Digression on the Objectivity of the Fifteen Properties

Christopher Alexander expressed a strong moral conviction that what he called living structure was good, and a lack of it was bad. The way to create living structure, according to Alexander, was through successive applications of (again, what he termed) the fundamental differentiating process, each step featuring one or more of these properties as structure-preserving transformations.

Whether living structure is a real phenomenon—and furthermore, whether it is immoral not to create it when you have the opportunity—are assertions you can have a genuine, good-faith debate about. You can even argue over whether or not a stepwise process of incremental differentiation is necessary to produce it (to the extent that it exists in the first place). That these fifteen properties are present in the built environment, in greater or lesser degree, is not as negotiable. They are conspicuous features of the geometry of the space in question; you shouldn't have to go digging into the drawings to perceive them. They require neither a certification in architecture, nor any professional interpretation to recognize. The only training necessary is the list of properties itself, with handful of examples, that anybody can memorize in an otherwise idle afternoon.

As I age, I inch farther toward the position that any sufficiently sophisticated and/or esoteric rationale for imposing one's will onto the public is indistinguishable from arbitrary. While said rationales need not be inherently disingenuous, they will nonetheless often be construed as such by the public. Where I've landed currently is what I'll call the Einstein Paraphrase: make your rationale as simple as possible, but no simpler—where “simple” not only denotes few moving parts, but those that remain are familiar. If you can't ground your rationale in language and concepts that ordinary people understand, that's a sign you don't understand it very well yet yourself.