News from Building Beauty
The Beautiful Software Seminar
Building Beauty invites computer professionals to work, study, and conduct research with a network of Christopher Alexander’s colleagues and students
Beautiful Software is a seminar and research group carried out in addition to the Building Beauty Core course.
The Building Beauty core course regards the creation of tangible material in the built environment. It consists of lectures, reading discussions, hands-on projects and small group meetings, a commitment of about 20 hours per week for an academic year of two semesters.
Beautiful Software is an additional 4 hours a week. It consists of a once-a-week 2-hour meeting where the material is discussed, and the group self-manages projects and research. In addition, we expect about 2 hours of work on the Beautiful Software joint project or research.
It is our belief that this maximizes the chance that the participants will be exposed to the material in a fashion that lets them fully make use of the core discoveries and motivations behind the work of Christopher Alexander, his students, and colleagues.
Ryan Singer, a highly respected thought leader in software engineering who has closely followed and built on Christopher Alexander’s work for many years, gave an introductory lecture on July 31, 2020: “Christopher Alexander, A Primer for System Designers.”
Ryan talks with Greg Bryant, a collaborator of Christopher Alexander’s and creator of the Gatemaker app. The subject is how to go beyond implementation patterns and apply Alexander’s principles on the front-end to make software that makes people feel more alive.
The Nature of Order Series: Book 4 Final Lecture, 25 June 2020
This is an invitation to the last session of the webinar which will take place on Thursday, June 25 at 16:00 UK time. In this session we will have a roundtable discussing the concluding chapters of the books, and the world view they propose as a whole. The participants in the roundtable will be: Maggie Moore Alexander, the president of Building Beauty and the Center for Environmental Structure; Prof. Hajo Neis, long time collaborator with Christopher Alexander, professor at the University of Oregon Department of Architecture and the Director of PUARL - Portland Urban Architecture Research Lab. Architects Munishwar Ashish Ganju and Narendra Dengle, authors of the book The Discovery of Architecture, and our colleagues in developing Building Beauty as a network of schools throughout the world.
People who'd like a link to this session, or would like to be included in our 2020-21 lecture series are invited to contact natureoforder@buildingbeauty.org.
The Nature of Order Series: Book 4, 18 June 2020
The lecture series continues with Savyasaachi on the theme “About Yourself.” He will share "some lessons I have imbibed in the course of working with forest dwellers, architects, crafts persons and students at the National Institute of Design and the department of Sociology Jamia MIllia Islamia are:
- it is necessary to work hard to not let your life be out-sourced,
-it is important to learn to spend time with one's own self and be available to others and,
-it is important to discern what is worthy of forgetting and what is worth of remembering because to forget everything and to remember everything undermines reverence for life".
Dr Savyasaachi is Professor at the department of sociology Jamia Millia Islamia. He has worked in the fields of political ecology, indigenous people, development, social movements, and conservation architecture. He has taught social anthropology to students of ‘conservation architecture, at the School of Planning and Architecture Delhi. At National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, he has taught weeklong SLA courses on Indian Society and culture, has been sharing with textile students ways of doing field work and Craft Documentation and has taught to a course of ‘visual language’. At NIRMA University Ahmedabad he has taught a course on :History of Objects’ to students of industrial design He has been in country faculty as well travelling Anthropology faculty for the International Honors Program.
The Nature of Order Lecture Series, Book 4, 11 June 2020
In today’s session we will have two speakers: Kathryn Langstaff and Alfred Bay. Kathryn and Alfred both studied for their Masters in Architecture with Alexander in the 1990's and as Graduate Student Instructors participated in teaching this material to undergraduate students. Kathryn is a practicing architect and activist, now based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, and Alfred is a contractor and builder in the San Francisco Bay Area.
They have both contributed essays to In Pursuit of Living Architecture, which was edited by Kyriakos Pontikis and myself. Kathryn will discuss chapter 22 of The Nature of Order, Book 4 - Making wholeness heals he maker: A generative design experiment for personal healing and ecosystem restoration. Alfred will discuss chapter 23 - The resolution of forces.
You can read essays from In Pursuit of Living Architecture here:
As always people who'd like a link to the session are invited to contact natureoforder@buildingbeauty.org.
Announcing: The Beautiful Software Initiative at Building Beauty
The Beautiful Software Initiative at Building Beauty is a new emphasis area for computer people and technologists who are interested in the application of Alexander’s The Nature of Order to their fields. This community will join the BB students and staff, and engage in creating tools to meet the technical challenges of amplifying, assisting and perpetuating Building Beauty’s educational, research, and practical efforts on behalf of the environment and people worldwide. For more information on how you can be involved, please contact software@buildingbeauty.org.
The Nature of Order Lecture Series, Book 4, 4 June 2020
Christopher Robin Andrews, architect, town planner, carpet maker, and ornamenteur, will speak on Chapters Six and Seven of Book Four, The Luminous Ground, of The Nature of Order by Christopher Alexander: "The Blazing One" and "Color and Inner Light".
"When I see the beautiful tile, or walk into the beautiful building, it is as if I just lift up the corner of the flap and temporarily see into the blazing "one". It looks like heaven. The idea, then, is that every part of our physical world is shadowed by this parallel domain of I-stuff, and that each part of our ordinary world, if it is given the right structure, will lift the flap or open the door, and give us a glimpse into that domain." (Alexander)
"Reality as we experience it is full of color, saturated by color, dominated by color at every turn, in every point, in every line, in every shadow." (Alexander)
This week’s webinar is on Thursday, 4 June, at 15:00 UTC time.
If you would like to attend the webinar series, please send an email to natureoforder@buildingbeauty.org and ask to be included.
Registration for Building Beauty's 2020-21 Academic Year is Open
Registration is open for Building Beauty’s 2020-21 academic year, which begins in October. Please contact us at hello@buildingbeauty.org to explore your interest in joining us.
Building Beauty will be online. The course will be delivered online with students and faculty in different locations, all working toward the repair and enhancement of their homes and communities, and developing a shared experience of how Building Beauty principles apply across cultures and built environments.
The first term (October – December) will be online only. If travel restrictions are lifted to allow travel to Sorrento, Italy, by January 2021, students will have the option of either spending the second term (January-April) in Sorrento, or completing the second term online.
The Nature of Order Lecture Series, Book 4, 28 May 2020
TO BE OR NOT TO BE, with Jaap Dawson
We can build a world of living beings. If we haven’t learned not to, we build that world automatically.
Let’s look at how we’ve always built. Let’s look at what moved us, what drove us, to build living beings. Let’s look at examples of how we can still build living beings.
We build a world of living beings when we’re in touch with the living source of our own lives.
Jaap is an architect in Delft, The Netherlands, where he taught architectural design at the Technische Universiteit.
This week’s webinar is on Thursday, 28 May, at 16:00 UK time.
If you would like to attend the webinar series, please send an email to natureoforder@buildingbeauty.org and ask to be included.
The Nature of Order Lecture Series, Book 4, 21 May 2020
Beauty and the Nature of Matter: The Legacy of Christopher Alexander, with Nikos Salingaros
Is beauty an intrinsic part of how the universe works? In the first 50 pages of his book The Nature of Order, Book 4: The Luminous Ground, Christopher Alexander describes the connective process that leads to life’s greatest experiences, which are also felt from great architecture. Yet architectural culture and education avoid this intimate connection, ignoring the tools necessary to achieve living structure, which come from the humanistic and religious mind-sets in past societies. Part of the blame goes to the mechanistic model used in science to derive useful results, but which has now supplanted reality. A strictly mechanistic worldview allows no place for an architecture that connects with our deepest self, thereby reducing the complexity of existence and life.
This week’s webinar is on Thursday, 16:00 UK time.
If you would like to attend the webinar series, please send an email to natureoforder@buildingbeauty.org and ask to be included.
The Nature of Order Lecture Series, 13 May 2020
This week’s webinar is on Thursday, 16:00 UTC.
Field Reports in a Pandemic Time
While we’ve been diving into the theory and practice of The Nature of Order, a crisis of epochal scale has risen to confront our human family. We’re a rather unusual group of people from a wide range of countries who feel a resonance with Chris Alexander’s ideas. We’ve been reaching to understand the properties of beauty, wholeness and aliveness, the processes through which it comes into being, and how we put this into practice in our lives. At this point between Books 3 & 4, we’d like to step back and listen to viewpoints of what all this means in this pandemic time. What is your field report from where you live? In the session on Thursday, each of us will have an opportunity to speak briefly to the question, followed by an open discussion among us. We look forward to hearing from you then!
Ross Chapin, Kate Ledogar
If you would like to attend the webinar series, please send an email to natureoforder@buildingbeauty.org and ask to be included.
The Nature of Order Lecture Series, Book 3, 6 May 2020
Building Beauty’s The Nature of Order lecture series continues on 6 May, 2020, at 16:00 UTC.
As a conclusion to Book 3 of the The Nature of Order and its description of A Vision of a Living World, we are hosting Professor Howard Davis for a lecture on The Re-emergence of the Productive City. Howard is a Professor of Architecture at the University of Oregon. He has studied and collaborated with Christopher Alexander since the 1970's. He is co-author of the book The Production of Houses, and author of the books: The Culture of Building, and Living Over the Store: Architecture and Local Urban Life.
If you would like to attend the webinar series, please send an email to natureoforder@buildingbeauty.org and ask to be included.
The Nature of Order Lecture Series, Book 3, 30 April 2020
Building Beauty’s The Nature of Order lecture series continues on 30 April, 2020, at 16:00 UTC. Hans Joachim Neis, co-author of The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World-Systems (2012), will talk with us about building the Eishin Campus in Japan in the context of chapters of 14-17 in Book 3. Hajo is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Oregon, Director of the Portland Urban Architecture Research Lab (PUARL), and a long standing colleague of Christopher Alexander.
If you would like to attend the webinar series, please send an email to natureoforder@buildingbeauty.org and ask to be included.
The Nature of Order Lecture Series, Book 3, 23 April 2020
Building Beauty’s The Nature of Order lecture series continues on 23 April, 2020, at 16:00 UTC. Next in the series of conversations on Book 3, A Vision of a Living World, is with Susan Ingham, architect in Seattle, Washington, and co-founder of Building Beauty.
Susan will be discussing the uniqueness of people's individual homes and the character of rooms through examples from her own projects as a residential architect in Seattle.
If you would like to attend the webinar series, please send an email to natureoforder@buildingbeauty.org and ask to be included.
The Nature of Order Lecture Series, Book 3, 14 April 2020
Building Beauty’s The Nature of Order lecture series continues on 15 April, 2020, at 16:00 UTC. Book 3, A Vision of a Living World, chapters 9-11, will be explored, which all deal with designing and cultivating living neighborhoods.
We will host Dr. Michael Mehaffy who will discuss his work, and in particular his contributions to the Center for Future of Places at KTH, his involvement with the New Urban Agenda, and his recent book: A New Pattern Language for Growing Regions.
If you would like to attend the webinar series, please send an email to natureoforder@buildingbeauty.org and ask to be included.
The four volumes of The Nature of Order by Christopher Alexander, 2002-2005
HOME 2020 Competition Launch
See the video of the March 2nd launch of our third, worlwide HOME Competition here.
Building Beauty is hosting this year’s annual HOME competition with the University of Hartford in Connecticut, Alfred State College in New York, and University of San Francisco in California.
Anyone who wishes to participate is welcome. Please contact Karen Erickson (kerickson.duos@gmail.com) to express your interest and receive further information about how to join online lectures and presentations.
Launch - March 2 + Preliminary designs due - March 9 + Feedback is sent to students - March 12
Final project due - March 24 + Project presentation - March 27
YOUR HOUSE
The requirements are:
600 sq ft/66.7 sq m on a flat site anywhere, but specified
No budget
FORMAT: one square image, digital in any media — photos of model, scans of drawings,
CAD, Revit — anything, but square and 600dpi x 600dpi
Call for Papers: New Design Patterns
The Journal New Design Ideas calls for new tools expressed in the Pattern format, which is a 1-3 page design method summary pioneered by Christopher Alexander and his colleagues in the classic book A Pattern Language. This comes after the launch of A New Pattern Language For Developing Regions on February 12, 2020. Patterns will be reviewed as regular articles. Those that are published can then be further considered by the separate team at the Online Pattern Repository for inclusion, to become companions to the new book of patterns. Contact Editor-in-Chief Nikos Salingaros.
A New Pattern Language for Growing Regions, and Wiki site for writing and editing your own patterns
Michael Mehaffy and his colleagues have compiled a collection of 80 new patterns to meet urban challenges, including some new kinds of of patterns and patterns addressing new urban issues. The new patterns are intended for people to use as “seeds” for their own projects around the world. Ward Cunningham has designed a wiki “repository” in which people will be able to write and edit their own patterns,. Right now the site is read-only, but it will be editable and savable as a separate copy very soon.
The work is being shared through UN-Habitat at the World Urban Forum, and is available through the wiki site, as well as downloadable pdf, and the book at Stasis.
Working Cities: Architecture, Place and Production
Howard Davis’ new book is out now. It describes the history of industry in its relation to architecture and urban form, argues for the continuing importance of cities in which things are crafted and manufactured, and proposes strategies and patterns with which cities can support local, humane industrial economies and the people who work in them. The book is published by Routledge UK.
WHY are We Doing This?
Duo Dickinson’s lecture at Alfred State College Department of Architecture and Design, on September 23, 2019. See video here.
