Beautiful places - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)

Dan Boland 03 Jun 05

Oops… looks like you need to add a clear: left to your stylesheet. ;D

Ty West 04 Jun 05

Elegant simplicity. Where have I seen this before?

indi 04 Jun 05

amazing how much our mood can affect our perceptions … I’m tired and worn out and so these look kind of drap and dreary … I’ll have to look again after resting :-)

Christopher Fahey 04 Jun 05

Ryan, thanks for the links.

I explored Alexander’s site quite a bit, and was particularly interested in his 1982 debate with Peter Eisenman. The debate repeatedly seemed to boil down to a debate between architecture for disembodied brains and architecture for human beings (i.e., intellectual versus emotional architecture).

Peter Eisenman is a fascinating figure for me. His buildings are interesting to look at on paper, but preposterous to even conceive of building (his World Trade Center site proposal was, to me, an insult). When I was a student at Cooper Union in the early 90’s, Eisenman (who has taught at Cooper) was a finalist in a competition to build Cooper’s first dorm building. The model was fascination, but everyone who looked at it agreed: I would not want to live there. The tiny rooms had acute angles (can’t put furniture in corners!), tiny windows flush with the floors (no light!), and other inconvenient conceptual details that stood in opposition to comfortable human habitation.

I do find the images of Alexander’s architecture fairly sentimental, but is that a bad thing? As I get older and further removed from the academic world of art and design, I find myself increasingly impatient with the coldness and over-intellectualness of design from the position Eisenman exemplifies. I think many designers want to like minimalism because it is flattering to beleive that the stimulation of one’s mind is more important than one’s physical or emotional pleasure. It’s the ascetic urge, I suppose.

But I’ve always thought that good minimalism wasn’t ascetic at all, and that the best minimalists weren’t minimal at all. Peter Halley once argued that minimalist art is actually as chock-full of meaning and metaphor as any figurative painting, insofar as it almost always stands as a commentary on modern industrial production and the new machine-made physical forms that surround us.

It’s also always been striking to me that so many designers say they love the so-called minimalism of the Eameses without realizing just how baroque their home was and how downright sensuous their designs really are. I think the Eameses would find the idea of living in a home with steel-and-concrete minimalist interior decor about as appealing as the idea of living in a slaughterhouse. I think Christopher Alexander would agree.

-Cf

Mr. Joel Dueck 04 Jun 05

It is refreshing to find a modern architect who designs for the human being and not for the glossy photo-world of coffee table books. However, the framework outlined in Timeless Way, Pattern Language has less to do with architecture per se, than it has to do with social engineering, and in it he displays little to no flexibility. The design vocabulary of cities & outdoor spaces of the Great Plains, for example, is utterly foreign to his framework, which implicitly calls for and venerates high population densities.

The pictures are great, but they do not tell the whole story. Mr. Alexander uses design as a thin envelope for his peculiar social gospel, while human-friendly spaces are created all the time by people with far less pretension than he.

Peter Mentzer 05 Jun 05

Christopher Alexander has written a number of books I’d recommend highly to anyone interested in design principles. Although he is an architect, his thoughts on design are applicable to everything — from graphic design, to painting, to music composition. “A Pattern Language” and “The Timeless Way of Building” and my personal faves.

The latter is a good primer, and bit more accessible than the former. He composed the book to be “scanable”, and even mentions in the beginning that you can just pick it up and flip through it, or read it in a non-linear way. Pretty interesting precog of the upcoming nature of information architecture for the internet, seeing as the book was published in 1979.

Joe 03 Oct 05

This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about entrepreneurship, design, experience, simplicity, constraints, pop culture, our products, products we like, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago.

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Beautiful places Ryan 03 Jun 2005

7 comments Latest by Joe

7 comments so far (Jump to latest)

Dan Boland 03 Jun 05

Ty West 04 Jun 05

indi 04 Jun 05

Christopher Fahey 04 Jun 05

Mr. Joel Dueck 04 Jun 05

Peter Mentzer 05 Jun 05

Joe 03 Oct 05

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