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"We do not need any arbitrary or external criterion of value. The value exists within the unfolding of the wholeness itself. When the wholeness unfolds unnaturally, value is destroyed. When the wholeness unfolds naturally, value is created."
"Real kindness is something quite different, something valuable in itself. It is a true process, not guided by the grasp for a goal, but guided by the minute-to-minute necessity of caring, dynamically, for the feelings and well-being of another."
"Is the way that we view design, planning, and construction -- in all the spheres mentioned, ecosystems, buildings, communities, objects, computers and computer software -- the right way to produce sufficient complexity, and does what we are doing have a chance of success?"
on how to write software that doesn't suck https://t.co/VzVLX8srnh
"...work out rules of the game so that people all over the world --builders, bankers, lay people – – can go forward, doing whatever they do in the world, repairing their surroundings, always accomplishing this one task, then the Earth's environment will steadily be healed."
we're talking total uniqueness https://t.co/lfCH2zSgH8
on ugly buildings, Doomers, and identity politics: https://t.co/nUEwpJiiql
Pattern languages embody knowledge, cultural subtlety, human need, and empirical information about the structure of living environment, in a form which may then be used to generate living centers by a combinatorial unfolding process.
a brutal imposition of geometry on the otherwise soft landscape, though as emergent from the landscape as possible, is necesssary to make the building truly a building with mass and wholeness at odds with much of Alexander's ideas on unfolding and emergent structure, yet...
The Nature of Poetic Order and its application to the problem of Locating Failures in Poems https://t.co/KGYPIKFgZs
What a great description of style that works: "The ways which will not only make a coherent and beautiful work, but one which can be built, in our time, by means we understand, control, and can execute for not impossible amounts of money."
The Form Language: a society's mostly unspoken set of schemata for design and architecture, like the Overton Window for buildings, a tacit constraint on what will be built because it is adjacent possible made possible by current thinking and style
it's not about RETVRN: "Indeed, buildings made with an eye to the past will most often fail to have a living structure, because the process of historical reproduction somehow turns vivid, living structure sour. It congeals, without having real force or real vivacity."
Gradually unfolding the design of buildings and spaces to mold directly with their environment and reality is not an emotional or cultural decision: it's a biological necessity if we are to create living spaces and extend the Earth system in a wholesome way
Imagine this as the planning rule of new highways: "Up to a certain limit, and regardless of extra length, the position of a new freeway should be chosen to leave beautiful and harmonious land untouched, and should be built as far as possible on land which is itself damaged."
Totalitarian Democracy: the system of thought and action which is prescribed by the rules, procedures, and lock-step processes of the modern democratic state, which attempts to shape the world by social routines that are military and regimented, not free or organic.
Totalitarian democracy is the process by which rules, codes, and regulations are born in some context (or worse but commonly made up arbitrarily) and then imposed on other or all contexts making it quite literally impossible or illegal to do things right
What sorts of processes could accomplish the goals of zoning laws (fire hardness, light and air access, etc) while maintaining the freedom to build in a way that is true to the wholeness of the street, the neighborhood, the city?
Why do lifeless buildings get built? Not through some coherent process that generates ugly buildings but "more a kind of idiot consequence, coming from the confluence of effects that no one understood or thought out."
Damn this is all Frederick Taylor's fault. The guy who designed Ford's famous factory line and spend his life spreading his ideas of efficiency to explicitly destroy the tacit knowledge and personal skill and craft that used to define the production of goods and the environment
He knew this tacit knowledge was there and how the good processes worked: https://t.co/Sjid76MoT4
Then tore it apart to lower costs and increase managerial control: 1) Disassociating labor process from the skills. Labor must be independent of craft, tradition, and knowledge 2) Separating conception from execution 3) Gaining monopoly over knowledge to control labor process
what a fucker: https://t.co/ZV8Tbv36bD
Modern "property development" as a process and institution is the core driver of the structure-destroying garbage we build, rooted in the way development of buildings are treated as investments and financed by those with aboslutely no stake in the thing being good
this process is baked into the infrastructure of the world to an alarming degree: https://t.co/4z7AjnsCxO
it's not a rag on Capitalism either: same terrible processes where the decisions are being made by those with no information based on perverse motives drive the vast majority of construction reign in Communist systems, Socialist, everywhere bad times
damn straight https://t.co/Ydilkzgje4