A Pattern Language
One way to describe and organize patterns of community as they emerge.
(Expected reading time: 15 minutes.)
Dear Brilliant Reader,
This week’s edition of Build Notes will give you some background on the concepts of patterns and pattern languages. I’ll explain why I think this is a helpful way to gather and organize information about thriving communities, as those communities emerge. My goal this year is to launch Patterns For Building, a collaborative pattern language for community-minded humans, as an outgrowth of this lil’ newsletter and podcast. Let’s see what happens!
First, the Earth cooled
Our journey begins in the Wayback Machine, where we shall set the big chonky dial to the summer of 1977. The OG Star Wars is a surprise smash hit in theaters. The #1 pop song in the US, heaven help us, is “You Light Up My Life” by Debby Boone. Jimmy Carter is President. And a group of architects and anthropologists from Berkeley is publishing an 1,100-page doorstop of a book called A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction.
(For the sake of brevity, we will call the book APL from here. Also, while we’re getting parenthetical for a moment, I was actually born not long before this book came out. A few years ago, one of my kids asked me, in all sincerity, if we had color photography yet when I was kid. Sigh.)
APL introduces itself on the dust jacket in this way: “You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. … People should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical … but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people.”
The book contains 253 short essays, starting from the level of towns and narrowing progressively to small details of construction for a single building. (You can access the full set of patterns online, to help you get a sense for what’s there.) The essays describe a typical problem or concern in creating human-scale communities, talk through the factors involved, and then propose solutions.
None of this was invented in a vacuum. The team of authors, led by Christopher Alexander, spent over a decade traveling around the world and studying towns, neighborhoods, and homes across a wide range of cultures. They rate each of their own essays with asterisks, noting the patterns that seem to be more universal in nature with a star or two, like a Michelin-rated restaurant. There is space in this approach for varying levels of confidence in the solutions.
APL also contains a pre-Internet version of hyperlinking. Each individual pattern is numbered, and linked to both antecedent and successor patterns at varying levels within the language. You can read the book straight through if you wish. But the authors emphasize that “no pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world, only to the extent that [it] is supported by other patterns: the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns that are embedded in it.” For this and many other reasons, I would consider APL a foundational text of the Postmodern era.
Let’s look at a specific pattern to see how all of this works in practice.
A (non) random walk
Pattern #120, a favorite of mine as a devoted walker, is titled Paths and Goals. It starts like this:
“The layout of paths will seem right and comfortable only when it is compatible with the process of walking. And the process of walking is far more subtle than one might imagine.”
The authors then launch into a brief but clear explanation of this process. tl;dr - we walk toward something in the distance, until we get somewhat near it, and then we shift focus toward the next landmark in the direction of our ultimate destination. This image illustrates the basic process:
And then they show how it looks in an actual neighborhood:
Their proposal for this pattern: “To lay out paths, first place goals at natural points of interest. Then connect the goals to one another to form the paths. The paths may be straight, or gently curving between goals; their paving should swell around the goal. The goals should never be more than a few hundred feet apart.”
There are 7 patterns before Paths and Goals that are considered antecedents, and are mentioned at the beginning of this pattern. I won’t review them all here, but Positive Outdoor Space (#106) is worth mentioning. It notes that “outdoor spaces which are merely ‘left over’ between buildings will, in general, not be used.” Positive Outdoor Space talks about open-air rooms, like courtyards and town squares, and how important they are to feeling welcome and at ease in the outdoor spaces of both a home and a town.
Paths and Goals then connects onward to 8 more patterns below it, ranging from Path Shape (#121) to Paving With Cracks Between The Stones (#247). (The APL authors left no stone unturned.)
Wide-ranging influence
I first learned about APL in 1996, from a member of my extended family who is an interior designer. It was an important enough moment in my life that I remember the exact details of where I was when it happened. This family member used the book to design her own home, and she referred to it extensively in her professional work.
Ever since then, I’ve been obsessed with APL, and have tried to apply this way of thinking to my own work. Partly this is because I have the kind of brain that can run up a decent RAADS-R score. I just love patterns as a general thing. But as I’ve learned more about our present Postmodern transition, I’ve come to appreciate that APL is the kind of book that answers questions you didn’t know you’d been wanting to ask. For example:
Why are some porches and balconies super comfortable for hanging out, and other ones feel awkward? Well, you need a Six-Foot Balcony (#167) to do the job right.
Could we adapt our education system to make better use of the resources and technologies available to us? Maybe a Network of Learning (#18) would work better.
How do we make our government more responsive to us at all levels? If you’re looking for the right “unit of measure” for community size, a Community of 7000 (#12) might be the answer.
Not everything in APL has aged beautifully, to be sure. But on balance, this is a wonderful collection of thought-provoking arguments for how to make spaces that thrive.
Going all the way back to when I was a kid - yes, you little monster, we had color photography - I could sense that things weren’t quite working right in the world. My neurodivergent sense of justice has been on high alert for a long damned time.
But what’s actually missing, and how do we talk about it? When we see possible solutions, how do we share them with each other? APL offered me not just a set of specific ideas, but also an example of how to organize answers, as they emerge in real time around us. Patterns and pattern languages feel so useful to me that I have been trying to apply them to my own life and work for decades, over and over again, like Richard Dreyfuss with the mashed potatoes in Close Encounters.
So here we are, you and I.
It’s worth noting that APL has never gone out of print since it was first published. Also worth noting: Christopher Alexander’s work has been hugely influential in the technology industry, particularly in software design and development, creating yet another point of connection for me as someone who has ended up with a career in the software world.
As it happens, in the same year I first learned about APL, Alexander gave a keynote address to a branch of the US high tech professional association, the ACM. His problem statement still resonates today:
“We are so ignorant about how to do this, to make living structure on Earth, it is lamentable. And it is very, very serious, becomes more serious every day, because the population of the Earth is growing, and the Earth is being damaged more and more — and with the damage to our towns and buildings, we too are being damaged.”
In the coming weeks, I’m going to write essays that I hope will start to point us toward some emergent patterns for thriving Postmodern communities. APL itself has much to say about thriving communities, of course. But as a work of architecture first and foremost, their pattern language is mostly concerned with the arrangement of physical space. With Build Notes, and then Patterns for Building, I want to create a sort of companion to APL, which addresses the organizational, emotional, and spiritual patterns that will help us turn this world inside out.
I will start by writing about some habits of mind, some ways of seeing and being, that feel important to this work and how we show up in community. Next week, though, we will first take a moment to dream about the future that awaits us on the other side of all of this patterning.
When I launch the podcast in March, I’m going to start gathering examples of actual work in progress out in the world. In this way, I want to give our small-but-mighty community some grist for the mill, some conversation starters on both conceptual and practical levels.
I will also be looking for ways to connect us directly with each other; I am very much open to suggestions here. I participate in other communities that use Discord servers, online discussion fora, and other tools. We shall see what makes sense in this specific context.
The last word this week comes from a couple of the early Quakers. First, from George Fox:
“Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them. Then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world.”
And then, Pennsylvania’s own William Penn:
“Let us then try what love can do, to mend a broken world.”
Yours in cheerful walking,
Michael
Build Notes is a publication of Leaders in Practice LLC, PO Box 241, Glenside, PA 19038. Build Notes is Pennsylvania born and made.