where suddenly, we're looking at an understanding of things that can come from fairly simple experiments that we do by examining ourselves, and our reactions to things, but in a very special way.

So I do think that the new scientific developments which have occurred, the whole slew of things in computer science, simulations, generativity, complexity theory, of course - all fascinating, all very important, because it provides foundations for those sorts of things as well. But the real crux of it is arriving at a sharable method.

And so I think this issue about the scientific cauldron which is capable of giving birth to this material is a phenomenally powerful thing.

MM: And historic?

CA: And it is historic, yes.

MM: You speak in a very direct and personal way, and as you said recently, that is the essence of science - the ideas and the discoveries of what works. You can put all the window-dressing and the other parts on it, but that's not the science.

CA: My interest is in buildings. And I'm a scientist insofar as I try to understand what's going on in buildings, in a reproducible, accurate fashion, and try to tell the truth about it. I'd say that the principal thing that has helped me to thread my way through this rather incredible briar patch is trying to tell the truth about what is really going on - when you're in a building, when you go into a building, when you come out of a building, when you use a building, when you look at a building, when you look out the window of the building, and so forth.

And I'd say that the biggest problem with 20^th century architecture was that architects became involved in a huge lie. Essentially what happened at the beginning of the 20^th century was really a legacy of the 19^th. New forms of production began to be visible. And in some fashion artists and architects were invited to become front men for this very serious economic and industrial transformation.

I don't think they knew what was happening. That is, I don't think in most cases there was anything cynical about this. But they were actually in effect bought out. So that the heroes of, let's say, the first half of the 20^th century - Le Corbusier, Mies Van Der Rohe, Gropius even - a very nice man, by the way - were brought on board in effect to say, OK, here's all this stuff happening, what can you do with it? Let's prove that it's really a wonderful world we're going towards. And instead of reflecting on questions about, well, what was it that was going to be wonderful about this world - from the very beginning, the architects became visual spokesmen, in a way to try to prove that everything was really OK. Not only that it was really OK, but somehow magic.

You know, there was this phrase, elan vital, which was bandied about a lot in the middle years of the century, and in the early years of the century as well - of, there's something incredible happening here, we're part of it, we're reaching forward. But all of this was really image factory stuff. And what they didn't know about the late 20^th century was only known to a few visionaries like Orwell and others who could actually see really what was going on.

I don't think this is a very flattering view, and I suppose architects would reject it, angrily. But I do think it's true.

MM: It's essentially a program of apology for industrialism?

CA: Glorification, of something that is inherently not glorifiable. And it's really very very similar to the ads we see on TV every day now, except this was being done with architectural imagery, and with buildings. And the architects are busy, right to this day, still trying to perpetuate that process that they successfully did in the 20thCentury.

MM: In the book you speak about the Cartesian world view, the mechanistic world view, and how it is, at least for you - and you've made parallels to others - giving way to another world view, a world view of process and of complexity. Are your critics trying to understand you in terms of one world view, and you're speaking from another?

CA: I actually don't think it's as deep as that. I think they know they're not doing very good work - especially the mainstream architects. And they don't really know what to do about it.

Going back to your other question - you know, I'm still really working at the question you asked me about science. The first rule of any scientific effort is observation. You know, you have to see what's going on and tell the truth about it, and not get hoodwinked by preconceptions. And so in that sense of course what I did was very deeply rooted in science, and in my scientific training. And it was the intellectual struggle that I have had to go through over these 25 or 27 years of writing this book [The Nature of Order], because the things that it seems to me necessary to conclude as one studies what is really true are staggering. I mean they are completely inconsistent with the scientific world picture that we have believed in certainly the 20^th century. And so especially for me, given the fact that I came from a scientific background at Cambridge, I had the most incredible difficulty actually writing this stuff down.

So gradually then, things arose out of that which I suppose people may claim kinship of all sorts.

There are so many major unsolved problems, which have reached similar conclusions for parallel reasons. Wholeness in quantum mechanics, for example, or unfolding of geometry in embryology. So you have lots and lots of things which have reached surprisingly similar conclusions, for very different reasons, just because people facing scientific problems in these different fields somehow seem to be coming up against a brick wall. Same one. And that I think is due to the fact that the world picture we've had doesn't support reality very well.

MM: And do you think that those people in those other fields are also changing their world view, in a parallel way to what you have discovered?

CA: I think so, yes, I think that's quite true. And I think that actually very similar problems have arisen in physics. [David] Bohm¹ faced tremendous difficulties - I mean, even though he probably was the person who made the single biggest contribution to understanding of what's really going on in some of the perennial puzzles of quantum mechanics - they wouldn't even let him lecture at Berkeley the last time they tried to get him here. And Brian Goodwin for instance, in biology - absolutely on the forefront of this kind of thinking.

I think there are dangers in all this - I don't like "woo-woo" land at all.

MM: And you have been accused of being "new age" and so on.

CA: Yes, for example, right. And so in some ways I quite deeply regret having had to write the book that I've written. You know, because it has a taint, almost.

MM: Simply because it's against the current world picture?

CA: It's partly that, for sure - but the ground is so treacherous. If you just take the subject of wholeness, for example - good lord, it is difficult. It's really difficult to get a strong firm grip on the concept, on the structure that it has, even how to talk about it clearly. There are peculiar things like self-reference in the logic of how you have to talk about it, that are very uncomfortable, for somebody who is used to normal scientific thought.

If we're just talking as architects, and we're talking about a particular room, let's say, and we're trying to figure out how to build the windows in that room, so as to make the room as good as possible... Now, the thing that's going to get us furthest in making that attempt is painstaking observation of our feelings as we are in the room, whether let's say the room is unfinished or something, whatever state it's in, and we're trying to guess what kind of window is going to have this effect. And whether we do it through mockups in the full size or whether we make models or we even try little sketches or whatever it is we're doing. But what we're trying to read is what depth of feeling comes into being because of the window being such and such a size, shape, position, and so forth. Now, this is hard work, very hard work.

MM: The core task is to figure out how to make beautiful places. And the other parallels in science are a supplement to the core task, more a reinforcement, or an echo if you will, of what that is?

CA: Right, yes exactly. It's partially even - you might almost call it a political effort. Because I think that this very bad form of architecture that has existed is vulnerable to this particular attack. And the reason is quite simple. You see, the thing is, the modernists really - because they've got their head in the sand to cover up the traces of what was begun so many decades ago, and was essentially founded in really untruths, they have to keep saying, "I don't want to know the facts, I've just got to keep going with this thing that we're all supposed to be doing." So they're all very vulnerable to the question about, well look, there actually are scientific ways of asking about these things and studying them. But if an architect of the modernistic persuasion is so vulnerable in his actions or his thoughts or his work that he can't dare to consider this possibility, then that will very quickly become very visible as a huge weakness.

MM: One of the goals of this issue of Katarxis is to explore the relationship with the Classicists. As we were talking before about alliances, is there a way that we could have an alliance, in spite of whatever differences there might be?

CA: Well, by an odd coincidence, I wrote something about this for the [TradArch, U. Miami] listserv. I agree with you that it is a necessary alliance. I really agree with that completely. I don't have any doubt about it. And I think the same goes for the New Urbanism.

MM: Yes. Andres Duany, who you know very well, said that Leon Krier's influence was a revelation for him, a formative moment. And I know that Andres is also sympathetic to the idea of "organic" order. And he once told me that something you said to him was the basis for "everything we're doing now." ²

So that was one of the questions I wanted to ask you too - what's your advice for the New Urbanists? It relates to the one about Classicism, because that's such a strong strain within the New Urbanism.

CA: Right. I think that many of the people who are involved in the CNU actually have not understood the problems that the developer represents, and what has got to be done in order to change that situation. It's very very serious.

I find that one actually much easier to talk about than the Classical issue.

I feel emotional sympathy for the Classicists. You know, in reading the pages of TradArch, there's something so nice about the way they talk to each other and the way they like to talk about buildings. There's something very warm-hearted about it, which I find extremely moving. But I get off the bus when I have to start thinking about - well, I don't want to put Doric columns in the jungle, you know.

You know, in the history of modern architecture, there was a refrain that kept coming back, which was such and such is not honest - copying things from other times and places is not honest. And you may be surprised to hear that I completely agree with that. Although I think what architects did with this idea was crazy, because or course it became a mad rush toward newness for its own sake.

But it is undoubtedly true that in each era, forms must arise that come from the technology and economics and social circumstances of that era. So that if one sets out a program where you're essentially sort of copying old forms in any version, you're liable to be in a hell of a lot of trouble. And I think that trouble is evident. I think that to some extent it explains the slight smirk of discomfort that people have when they're looking at not only Classicist buildings, but what you might call developer kitsch. I mean, there's a lot of developers who certainly clearly understand that people do not want glass and aluminum houses. But they don't know what to do about it, so you get your - whatever - your Cape Cod, you know, lookalike, and all these different things.

So what I'm really saying is, developers have in effect got this problem, just like Classicists have got this problem. I mean, developers have other problems too, but I'm just saying this is not peculiar to people with a classical bent.

And I think that it is necessary to spend time - I would say major amounts of time - thinking only about form and geometry. Thinking about the language of form that is appropriate now. That we can use. And this doesn't merely mean, OK, we're going to have some generating system which is magically going to put things in our hands. I think that's a fallacy actually. Because although certainly nobody believes in generating systems more strongly than I do, but some aspects of the generating system actually have to specify geometrical organization.

And if we're not constantly thinking about, OK, here's such and such kind of a building, and here we are in 2004, what is a really comfortable and right kind of form for such a building. And how do we do it? And then of course, what's the generative process which will produce endless buildings of that kind, in that sort of sensible manner.

The Classicists, interestingly, have absolutely no problem doing those kind of exercises. That is, they spend a huge amount of time teaching people simply how to draw buildings that are good, in organization, shape, proportion and so on and so forth. And actually I don't believe it can be done any other way - except that I don't believe one wants to be using only classical forms for that purpose.

But when I say, I don't think one can do it any other way - you know, I think there's a lot of very intelligent people, who would love it if somehow one didn't actually have to make that artistic commitment, or take on that artistic act. And if somehow, from some sort of scrambled mélange of systems or dynamic variables, or whatever, that the form is going to give itself. And sort of come without the artistic commitment to it. And I don't have any problem with that thesis if it was true. That is, if you could do it. But I don't think one can do it. I don't think it works.

MM: No matter what system, don't you need the human being there to say what is their feeling at any given point in time, and whether that is true for them?

CA: Oh, certainly, absolutely you need that. No question about that.

I mean a very significant and interesting issue has to do with roofs. You know, 1965, 1970 it was completely taboo to use a pitched roof. There was quite a struggle - I played some role in that struggle myself, and I remember all the humorous episodes involved in trying to get students to say, yes, actually I can make a pitched roof, and think well of myself. But in fact I think that the pendulum has swung too far in that direction. I mean, it's one thing in a snow and ice climate, where you've got real problems with large amounts of snow sitting on roofs, causing snow load and all other kinds of problems. But in many of the world's climates, that's really not a fundamental problem. And also the waterproofing methods that we have now are so incredible compared with those from earlier times, that you don't necessarily have to have a roof that will literally let the water run off and shed itself.

So I don't think there's anything wrong with building pitched roofs. But actually what I've gradually come to find is that the buildings with flat roofs is a bit more comfortable in terms of seeming to reflect the ordinariness of everyday life. And pitched roofs are OK, they're sometimes unbelievably beautiful - but also sometimes, a little bit on the cute side. And it's not that easy to avoid that. And I find it curious that in an odd sense, a flat roof may be more suitable - leave things alone a little better, and so forth. ³

It's very difficult to define this, but there's something there that makes sense out of technology, that makes sense out of very vague, large-scale feeling of a certain kind of site, or certain kinds of neighborhoods, and leaves things alone better, and is actually, in an odd sense, more structure-preserving to the earth.⁴ Now this is not a universal rule by any means, but I'm -

MM: It's an exception to the usual classical approach?

CA: Well, definitely that. And it means that you're actually on your mettle, if you can even get an answer to this problem. You know, because you're thinking about stuff - my gosh, there certainly is no pre-cooked answer in history to be found to this. And it's a hell of a tough question.

Or another example, it's in Book 3 of The Nature of Order. We were suddenly faced with the issue of building marble floors for the Megaron in Athens, which is a huge concert hall. And the floors we were asked to do were about two acres in size. Very large concourses. And to do the kinds of intricate patterns of the kind that [the owner] specifically wanted in two acres, it looked as though there were likely to be 400,000 pieces. Now, just to cut 400,000 pieces of marble is an incredible problem in itself - let alone assembling it. On top of all that, we had to put that floor in - we were given two months to do it. So we set out a way of using a water jet cutter, prefabricating pieces, creating circumstances where you could both do mockups while you were developing the floor, then you could do them again in the actual place.

MM: Computer-controlled?

CA: Yes, exactly. All of this sort of thing.⁵ Well, it really changes the result. That is, if you compare that with the kind of floors that were built in Italy in the 12^th century, they're really different. And it's not, I don't think, all that helpful to say it's vaguely classical in feeling - actually it's not. But I mean somebody who is persuaded by Classicism might say, "well anyway, you know, the reason these floors are nice is because they vaguely resemble that sort of thing." But actually I think the reason that they're nice is that they have that living structure which I've written so much about, in a demonstrable fashion.

And that that's really what the people who have immersed themselves in classicism - that's really why they're doing it, because they have a passion for buildings, they don't know how to get that result, without emulating those ancient types. It really is not a harmful thing to do, but it isn't the best way to do it.

MM: Right. I thought your paper [“Classicism and the Many Cultures”]⁶ did a good job of discussing the fact that tradition is really a much wider thing than Classicism, and you have different traditions all over the planet, and you have, you know, us in our day, able to make our own tradition. And tradition isn't at all something that's frozen in time.

CA: Right. This business about finding a language of form which comes out of a technology, out of a technique, and out of the feelings that exist in our environment, is really the core of the matter. And although the modernists have – it's weird, because actually they would probably subscribe to a great deal of what I've just said. But what they actually do with it is so peculiar and often offensive.

MM: And they were embracing a form of industrialization that was - how would you characterize it? Inhuman?

CA: Well, it was really limited. It really was the first few decades of industrialization. And the things that were being mass-produced, and what could be done by mass production, were very limited. But more important, you know, all of that mass production stuff came from Taylor. And there are serious social problems. In other words, it came from something that's actually quite gruesome, humanly speaking. I'm just talking about the production techniques.

MM: I wanted to ask you what you think is happening to technology today, particularly computers, and the potential to create a more human kind of technology at this point.

CA: Well, it's positive. You know there's all these kind of one-off assembly lines now. Special purpose, car manufacturer, furniture manufacturer, and so forth.

MM: Cabbage patch dolls, where each doll is different, to take a trivial example.

CA: Yes, that's right. But still, nevertheless it's interesting. But the trouble is that even the people that I think are the most far-sighted and the most intelligent in dealing with that stuff are completely, I'd say almost 100 percent trapped in the notion of combinations. Of recombination and recombination of components.

MM: The reductive technology in the early industrial period which still very much grips us? Pulling things apart and putting them together in little bitty pieces instead of trying to create wholes?

CA: Right. And of course what happens in the biological world is that the wholes come about by differentiation - not by assembly. And that's an entirely different class of things.⁷

MM: That's a crucial point, isn't it?

CA: Yes, very very - absolutely crucial. And probably - it's probably the single most serious issue, because without that you just cannot get there. And yet so much of the definition of an architect, the definition of a contractor and of a subcontractor, and all these things - they're all virtually assumed to be playing some role in the assembly process. And the idea that all these folks might be playing roles in a differentiation process, and that it really and truly was that, is just I think almost out of reach at the moment. And I think it's one of my biggest aims in the Nature of Order is to show what this means, that it is feasible, to set it up as a model of our profession, what we must do.

MM: Something else I wanted to ask you about is that in our current view, everything is personal taste. And anyone who suggests otherwise is a dictator. And you certainly have had that allegation.

CA: Oh, yes!

MM: Right. And so, to go down the path of saying, well wait a minute, everything isn't personal taste, is very frightening. Are we heading towards, you know, something where our freedom is going to be taken away? I mean it's terra incognita.

CA: Yes, it's a complex subject. Actually, it's ironic - in a way, it's quite peculiar, because probably of all living architects, I'm probably the one who's most catholic. So, it's quite a stretch to do that, and yet it's very effective.

MM: And there's a related concept I wanted to ask you about, and that is that tradition implies authority. Tradition in the broad sense, not just tradition in the Classicist sense of following a historic pattern.

CA: Right. One of the things which I am trying to do in Book 3 ⁸ is, in effect, say look, there's this family of forms, this idea of living structure. It does seem to me quite plain that we must draw our material from that family. And if you go outside that family, you're going to continue to devastate the earth.

OK, so now let's just think about some numbers for a minute. Because that statement can have a lot of different interpretations.

One interpretation, an extreme one, is that for any given problem, there's only one solution. I mean, I've been accused of saying that, which I've certainly never said. The second, slightly more sophisticated version of that is, that as you're wending your way through the path of a design process or a building process, there's only one best step to take at any given moment. Also not something I've said. But of course if those things were actually said, it would indeed be frightening, because it would have a sort of deterministic quality which would be actually quite strange and I think uncomfortable, for anybody that was doing anything. ⁹

The real situation is quite different from that. I've got an appendix in Book 3, where I discuss the number of possible configurations, how many of those are living structures. And all of this is quite difficult to make estimates of. But the numbers are fascinating because they're so utterly, absurdly gigantic. If you take a sort of middle-size building, a few stories high, and you say, OK, how many possible arrangements are there within the volume of that building and its immediately surrounding open space. Now the number that you come up with is one of those numbers that looks deceptive, it's something like 10 to the 10^th of 17. ¹⁰ I mean, it is a number so utterly insanely huge, that's the number of all possible configurations within that sort of volume.

So then you say, alright, well now how many of those are probably living structures? Can one make an estimate? And that number is an infinitely small fraction of the first number that I just told you. But even though you have to divide that number by 10 to the godzillion, to get down to the living structures, when you try to estimate this out - the number of living structures is still utterly gigantic beyond measure. Far, far larger than the number of seconds since the universe began, or the number of particles in the universe.

So that what you have to realize as an architect, thinking about generative theories, and thinking about unfolding... suppose that you're in a process and at a given moment, there might be, let's say a thousand things that you could do, and let's say that there's a hundred sensible things to do. And you're going to take steps over and over and over again over a period of a year, let's say. So you're going to make these kinds of choices, and you're going to have the opportunity for a hundred choices, twenty thousand times.

So that any idea that this is deterministic, or that this really putting you in a bind because it's authoritarian or it's under control, or it's whatever - is just actually the sheerest nonsense.

You know, I've known quite a few traditional craftsmen, in real traditions, in different societies and different cultures. I've never met a person who was in one of those traditions, who felt themselves to be in a bind, who felt themselves to be locked into something, who felt themselves to be under authority. Of course what they actually feel is free. Because they know what to do, and therefore they can do whatever they want.¹¹

So that this whole discussion about totalitarianism - what it really boils down to is the contrast between freedom to be arbitrary, as opposed to freedom to be appropriate. And if - of course if you want to have freedom to be arbitrary, that's one thing. And much of what we've got going on in the world of architecture today is based on that supposition. If you want to be appropriate, you can still do a million different things, but being appropriate is going to guide you, and that is what is going to tell you what to do.

MM: We talked a little bit about tradition and traditional cultures, and you addressed that in your paper on TradArch.¹² And I wanted to touch on what you think is happening globally right now, with other traditions, and where that's all heading and should be heading. I'm thinking in particular of the idea that there is a huge reaction to the western modernist tradition around the world. And some of it is obviously murderous and horrendous and evil, and some of it is understandable, and something that we should perhaps pay more attention to.

CA: You mean 9/11? Oh, I think so. I think that there are two, kind of parallel courses. Of course, one of them is, that we've got this really incredible economic dichotomy. We've got five billion people who have a small income, and about one billion people who have what we consider a normal income, but it's actually a huge income by comparison. And of course it's absolutely inevitable that that is going to lead to consequences - which I've actually been waiting for since the middle of the tw