construction
Stacking the rails
Stage sets for the eye
With the loss of tactility, measures and details crafted for the human body – and particularly for the hand – architectural structures become repulsively flat, sharp-edged, immaterial and unreal. The detachment of construction from the realities of matter and craft further turns architecture into stage sets for the eye, into a scenography devoid of the authenticity of matter and construction. The sense of 'aura', the authority of presence, that Walter Benjamin regards as a necessary quality for an authentic piece of art, has been lost.
To build a folly
To build a folly is essentially to do something a second time, something at an inopportune moment. That something is always the memory of something forgotten, about which we can paradoxically say "There it is again."
Follies were misunderstood, purposeless constructions. They were often only small, extravagant gestures in a garden, easily whisking off the imagination to distant lands, a sort of time capsule built to awaken the memory and induce surprise in passers-by. They marked locations, organized secondary paths in a park, or simply predicted the arrival of better times—a demarcation, a sacred spot, a mysterious trail, a hill whose tragic rocky nature begged for a tower, a party, or the arrival of summer.
Errors & Crimes
"A builder who hides any part of the building frame, abandons the only permissible and, at the same time, the most beautiful embellishment of architecture. The one that hides a loadbearing column makes an error. The one who builds a false column commits a crime."
— Auguste Perret
The Timeless Way of Building
A Book by Christopher Alexander- Mind of no mind
- The quality without a name
- An objective matter
- Bitterness
- The most precious thing we ever have
A Pattern Language
- Its place in the web of nature
- 9. Scattered Work
- 21. Four-Story Limit
- 51. Green Streets
- 53. Main Gateways
The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth
A Book by Christopher Alexander- Two generating systems
- Two types of building production
- System A
- System B
- This has harmed modern society greatly
On the "Building" of Software and Websites
An Essay by Dorian TaylorI’m beginning to suspect that software, and more conspicuously the Web, is fundamentally the wrong shape for the archetype of the construction project.
The Spoken and the Unspoken
What is unspoken
Ethnographic studies are distinct from ethological research in other species because we can speak with our subjects and ask them questions. This has tremendous value, but much of what humans do is not spoken, and we also observe, count, and measure.
Research questions
From my records, research questions emerged that I never expected when I was making them.
Quantitative data collection
Quantitative data collection involves systematic and repetitive observations on the same set of variables.
Anthropological rapport
Accurately capturing how people spend their time is contingent not only on systematic data collection, but also on participants moving in a relaxed and normal manner through their daily activities. Just as primatologists habituate their subjects to their presence, anthropologists first must develop rapport and trust with the communities in which they live.
Scan samples, focal follows
Scan samples and focal follows are two commonly used behavioral observation methods.
During a scan sample, randomly selected individuals are located at specified time intervals, usually every ten to fifteen minutes, and the observer instantaneously records what the participant is doing.
Focal follows complement scan samples by documenting the continuous sequence of an individual's activities. During a focal follow, each subject is observed over a period of several hours with each change in activity recorded with a start and stop time.
Multitasking
In most traditional societies children help care for their younger siblings. However, it is often the case that a child minding his younger sibling does so out of the corner of his eye while playing with other children. Is this play or child care?
A nested classificatory hierarchy
I organized behavioral codes to contain several levels of information. As in this example, if a child is outside playing with friends while minding her two-year-old sister, the activity was coded as 675: the 600 signifies noneconomic activity, the 70 that it is playing, and the 5 that it is playing while in charge of a child. All activities were coded in this way. A nested classificatory hierarchy preserves both detail for future research and flexibility to lump or disaggregate activities for analyses. This method of nesting information carries over into many kinds of coding and classificatory schemes.
A child's question
Because they live so successfully in their world, we expect our subjects to readily explain the strategies that underlie the behaviors we observe. This can be trying, because from their point of view we are asking the obvious, a child’s question.
The research agenda
Important connections are often made by accident, outside the bounds of our research agenda.