On Re-reading Christopher Alexander

I don't know how they did it to curmudgeonly, resistant, skeptical me, but somehow my architecture professors instilled in me a set of profoundly-rooted compunctions around what is usually called modernism. Somehow it got under my skin and into a part of my brain that is remarkably impervious to criticism and evidence that the peculiar congeries of aesthetic qualities that arose right around WW1 in Germany and France contain sweeping ethical imperatives. Somehow, unadorned, flat, white walls, uninterrupted expanses of glass, fixtures that look like they belong in a submarine, and an overall facelessness or blankness came to signify solidarity with the proletariat, which in the USA means something like: not getting all hoity-toity and remembering where you come from and honoring your small-town roots, whether you have any or not. This is, of course, absurd. Whatever the needs of the European proletariat back when Marxism still had some cachet and could maybe even save the world, that kind of faith in a political solution is long-since dead, and architecture was never more that a mutable symbol that easily accommodated the post-soviet condition by switching meaning: from symbol of egalitarian solidarity and state munificence to symbol of corruption, decay, and terrifying soullessness. In America, the same aesthetic was almost immediately bought up by big, faceless corporations to become decoration for their headquarters. Here it meant, and means, efficiency, solidity, no-nonsense busy-ness, seamlessness, international reach, etc. But here I sit still more or less in hock to that old Corbusian idea: ornament, surface decoration, gaudiness, that sort of thing are all holdovers from an old regime of bourgeois preoccupation with status through conspicuous consumption. Maybe only the rich could afford decorative crafts, so the poor found solidarity in machine-made sameness? No, actually, that's what the academics, revolutionaries, and architects postulated. The poor had forever decorated as much as they could, and had always displayed considerable ingenuity in decorating on a budget. Their idea of a good house was a decorated box. Always has been. Nothing new here. This criticism of Modernism is old hat: all the seamless, smooth sleekness was not the organic result of efficient design and noble concern for the poor, it was an aesthetic. And, it happened, it was an aesthetic that provided developers and states to house their poor in very cheap boxes. It also, conveniently, resisted decoration, which had long been the public display of clan identity, so it was very useful for multinational economies to consolidate their populations through sameness. These were the days of mass-production, international fashion, the beginnings of mass media exposure, and Esperanto, remember. So what Le Corbusier theorized and proselytized, whatever his intentions, quickly became a tool that worked well for the bourgeoisie, who could leave it at work and go home to comfortable old houses. etc etc etc.

And: "comfortable old houses" raises some sticky questions: why do we say that? Why are modern houses almost universally derided as uncomfortable? What went wrong? Here's an answer: what went wrong was a compound, complicated thing best summarized as a series of pseudo-ethical arguments about the meaning of architectural form combined with the oft-cited European susceptibility to revolutionary ideas around WW1. I can't picture another time in history that could have been such fertile ground for these ideas: millions of buildings destroyed, millions of homeless people wandering the countryside and choking the cities, a general disgust at the past that led up to the slaughter of the trenches, all that stuff. The field was freshly-tilled and watered, and they planted the seeds of change.

It took a while to see what was going on. After some years the gleaming buildings became sooty and rusty. People started hanging distinctly non-Bauhausian curtains, the socially-condensed poor didn't own their properties and began to vandalize them. The Utopian Platonic perfection of the early Moderns looked pretty bad in real-world conditions, and became downright squalid, pretty soon. It became easier to criticise the precepts of the Moderns, which had seemed like a gospel of salvation a decade or so earlier. The building boom after WW2 pushed this further. And by now a whole critical apparatus has grown up around the machine aesthetic. But one very strange thing about that criticism: there are almost no architects involved. Architects and architecture critics have almost universally stuck to their guns, to the point where a traditional building, made of good old stone and wood, is seen as retrograde, out of fashion, downright laughable. Modernism has become the arriere-garde. Funny how that happens when you serve the state and corporations. Anyway, here's where Christopher Alexander comes in:

In the sixties, [of course!] he proposed what amounts to the most radical challenge to modernism yet: he suggested, gently but firmly, with tons of examples and some very beautiful little pictures and lucid prose, that what we really need in our houses and towns is a set of normative standards or rules, that basically amount to a how-to manual for designers. Porches should be 6 feet wide if you want to sit at a cafe table, 9 feet wide if you want to dine. Kitchens should be the heart of the house and should have a place to eat and a place to sit by a window. Windows are tricky, and should usually be small, even when the view is spectacular. Fires are not simply heat sources, but have deep psychological or even archetypal meaning that defies analysis and programming. Ditto water. Roofs should SHELTER, not just by being waterproof, but by creating a psychologically-satisfying sense of enclosure and safety. Stuff like this. He was proposing, I think, to remove architecture from the realm of conceptual art and ethico-political tool and return it to the accreted wisdom of the deep past, to tradition. Anathema in those days!

But I think he was right. Turns out you can't simply tabulate human shelter needs and devise a systematic machine for accommodating them. There is more to dwelling, which is, after all, closely held to BEING. The quality of a dwelling has existential meaning, somehow. There is something so at the root of humanness in dwelling that a house can't ever be just an enclosure, and a combination of intuition and hard-won lessons from the deep history of building seem to accommodate people better than any amount of programmatic cleverness and analysis has ever managed to do.

So, getting back to my own personal puzzle: why do I feel so resistant to decoration? Why is a sort of modern stripped minimalist cleanness my default design mode? Why do I have to work so hard to get the edge of a timber just right, all the while feeling professor Sobin hanging over my shoulder asking why don't I just leave it square and unadorned? Compunction! It feels like a hangover from a period of religious devotion! And I should know. Anyway, here's a comforting note of encouragement to myself: when I sit by a sunny window in an overstuffed chair with a cup of coffee first thing in the morning and sketch I come up with the most marvelous and beautiful stuff. Professor Sobin retreats into the bracing distant history of revolution and Marxist certainty, and I am left wondering at the power of a subtle curve in a timber to soften an entire room, and make it fit for habitation. I am left with little comprehension of the intellectual kind. I don't know why, and I can't say much in defense of the design intuition that allows this, except to guess that we have evolved as human beings along with our buildings, and we can't be separated from them, and we know when we're home.