jeudi, novembre 05, 2009

Slow Urbanism

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I forgot to post a review yesterday so I'll try to do two now before six when Thom Mayne is scheduled to speak here at CCNY's school of Architecture.

30 Books in 30 days Parts 4 and 5: Slow Food and Christopher Alexander

Slow Food CCNY is one of the most popular CCNY related Clubs on FaceBook. This morning over breakfast I started reading a dollar book that has been sitting with the cookbooks in the hallway for a while. I think I thought it was a vegan cookbook at first. The title is SlowFoodAward Bologna 2000 for Defense of the Biodiversity by Cinzia Scaffidi and Corby Kummer. There is no table of contents, after a few pages about delicious food in Bologna, we jump right into a story about Nancy Jones, born in England in 1947 who was kicked out of the country for political reasons married a student from Africa and started a small dairy in Mauritania where milk was thought to neutralize the magical powers of the drinker.

There is something about the stories in this book that give one pause. Camel meat? Really? One might ask? I don't know if this story is true or if there really is an
delicious endangered population of cannibalistic fish called Pez Blanca that only lives in Lake Patzcuaro, thirty kilometers outside of the town of Morelia in the Mexican state of Michoacan and brings a high price at market. But I do believe that the French know how to make good cheese.

Slow Food seems to be a group or movement promoting the idea of scientists interacting through research studies and business ventures with indigenous peoples in the name of preserving ancient ways of life and of doing things in time honored ways. They seem not to be anti-capitalistic nor promoting socialism; rather, a kind kind of conservatism. The people recognized in this book (from Maori potato farmers farmers to Beekeepers and Haviar Harvesters in Turkey) seem to me, well intentioned, college educated folks who are tackling some complicated issues about economics, environments and culture and having a good time doing it.

Oh...here's the table of contents at the end.

And now, for your reading pleasure an essay I wrote last week:

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction described a practical architectural system in a form that a theoretical mathematician or computer scientist might call a generative grammar.
The introduction to APL recommends that this is one half of a single work--Vol I-The Timeless Way of Building (TTWB) explaining the discipline and APL being a source book for putting the discipline into practice. Oddly, Vol. I is published two years after VOL II. These books are small, well-bound, poetically written and elegantly type set. It is no wonder that they have become cult classics amongst urban planners and archtiects.


"To you, mind of no mind in whom the timeless way was born."


Thus reads the inscription to TTWOB. Alexander and company recommend these as tools for creating a common language for communities. TTWOB reads like a Taoist mandate (low pressure, yet assertive) and is described within as a way of creating order out of nothing but ourselves. TTWOB has three main parts: The Quality, The Gate, and The Way. The Quality is described as a nameless quality, both objective and precise. This section deals with such topics as being alive, events, space and of course quality. The Gate is described as a gate made of language through which we may pass to practice the timeless way. The Gate deals with such matters as flowers and seeds, the power of language, sharing, evolution of a common language, and gradual improvement. The Way addresses shaping, process, repair, slow emergence and agelessness.


APL's three main sections (Towns, Buildings and Construction) are comprised of 253 numbered assertions, any of which seem debateable, arranged in decreacing order of size and related to one another at the beginings and ends of each assertion. Some of these are delightfully evocative and imply a way of life that is rich, wholesome, humane, and less capitalistic than socially responsable.


dancing in the street...necklace of community projects...housing in between...green streets... gateways...high places...pools and streams...birth places...holy ground...common land...sleeping in public...animals...south facing outdoors...wings of light...cascading roofs...roof gardens...stair seats...communal eating...small work groups...rooms to rent...fruit trees...vegetable garden...sitting circle...sunny counter...secret place...windows overlooking life...good materials...orniment...different chairs...pools of light



Alexander (according to Wikipedia) is a note worthy chap born in Vienna in 1936 studied physics, mathematics at Cambridge University and received the first PhD in Architecture from Harvard. His doctoral work involved designing a computer program to analyze and create new environments. Alexander has influenced architecture through his writings and teachings more than his completed buildings. He now lives and works on Berkely, CA Titles attributed to Alexander include:

Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964), Community and Privacy (1965), A city is not a tree (1965), The Atoms of Environmental Structure‎ (1967), A Pattern Language which Generates Multi-service Centers (1968), Houses Generated by Patterns (1969), The Oregon Experiment (1975), A Pattern Language, with Ishikawa and Silverstein (1977), The Timeless Way of Building (1979), The Linz Cafe (1981), The Production of Houses (1985), A New Theory of Urban Design (1987), Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets (1993), The Mary Rose Museum (1995), The Nature of Order Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life (2004), The Nature of Order Book 2: The Process of Creating Life (2004), The Nature of Order Book 3: A Vision of a Living World (2004), The Nature of Order Book 4: The Luminous Ground (2003)

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