News from Building Beauty
Architect Nabeel Hamdi Interview
A pioneer in participatory design, Nabeel Hamdi speaks with David Getzin about the how "trickle up" process brings successful results, the broad shift away from architects as commodifiers towards architecture as a service, and much more.
Architect Susan Ingham Interview
An engaging discussion of adaptive design, Susan Ingham talks with David Getzin about her unique work and how it draws upon the methods of Christopher Alexander to provide architectural solutions that truly enrich the lives of the occupants.
Interview Architect Chris Andrews: The Line of the Arabesque
Chris Andrews presents a fascinating look at how the methods he learned from Christopher Alexander generate astounding results in his work with Turkish carpets, from the advantages natural and organic dyes, all the way up to deepening an understanding of fractal structure expressed in the process of weaving.
Interview with Besim S. Hakim
Besim S. Hakim’s response to the question: “BUILDING BEAUTY IS AN EFFORT TO LEARN ABOUT THE BEAUTY THAT MAKES A DIFFERENCE IN THE REAL WORLD: WHAT IS YOUR WORK GOING TO CONTRIBUTE TO THAT?”
During the Fall of 1975 I and ten of my senior architecture students spent nine weeks in the village of Sidi Bou Sa’id located 16 kilometers north of Tunis the capital of Tunisia. The village is beautiful and when confronted with documenting the work that the students undertook during their stay, it became obvious and necessary to articulate the reasons why the village was determined to be beautiful. At the time of working on the first edition of the study, published in 1978 and re-issued in 2009 (Hakim, 1978, 2009) I became aware of the book A Pattern Language (1977) by Christopher Alexander and other colleagues which suggested that the existence of many of the patterns in a built environment would ensure a high quality and thus achieve beauty. Of the 253 patterns in the book, 92 were found to be embodied in the village and of those 27% related to the village scale and 73% to the building scale and related construction details. The results are documented in the Conclusions chapter of the book, pages 142-152. What is important to note here is that the people who were involved in building, since the thirteenth century, did not identify specific patterns as documented in APL but were a part of the generative process that shaped the village and addressed the challenges of growth and change.
I have documented the workings of the generative process in (Hakim, 1986, 2007, 2008, 2014). My work in addressing the question of beauty is at the level of the neighborhood, town and city. The work is directly useful for providing the knowledge and insight for developing the structure of a generative process that is designed for particulars of a specific project and/or location, such as revitalizing an existing historic town or site, developing a new neighborhood, or repairing existing neighborhoods.
Hakim, Besim S. (Editor, 1978, 2009). Sidi Bou Sa’id, Tunisia: Structure and Form of a Mediterranean Village, re-published in 2009 by EmergentCity Press and available from the online bookseller: Amazon.com.
Hakim, B.S. (1986). Arabic-Islamic Cities: Building and Planning Principles. Kegan Paul International, London. Second revised edition, 1988. Paperback edition, 2008.
Hakim, B.S. (2007). “Generative processes for revitalizing historic towns or heritage districts”, Urban Design International, Vol. 12, No. 2/3, pp. 87-99.
Hakim, B.S. (2008). “Mediterranean urban and building codes: origins, content, impact, and lessons”, Urban Design International, Vol.13, No.1, pp. 21-40.
Hakim, B.S. (2014). Mediterranean Urbanism: Historic Urban/Building Rules and Processes. Springer, Dordrecht, Heidelberg, New York, London.
Hakim, B.S. (Editor, 2017). Rules for Compact Urbanism: Ibn al-Rami’s 14th Century Treatise, EmergentCity Press. Available from the online bookseller: Amazon.com.
There are three files from Christopher Alexander’s writing that I would like to point out and whose contents overlaps with my research and findings of traditional towns and cities. These files are:
-- “Sustainability and Morphogenesis: The Rebirth of a Living World” (2007/2008) published in Structurist, nos. 47/48, pages 12-19. The first (page 12) is attached. This page provides a definition of the term Morphogensis: ‘it is the process by which organisms are shaped, by growth. In particular, it is the process by which embryos grow into organisms’. An aspect of Morphogenesis is the working of the Generative Process that underlies the process of growth.
-- “What is an Unfolding?” (2006). Available from livingneighborhoods.org. 5 pages. Unfolding is a dynamic process, and it has an underlying feature that Alexander describes as structure-preserving transformations that is embedded in the particulars of a locality, and becomes operational by the input of the people doing the work and the process preserves the wholeness of the built environment that emerges. The results will be unique to each locality and situation.
-- “Generative Codes have evolved from Pattern Languages, but are much more sophisticated generating systems” (2006). Available from livingneighborhoods.org. 2 pages. Alexander defines the term Generative Codes as a system of unfolding steps that enable people in a community to create a wholesome and healthy neighborhood. The steps are governed by rules of unfolding that are not rigid, but depend on context, and on what came before. The rules work in a way that is similar to the rules that nature follows to unfold an organism or a natural landscape, much as genetic codes unfold embryos.
Interview with Bin Jiang
In this interview, Bin Jiang discusses how he discovered Christopher Alexander's ideas, how these ideas foresaw Google PageRank before Google, how they are more profound than Benoit Mandelbrot's fractals, about their connections to scientific discovery, and how his own pioneering mathematical work directly applies to projects at Building Beauty.
David Getzin: What are some of your ideas for the school? How did you come across Christopher Alexander’s ideas?
Bin Jiang: I came across The Nature of Order through reading Nikos Salingaros’ papers and books, so I ordered the four-volume book in my school library when it was first published. But I did not read it in detail until around 2008 after I have studied urban street networks for more than 10 years, and published many papers on street hierarchies, power laws, and traffic flow prediction, very much along the line of statistical physics.
To be honest, The Nature of Order is not an easy reading for me, particularly at the very beginning. However, as soon as I started to capture Alexander’s ideas – his profound thought in design, I could not stop, so I read all his previous works: about 16 books and many other papers and reports as much as I can get. From my experiance, his works should be read as a whole rather than fragmented pieces. As I remarked in one of my papers, Alexander’s living geometry is more profound than Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractal geometry; fractal geometry is mainly for understanding complexity, while living geometry for creating complex or living structures.
Now I can link my quantitative studies on cities to Alexander’s theory of centers or living geometry. For example, there are two fundamental laws of geography: Scaling law of far more small things than large ones, and Tobler’s law of more or less similar things, which is also referred to as the first law of geography formulated by Waldo Tobler in the 1970s: “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things”. The scaling law can be more truly rephrased as the scaling hierarchy of numerous smallest, a very few largest, and some in between the smallest and the largest. In fact, scaling law is essentially about differentiation – one of the two design principles embedded in Alexander’s 15 geometric or transformation properties. The other design principle adaptation is in line with Tobler’s law. These two laws can be said to be those of living structure, which inheres in space across scales ranging from the Planck length (10^-43 m) to the scale of the universe itself (10^27 m). These design principles, or laws of living structures, can be directly applied to design of our built environment. These are also some of my ideas for the buildingbeauty school.
David Getzin: Could you summarize about your views on how Google PageRank and The Nature of Order connect?
Bin Jiang: This is a very deep question! We know PageRank is a key technology behind the phenomenal success of Google. In my paper entitled “Wholeness as a hierarchical graph to capture the nature of space”, I developed, based on Alexander’s definition of wholeness, a mathematical model of wholeness or life or beauty. In the model, I combined a topological representation of space and PageRank metric in order to measure or quantify degree of wholeness or life or beauty. The power of PageRank lies on its recursive definition: an important page is one to which many important pages point. As an example, to ask how important a person is, you must know how important the friends are, the friends of these friends, and the friends’ friends’ friends, and so on until virtually all people on the planet are considered. Alexander defined wholeness or life or beauty also in a recursive manner; see an Appendix in Book 1 of The Nature of Order – a beautiful center is one which many beautiful centers support. Here I would like to point out a fact that Alexander had the very first edition of The Nature Order in 1981, one year before his famous debate with Peter Eisenman at Harvard. Although Google’s PageRank idea was initially taken from the literature around the 1980s, Alexander independently developed this idea of mathematics, by which I mean that the recursive definition of wholeness or life or beauty is really original.
David Getzin: Does it sound right to you that because of PageRank deals with hyperlinks, architectural spaces that share proximity are related in terms of how they enhance each other or not? (This leads to discussion of Strong Centers.)
Bin Jiang: Yes, you are right! An architectural space – actually any space as noted by Alexander, is a complex network of numerous nesting and overlapping centers – the fundamental idea of the theory of centers or living geometry. This network thinking or precisely complex network has become very hot in the science community following the works of Duncan Watts, Albert-László Barabási, and Google’s two founders around 2000. BUT, Alexander had the complex network thinking in the 1980s, even earlier as shown in his classic – “A city is not a tree”. I had some remarks on Alexander’s pioneering thinking in these two papers:
A Complex Network Perspective on Alexander's Wholeness
Yes, there are far more low-degree centers than high-degree centers. This is what underlies scaling law or differentiation principle. Eventually, strong centers are emerged within a complex whole.
David Getzin: It certainly appears that this applies to the natural world just as much as to the world of architecture.
Bin Jiang: Yes indeed, Alexander’s work is beyond architecture, and brings science and art or humanities into one towards the third culture (with respect to C. P. Snow’s famous lecture on two cultures). I am a geographer, so I have tried to provide analytical evidence that geographic space is a living structure at country scale, at city scale, at building scale, even at the scale of an ornament. Living structure exists not only at the scale of geographic space, but all scales ranging from the smallest (Planck length mentioned above) to the largest (the scale of universe). To this point, I should mention the last year’s Nobel Prize to three quantum physicists for their key contribution on topology. I truly believe the topology is related to living structure at some finest scales.
David Getzin: Regarding the work with the school, it is useful to have both quantitative and qualitative methods at hand so you can measure with feeling as well as complimentary metrics. You can compare this to other advances in science, such as color. What are you most looking forward to in bringing this type of research to the school?
Bin Jiang: I truly believe that Alexander’s work is essentially quantitative, although he suggested using human feeling or the feeling of wholeness to measure degree of wholeness or life or beauty. Of course the quantitative would lead to the qualitative – living structure, or degree of life or beauty. Let’s use temperature as an example. Before the thermometer was invented, we human beings could sense temperature based on our feeling – the feeling of temperature, so we can sense something hot or cold. Now with thermometer, we can accurately measure temperature. This is the same for wholeness or life or beauty. With the mathematical model (or beautimeter) I mentioned above, we can measure degree of wholeness or life or beauty more accurately. I therefore look forward to applying beautimeter or the kind of research to the school in Naples.
David Getzin: So it seems that this type of feeling [of wholeness] becomes more like a distinct type of sense perception, like perceiving [other objectively measurable phenomena] color or harmony?
Bin Jiang: The feeling of wholeness is objective, so it is unlike idiosyncratic feelings, which vary from people to people. Alexander said that 90% of our feelings are shared, and idiosyncratic feelings account for only 10% of our feelings. I tend to put beauty into two types: surface beauty which is in the eye of the beholder (being subjective), and structural beauty which is objective. Taking human beings for example, we all have different or unique beauty on the surface. However, structurally or at a deep level, we are all the same in terms of the scaling hierarchy of numerous atoms (being the smallest), dozens of organs (being the largest), and some in between the smallest and the largest). It is the fine structure or scaling hierarchy that makes us to have spirit or soul, according to Alexander.
David Getzin: Are you looking forward to pursuing the use of these metrics with students in the building environment in Naples?
Bin Jiang: Absolutely! In order to build a good or beautiful environment, we must rely on the 90% of our shared feeling – the feeling of wholeness, rather than idiosyncratic feelings. Unfortunately, modern architecture and modernist urban planning have relied on the 10% idiosyncratic feelings for building our environment. Misguided by the arbitrary feelings, there is little wonder that the built environment has been deteriorating. According to Alexander, the value of built environment is NOT an opinion, but a matter of fact. It is time to rely on the scientific thinking or Alexander’s living geometry to make or re-make, to heal or re-heal our built environment.
Thank you very much David for the stimulating interview!
Munishwar Nath Ashish Ganju Interview
Munishwar Nath Ashish Ganju and David Getzin have a fascinating conversation about ancient philosophical values, the biological practicality of urban periphery building, architecture as a form of yoga, how making heals the maker, and reviving wisdom "lost for a thousand years."
Narendra Dengle Interview
Narendra Dangle and David Getzin talk about his meeting Maggie and Sergio, the founding ethos of the program and how architects do well to listen to and work with the extant wisdom of local building methods.
Yodan Rofè Interview
We talk with Yodan Rofè about how the Building Beauty Program is like no other in the world. He provides information on his extensive background with collaborations in living process, the attempt to make objective measurements of value in built form and what he sees for the school going forward.
Michael Mehaffy Interview
Watch our interview with Michael Mehaffy, discussing the intersection of technology and hands-on experience in the Building Beauty program.
Maggie Moore Alexander Interview
Here is our interview video with Maggie Moore Alexander, discussing the Building Beauty program and her prior work with Christopher Alexander.
Sergio Porta Interview
Watch the new video, our interview with Sergio Porta, discussing the origins of and vision for the Building Beauty Program.