Great post. You make a great point around how Alexander's work is good at pointing out the problems & the patterns but less on how to apply these insights to a world that depends on large-scale development and economies of scale.
My take is that Alexander's personal dislike of scale was actually a bias that made his theories and prescriptions less helpful (especially when they moved into more macro aspects like his city/town prescriptions in earlier books).
One thing I wanted to share is that Alexander's theories developed more after writing "A Pattern Language"; his final set of books is called "Nature of Order" and I think it evolved his thinking a bit. I wrote about the books a few years back in a series of posts in case that's of interest. It can be a bit abstract but I love to think about his work :) https://mysticalsilicon.substack.com/p/how-to-make-living-systems
Brilliant synthesis of Alexander's pattern language concept and how it clashes with modern scale. The tension you identifiy between making buildings livable versus economically viable feels real in practice. I've seen developers try to apply a few of these patterns to subdivisions and the results are noticeably better, but the pressure to maximize density always wins out dunno if there's a middle path here.
Excellent longform post: house and city design as enshrined patterns of living culture. Your distillation of Alexander's work would make a useful small book -- the examples are easy to visualize, practical yet thorough, accessible and informative. I learned most of this reading Lewis Mumford's work in the 1980s, but boy do we need it now. Thanks.
I don’t think the real tension here is between liveability and scale. It’s between liveability and financial time. Pattern languages assume slow feedback, small fixes, and the freedom to get things slightly wrong and improve them. Modern development runs on short debt cycles, guaranteed returns, and getting in and out fast.
That’s why “developers could do better” always sounds a bit hopeful. Often, they’re doing exactly what the spreadsheet asks. You can borrow against floor area and car parks. You can’t borrow against a place that slowly becomes somewhere people want to linger.
Alexander often gets read as anti-scale, but I’m not sure that’s the real offence. He’s anti-finance in a narrower sense. He’s saying that use matters more than resale. Once rising land values are privately captured and debt-funded, the things that make places feel alive are usually the first to be trimmed. Even good designers struggle to fight that gravity.
Which nudges a more awkward question into view. If most land value comes from collective life, public infrastructure, and time, why do we treat the upside as a permanent private entitlement? We’re comfortable putting limits on patents and copyright. Land somehow gets a free pass.
If there’s a middle path, it’s probably less about lecturing architects and more about who gets the upside. Public development, social housing, land taxes, long-hold ownership. Models where sticking around pays better than flipping.
Otherwise, we’ll keep agreeing on the patterns and wondering why the spreadsheet keeps winning.
I feel like the “aesthetic” approach to city design is doomed because it’s solving a problem that we don’t have. Only a tiny percent of a city is going to be rebuilt over the next ten years, so there’s just no way to make it more aesthetically appealing.
To me this is also why cities tend to be ugly. Any work of art designed by 1000 different people with different aesthetic opinions over 100+ years is going to be ugly. The 1001st person to come along and redesign 1% of the city won’t be able to fix it. Sorry!
The problem with Alexander is much deeper. His lack of knowledge of the history of architecture stops him from really seeing the possible options. Add a few “mathematical” sounding claims about relationships and he loses the thread to fulfill his personal formal and ideological biases. It is as though he lacked the capacity to imagine counter examples. Think about churches for example. Do churches follow his rules. Absolutely not, including religious groupings. There is much to be said about architecture as a language, Alexander’s work is thin gruel indeed. Lots of people who like cutesy European villages and are already anti-car from their days backpacking on EURail are easily fooled by this stuff.
The primary function of devolution of local government is to create jobs for bureaucrats. Parkinson's Law is funny because it's true. Already the largest employer by far in any country is the state. Year by year a smaller proportion of the people are engaged in productive work that creates wealth. The rest are parasites. We really, really don't need a city to be split up into fifty boroughs, each with its own council and collection of sub-committees that dictate how often refuse is to be collected, and what color the different recycling bins should be. That's not an exaggeration. That's how councils actually operate.
The ugly city starts with a town planner drawing lines on a map. The planner draws streets and avenues, and divides the real estate into neat box-grids of lots. The major streets of Pretoria, South Africa were designed to be wide enough to turn a wagon drawn by a team of (I think) twelve oxen. Practical, spacious, but not very appealing.
The aesthetic city starts with a war or a huge fire that destroys most buildings. Then there's another war and another fire. Those beautiful Mediterranean towns have been destroyed and rebuilt many times over. There should be a better way to do it.
In a modern UglyCity (TM) a developer sees an opportunity to make a profit by fulfilling the human need for living, retail and industrial spaces. (Denying the profit motive results in Communist Bloc monstrosities.) Say that it's going to be a living space. Say that the developer has a soul and would like to construct a dwelling unit that not only makes a profit, but earns the commendation of others.
The developer is severely constrained by economics. A multiple-family unit of boxes stacked on top of each other may be the only option in that particular neighborhood. A lower density would result in unaffordable housing that stands empty. Renters and buyers will pay more for high-rise apartments with a view.
Home-buyers, regrettably, have been given a say in the matter. I would have said that this is the same terrible mistake as allowing women to choose who they're going to marry, but not everyone understands irony. Americans prefer free-standing homes with timber frames to more durable European designs. A developer who chooses superior European construction over timber, doesn't stay in business very long. The people who are going to buy and live in those houses, have voted the developer out.
And that's how the UglyCity (TM) is created. The town planner, the artificial scarcity of land for development created by the town planner, rent control, building codes, and the pesky home-buyer who wants the largest floor area with a status-enhancing exterior design at the the lowest cost.
One solution is to give the public no say. We will build large blocks of communal housing, and you will live there, end of argument. This works quite well in Singapore, but won't transplant to other societies that allow, for example, the possession of drugs and chewing-gum, and killing people on subways.
I have a vision of large housing estates laid out like a village that developed organically, starting out with the strip development of most actual villages and as the village spread, housing units laid out apparently higgeldy-piggeldy but nevertheless economically, making best use of available space. Cars stay at the front entrance; narrow lanes give pedestrian access. I stayed for a couple of weeks in a self-catering resort in Mallorca like that, and despite the uniform architecture it was very charming. When I had to leave I thought that I would like to live like that.
I had some similar thoughts when I was checking out A Pattern Language. Splendid when descriptive (describing useful patterns) and dreadful when prescriptive (proposing solutions). I recall at one point they were proposing to allocate agricultural areas in spokes radiating from the urban center to allow people access to natural lands. This might work in Roblox or the Sims or some god game where you can customize the map, but in what universe is this even close to possible in the real world? Frankly it was so ludicrous it made me put down the book. Would you recommend I pick it back up again and finish it?
Great post. You make a great point around how Alexander's work is good at pointing out the problems & the patterns but less on how to apply these insights to a world that depends on large-scale development and economies of scale.
My take is that Alexander's personal dislike of scale was actually a bias that made his theories and prescriptions less helpful (especially when they moved into more macro aspects like his city/town prescriptions in earlier books).
One thing I wanted to share is that Alexander's theories developed more after writing "A Pattern Language"; his final set of books is called "Nature of Order" and I think it evolved his thinking a bit. I wrote about the books a few years back in a series of posts in case that's of interest. It can be a bit abstract but I love to think about his work :) https://mysticalsilicon.substack.com/p/how-to-make-living-systems
Thanks for writing :)
Thanks for this Maxwell, I've stored this for closer reading. The strange disappearance of beauty as a consideration is extremely beguiling and important. I've written a little on it here - https://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/09/27/architecture-and-beauty-some-thoughts/ and here https://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/02/16/liveability/
And even made some videos on it would you believe.
https://youtu.be/BxNdnpGbfFg?si=vADW-HZRNiqsfeut
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zYHdQipaGOs
Brilliant synthesis of Alexander's pattern language concept and how it clashes with modern scale. The tension you identifiy between making buildings livable versus economically viable feels real in practice. I've seen developers try to apply a few of these patterns to subdivisions and the results are noticeably better, but the pressure to maximize density always wins out dunno if there's a middle path here.
Excellent longform post: house and city design as enshrined patterns of living culture. Your distillation of Alexander's work would make a useful small book -- the examples are easy to visualize, practical yet thorough, accessible and informative. I learned most of this reading Lewis Mumford's work in the 1980s, but boy do we need it now. Thanks.
Thank you, Joel!
I don’t think the real tension here is between liveability and scale. It’s between liveability and financial time. Pattern languages assume slow feedback, small fixes, and the freedom to get things slightly wrong and improve them. Modern development runs on short debt cycles, guaranteed returns, and getting in and out fast.
That’s why “developers could do better” always sounds a bit hopeful. Often, they’re doing exactly what the spreadsheet asks. You can borrow against floor area and car parks. You can’t borrow against a place that slowly becomes somewhere people want to linger.
Alexander often gets read as anti-scale, but I’m not sure that’s the real offence. He’s anti-finance in a narrower sense. He’s saying that use matters more than resale. Once rising land values are privately captured and debt-funded, the things that make places feel alive are usually the first to be trimmed. Even good designers struggle to fight that gravity.
Which nudges a more awkward question into view. If most land value comes from collective life, public infrastructure, and time, why do we treat the upside as a permanent private entitlement? We’re comfortable putting limits on patents and copyright. Land somehow gets a free pass.
If there’s a middle path, it’s probably less about lecturing architects and more about who gets the upside. Public development, social housing, land taxes, long-hold ownership. Models where sticking around pays better than flipping.
Otherwise, we’ll keep agreeing on the patterns and wondering why the spreadsheet keeps winning.
I feel like the “aesthetic” approach to city design is doomed because it’s solving a problem that we don’t have. Only a tiny percent of a city is going to be rebuilt over the next ten years, so there’s just no way to make it more aesthetically appealing.
To me this is also why cities tend to be ugly. Any work of art designed by 1000 different people with different aesthetic opinions over 100+ years is going to be ugly. The 1001st person to come along and redesign 1% of the city won’t be able to fix it. Sorry!
See my comment in this thread; what we need is a war.
The problem with Alexander is much deeper. His lack of knowledge of the history of architecture stops him from really seeing the possible options. Add a few “mathematical” sounding claims about relationships and he loses the thread to fulfill his personal formal and ideological biases. It is as though he lacked the capacity to imagine counter examples. Think about churches for example. Do churches follow his rules. Absolutely not, including religious groupings. There is much to be said about architecture as a language, Alexander’s work is thin gruel indeed. Lots of people who like cutesy European villages and are already anti-car from their days backpacking on EURail are easily fooled by this stuff.
The original quote from Alexander reminds me of a joke my mother told me. Someone says to the vicar
"That's a lovely garden that you and God have grown around the church".
The vicar replies:
"You should have seen it when God had it on his own" ;)
The primary function of devolution of local government is to create jobs for bureaucrats. Parkinson's Law is funny because it's true. Already the largest employer by far in any country is the state. Year by year a smaller proportion of the people are engaged in productive work that creates wealth. The rest are parasites. We really, really don't need a city to be split up into fifty boroughs, each with its own council and collection of sub-committees that dictate how often refuse is to be collected, and what color the different recycling bins should be. That's not an exaggeration. That's how councils actually operate.
The ugly city starts with a town planner drawing lines on a map. The planner draws streets and avenues, and divides the real estate into neat box-grids of lots. The major streets of Pretoria, South Africa were designed to be wide enough to turn a wagon drawn by a team of (I think) twelve oxen. Practical, spacious, but not very appealing.
The aesthetic city starts with a war or a huge fire that destroys most buildings. Then there's another war and another fire. Those beautiful Mediterranean towns have been destroyed and rebuilt many times over. There should be a better way to do it.
In a modern UglyCity (TM) a developer sees an opportunity to make a profit by fulfilling the human need for living, retail and industrial spaces. (Denying the profit motive results in Communist Bloc monstrosities.) Say that it's going to be a living space. Say that the developer has a soul and would like to construct a dwelling unit that not only makes a profit, but earns the commendation of others.
The developer is severely constrained by economics. A multiple-family unit of boxes stacked on top of each other may be the only option in that particular neighborhood. A lower density would result in unaffordable housing that stands empty. Renters and buyers will pay more for high-rise apartments with a view.
Home-buyers, regrettably, have been given a say in the matter. I would have said that this is the same terrible mistake as allowing women to choose who they're going to marry, but not everyone understands irony. Americans prefer free-standing homes with timber frames to more durable European designs. A developer who chooses superior European construction over timber, doesn't stay in business very long. The people who are going to buy and live in those houses, have voted the developer out.
And that's how the UglyCity (TM) is created. The town planner, the artificial scarcity of land for development created by the town planner, rent control, building codes, and the pesky home-buyer who wants the largest floor area with a status-enhancing exterior design at the the lowest cost.
One solution is to give the public no say. We will build large blocks of communal housing, and you will live there, end of argument. This works quite well in Singapore, but won't transplant to other societies that allow, for example, the possession of drugs and chewing-gum, and killing people on subways.
I have a vision of large housing estates laid out like a village that developed organically, starting out with the strip development of most actual villages and as the village spread, housing units laid out apparently higgeldy-piggeldy but nevertheless economically, making best use of available space. Cars stay at the front entrance; narrow lanes give pedestrian access. I stayed for a couple of weeks in a self-catering resort in Mallorca like that, and despite the uniform architecture it was very charming. When I had to leave I thought that I would like to live like that.
I had some similar thoughts when I was checking out A Pattern Language. Splendid when descriptive (describing useful patterns) and dreadful when prescriptive (proposing solutions). I recall at one point they were proposing to allocate agricultural areas in spokes radiating from the urban center to allow people access to natural lands. This might work in Roblox or the Sims or some god game where you can customize the map, but in what universe is this even close to possible in the real world? Frankly it was so ludicrous it made me put down the book. Would you recommend I pick it back up again and finish it?