Computing and Communities Beautiful Software; Building Beauty; Rain Magazine; Urbanology; UOregon; Tango Center; Workspot; Christopher Alexander's programmer
Joined February 2009
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Here's an attempt to explain 'unfolding sequences', and include computer people in the audience. Unfolding sequences are natural, pervasive, and extremely powerful. But we don't notice them or use them enough.
youtube.com/watch?v=m1IZqlnE…
As universities compete for wealthier students, they're destroying solid old student housing, to build expensive units. That's simply irresponsible. We want affordability -- so just follow Christopher Alexander's basic rule: youtube.com/shorts/lNsn4CER7…
Market-rate developers & investors purposely, continually raise prices & rents -- and stop building when prices stabilize. So, increasing the market-rate supply does NOT make housing affordable: quite the opposite. At the same time, we're destroying livability, and nature.
Greg Bryant retweeted
Nature of Order Webinar speakers for Spring term: buildingbeauty.org/news/2025…
A new lecture by architect Christopher Alexander from 1995, shown for the first time. 90 minutes of philosophy in action, as he wrestles with complex issues on a real building site, and with questions from an audience of mostly students.
youtube.com/watch?v=a8wPKso-…
Greg Bryant retweeted
The Christopher Alexander & Center for Environmental Structure Archive gives access to 50+ years of work by Alexander/CES, sharing ideas and projects to inspire all who wish to build and repair living environments in which people thrive. Visit at christopher-alexander-ces-ar….
Greg Bryant retweeted
The 29th PLoP 2022 conference continues! See our exciting program, incl. the panel "Design Patterns, then & now" with @WardCunningham, @bigballofmud, @metayoda and @rebeccawb, and the talk "Technology Last: Christopher Alexander's approach to software development" by @greg_bryant
Greg Bryant retweeted
“The great thing about Building Beauty is that it leads to the creation of tangible things that everyone can do… One of Chris’ goals was to empower people to be able to do things for themselves… teaching them the abilities required to do something good.”
Anyone who's seriously interested in studying the work and practicing the approach of Christopher Alexander, with a growing transnational community of his students, colleagues, and friends, can join us this year at buildingbeauty.org/ ...
“Many of us are drawn to this field because we want to make something beautiful for people in this world. I think this impulse is usually crushed out of the students in the first year of architecture school.”
Interview with our Course Director, Yodan Rofè
bit.ly/3CSOyR0
Greg Bryant retweeted
Modern architecture may be sleek and intellectual but much of it makes people feel dead inside. It doesn’t have to be that way as we speed toward the #metaverse
(By @timgorichanaz of @DrexelCCI)
bit.ly/3dl4pga
Are you a community organizer interested in building beautiful, humane, ecologically-sensitive places? Are you a computer person interested in studying how Christopher Alexander's living process works, in its original context? Our open house is Friday!
Curious about the Building Beauty program but not sure if it’s for you? Join our Open House Zoom event on Friday at 16:00 UTC, meet former students, and ask us anything. Your future community of beauty builders might be right there!
Write to [email protected] for a link.
Anyone interested in studying Christopher Alexander's living building process and 'The Nature of Order' while practicing it under his students and colleagues (computer people too, with an additional seminar on moving this material to computing) here's an opening:
Join us for Building Beauty's Open House on Zoom to learn about the course starting in September 2022: 16:00 UTC on July 15,2022. Write to [email protected] to get the link.
buildingbeauty.org/building-…
To fix things, we need to figure out what's broken. We need a diagnosis. But how do we diagnose a place? We must ask ourselves, in the place, whether it has life, whether it helps us to become more alive.
... from a 1994 chat with Christopher Alexander.
youtube.com/watch?v=2V4QYC-P…
Greg Bryant retweeted
"It got to the point where architects thought they could completely dismiss popular opinion. I mean, some architects. The high modernists. We’re talking about the people in the turtlenecks." currentaffairs.org/2022/05/h…
Those interested in looking into the evolution of Christopher Alexander's thought, should check out our huge resource page at beautiful.software ... including articles going back to 1959. The beautiful software initiative is actively continuing his computing research.
“In my opinion, the question ... ‘How can the computer be applied to architectural design?’ is misguided, dangerous, and foolish ... We do not wander about our houses, hammer and saw in hand, wondering where we can apply them ... "
"It will allow you to consider only those aspects of the problem which can be encoded -- and in many cases these are the most trivial and least relevant aspects.” Christopher Alexander, 1964.
From "A Much Asked Question about Computers and Design" by Christopher Alexander in "Architecture and the Computer" proceedings of the First Boston Architectural Center Conference, which included Walter Gropius and Marvin Minsky. h/t to @danklyn ... gregbryant.com/gatemaker/196…
Yes, but it's not too late. I once wondered if people still had the capacity to coöperate, to be sensitive to nature and each other. Chris said -- well, our species hasn't changed, so everyone still has those abilities within them. They're just distracted.
How do you discover principles of quality?
"... Chris realised that the smallest hint of unease about an idea might be the sign of something important."
theguardian.com/artanddesign…
