A sensitively tailored combination of modes Efficiency is produced not by the sort of movement monoculture of cars-only American cities but by a sensitively tailored combination of modes sited to exploit the particular efficiencies of each and providing useful duplication and alternative. Michael Sorkin, 20 Minutes in Manhattan efficiencytransportation
Conversations, not commandments Good software comes from a vision, combined with conversations not commandments. In a craft-focused environment, care for efficiency, simplicity, and details really do matter. I didn’t leave my last job just because I wanted to make something new. I left because I wanted to make it in a way I could be proud of. Pirijan Ketheswaran, Why Software is Slow and Shitty pketh.org detailscraftsimplicityefficiency
Dwelling densities and diversity The reason dwelling densities can begin repressing diversity if they get too high is this: At some point, to accommodate so many dwellings on the land, standardization of the buildings must set in. This is fatal, because great diversity in age and types of buildings has a direct, explicit connection with diversity of population, diversity of enterprises and diversity of scenes. Among all the various kinds of buildings (old or new) in a city, some kinds are always less efficient than others in adding dwellings to the land. A three-story building will get fewer dwellings onto a given number of square feet of land than a five-story building; a five-story building, fewer than a ten-story building. If you want to go up far enough, the number of dwellings that can go onto a given plot of land is stupendous—as Le Corbusier demonstrated with his schemes for a city of repetitive skyscrapers in a park. But in this process of packing dwellings on given acreages of land, it does not do to get too efficient, and it never did. There must be leeway for variety among buildings. All those variations that are of less than maximum efficiency get crowded out. Maximum efficiency, or anything approaching it, means standardization. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities efficiency
The mirror-image economy When we enter the world of refuse and waste, we cross over into a mirror-image economy. In the "normal" world, we pay to acquire things; on the other side of the looking glass, we pay to get rid of them. Junk isn't merely worthless; it has negative value. A chemical engineer once told me about a recent improvement in a manufacturing process; by fine-tuning a chemical synthesis he had increased the yield of a certain commodity from 98 percent to 99 percent. I congratulated him, but I couldn't help remarking that this seemed like a rather paltry improvement. "Ah, you miss the important point," he said. "The amount of waste goes from 2 percent down to 1 percent. It's cut in half. We save tremendously on disposal costs." Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape wasterecyclingtrashefficiencyeconomics
Taylorism “In the past the man has been first. In the future the system must be first.” — Fred W. Taylor Taylorism was a way of thinking that came at the expense of the workers’ own knowledge of their system. Taylor summed up his philosophy thus: “It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standard and enforcing this cooperation rests with the management alone.” The unscripted practices of the old offices would remain, but as a kind of subterfuge: in the future, a leisurely pace wouldn’t be the norm; time would not be given, but stolen. Nikil Saval, Cubed systemsefficiency
Efficiency is the Enemy An Article fs.blog Many of us have come to expect work to involve no slack time because of the negative way we perceive it. In a world of manic efficiency, slack often comes across as laziness or a lack of initiative. Without slack time, however, we know we won’t be able to get through new tasks straight away, and if someone insists we should, we have to drop whatever we were previously doing. One way or another, something gets delayed. The increase in busyness may well be futile. It’s Time to Embrace Slow Productivity efficiencyproductivitywork
Muda, Muri, Mura An Article mag.toyota.co.uk Eliminating waste is the key to efficiency – in the Toyota Production System, this is termed as: Muda (waste), Muri (overburden), and Mura (irregularity). productionwastemanagementefficiency
The Timeless Way of Building A Book by Christopher Alexander www.patternlanguage.com Mind of no mindThe quality without a nameAn objective matterBitternessThe most precious thing we ever have+27 More Some emptiness in usDeliberate actsNo kindpatternsof.designA Pattern LanguageNon-architectsThe Side View #17: Susan Ingham & Chris AndrewsThe usages of life architecturemakingbuildingurbanismbeautyconstructionzen
The quality without a name There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named. There are words we use to describe this quality: alive whole comfortable free exact egoless eternal But in spite of every effort to give this quality a name, there is no single name which captures it. No words to describeThis language without words beautylifemeaningspirit
An objective matter We have been taught that there is no objective difference between good buildings and bad, good towns and bad. The fact is that the difference between a good building and a bad building, between a good town and a bad town, is an objective matter. It is the difference between health and sickness, wholeness and divided ness, self-maintenance and self-destruction. In a world which is healthy, whole, alive, and self-maintaining, people themselves can be alive and self-creating. In a world which is unwholesome and self-destroying, people cannot be alive: they will inevitably themselves be self-destroying, and miserable. ethics
Bitterness The quality which has no name includes these simpler, sweeter qualities. But it is so ordinary as well, that it somehow reminds us of the passing of our own life. It is a slightly bitter quality. melancholy
The most precious thing we ever have In our lives, this quality without a name is the most precious thing we ever have. And I am free to the extent I have this quality in me. life
When our forces are resolved When a person’s forces are resolved, it makes us feel at home, because we know, by some sixth sense, that there are not other unexpected forces lurking underground. He acts according to the nature of the situations he is in, without distorting them. There are no guiding images in his behavior, no hidden forces; he is simply free. And so, we feel relaxed and peaceful in his company. Each of us knows from experience the feeling which this quality creates in us. And for this reason, each one of us can also recognize this quality when it occurs in buildings. The doctrine of salvation by bricksA sense reflected in the plans happiness
Patterns of life If I consider my life honestly, I see that it is governed by a certain very small number of patterns of events which I take part in over and over again. Being in bed, having a shower, having breakfast in the kitchen, sitting in my study writing, walking in the garden, cooking and eating our common lunch at my office with my friends, going to the movies, taking my family to eat at a restaurant, having a drink at a friend’s house, driving on the freeway, going to bed again. There are a few more. There are surprisingly few of these patterns of events in any one person’s way of life, perhaps no more than a dozen. When I see how few of them there are, I begin to understand what huge effect these few patterns have on my life, on my capacity to live. If these few patterns are good for me, I can live well. If they are bad for me, I can’t. life
Fabric And finally, the things which seem like elements dissolve, and leave a fabric of relationships behind, which is the stuff that actually repeats itself, and gives the structure to a building or a town. connectionurbanismpatterns
They are the atoms of our man-made universe Further, each pattern in the space has a pattern of events associated with it. We realize then that it is just the patterns of events in space which are repeating, and nothing else. Nothing of any importance happens in a building or a town except what is defined within the patterns which repeat themselves. Each building gets its character from just the patterns which keep on repeating there. Each neighborhood is defined, too, in everything that matters, by the patterns which keep on repeating there.
Forces of conflict A pattern which prevents us from resolving our conflicting forces leaves us almost perpetually in a state of tension. For, if we live in a world where work is separated from family life, or where courtyards turn us away, or where windows are merely holes in the wall, we experience the stress of these inner and conflicting forces constantly. We can never come to rest. We are living then, in a world so made, so patterned, that we cannot, by any stratagem, defeat the tension, solve the problem, or resolve the conflict. In this kind of world the conflicts do not go away. They stay within us, nagging, tense…The build-up of stress, however minor, stays within us. We live in a state of heightened alertness, higher stress, more adrenaline, all the time. Fucking up the world
The multiplicity of living patterns The more living patterns there are in a thing—a room, a building, or a town—the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has this self-maintaining fire, which is the quality without a name. The right overlapEach element performs many functions complexity
To fly past each other In our own lives, we have the quality without a name when we are most intense, most happy, most wholehearted. This comes about when we allow the forces we experience to run freely in us, to fly past each other, when we are able to allow our forces to escape the locked-in conflict which oppresses us. But this freedom, this limpidity, occurs in us most easily when we are in a world whose patterns also let their forces loose. Just as we are free when our own forces run most freely within us, so the places we are in are also free when their own forces themselves run free, and are themselves resolved. The quality without a name in us, our liveliness, our thirst for life, depends directly on the patterns in the world, and the extent to which they have this quality themselves. Patterns which live, release this quality in us. But they release this quality in us, essentially because they have it in themselves.
When a building has this fire And when a building has this fire, then it becomes a part of nature. Like ocean waves, or blades of grass, its parts are governed by the endless play of repetition and variety, created in the presence of the fact that all things pass. This is the quality itself. beautynaturearchitecture
Modularity One of the most pervasive features of these buildings is the fact that they are “modular.” They are full of identical concrete blocks, identical rooms, identical houses, identical apartments in identical apartment buildings. The idea that a building can - and ought - to be made of modular units is one of the most pervasive assumptions of twentieth-century architecture. Nature is never modular. Nature is full of almost similar units (waves, raindrops, blades of grass) - but though the units of one kind are all alike in their broad structure, no two are ever alike in detail. The same broad features keep recurring over and over again. And yet, in their detailed appearance these broad features are never twice the same. naturearchitecturemakingdetailsmodularity
It is going to pass The character of nature can’t arise without the presence and the consciousness of death. When we make our own attempt to create nature in the world around us, and succeed, we cannot escape the fact that we are going to die. This quality, when it is reached, in human things, is always sad; it makes us sad; and we can even say that any place where a man tries to make the quality, and be like nature, cannot be true, unless we can feel the slight presence of this haunting sadness there, because we know at the same time we enjoy it, that it is going to pass. naturemelancholydeath
The gate To reach the quality without a name we must build a living pattern language as a gate. beauty
The patience of a craftsman Here there is no mastery of unnameable creative processes, only the patience of a craftsman, chipping away slowly; the mastery of what is made does not lie in the depths of some impenetrable ego; it lies, instead, in the simple mastery of the steps in the process, and in the definition of these steps. makingcraftpatience
An infinite variety The people can shape buildings for themselves, and have done it for centuries, by using languages which I call pattern languages. A pattern language gives each person who uses it, the power to create an infinite variety of new and unique buildings, just as his ordinary language gives him the power to create an infinite variety of sentences.
Each pattern is a rule Each pattern is a rule which describes what you have to do to generate the entity which it defines. It is a three-part rule, which expresses a relation between a certain context, a problem, and a solution. There is an imperative aspect to the pattern. The pattern solves a problem. It is not merely “a” pattern, which one might or might not use on a hillside. It is a desirable pattern; and for a person who wants to farm a hillside, and prevent it from erosion, he must create this pattern, in order to maintain a stable and healthy world. In this sense, the pattern not only tells him how to create the pattern of terracing, if he wants to; it also tells him that it is essential for him to do so, in certain particular contexts, and that he must create this pattern there. It is in this sense that the system of patterns forms a language. problems
The network of connections Each pattern depends both on the smaller patterns it contains, and on the larger patterns within which is is contained. Each pattern sits at the center of a network of connections which connect it to certain other patterns that help to complete it. It is the network of these connections between patterns which creates the language. connectionnetworks
The grammar of the language An ordinary language like English is a system which allows us to create an infinite variety of one-dimensional combinations of words, called sentences. A pattern language is a system which allows its users to create an infinite variety of those three-dimensional combinations of patterns which we call buildings, gardens, towns. It tells us which arrangements of words are legitimate sentences, in a given situation, and which are not. And, furthermore, which arrangements of words make sense in any given situation, and which ones don’t. It narrows down the total possible arrangements of words which would make sense in any given situation. Second, it actually gives us a system which allows us to produce these sentences which make sense. So, it not only defined the sentences which make sense in a given situation; it also gives us the apparatus we need to create these sentences. It is, in other words, a generative system, which allows us to generate sentences that are appropriate to any given situation.
Rules of thumb Of course, these patterns do not come only from the work of architects or planners. Architects are responsible for no more than perhaps 5 percent of all the buildings in the world. Most buildings, streets, shops, offices, rooms, kitchens, cafes, factories, gas stations, freeways, bridges… which give the world its form, come from an entirely different source. They come from the work of thousands of different people. Each of them builds by following some rules of thumb. And all these rules of thumb - or patterns - are part of larger systems which are languages. Every person has a pattern language in his mind. This is true of any great creative artist, as of the humblest builder. At the moment when a person is faced with an act of design, he does not have time to think about it from scratch. Even when a person seems to “go back to the basic problem,” he is still always combining patterns that are already in his mind. It is only because a person has a pattern language in his mind, that he can be creative when he builds. The rules of English make you creative because they save you from having to bother with meaningless combinations of words. A pattern language does the same.
Ordinariness We have a habit of thinking that the deepest insights, the most mystical, and spiritual insights, are somehow less ordinary than most things - that they are extraordinary. In fact, the opposite is true: the most mystical, most religious, most wonderful – these are not less ordinary than most things – they are more ordinary than most things. And it is because they are so ordinary, indeed, that they strike to the core. The natural thing to do beautyspirit
A genetic process The mere use of pattern languages alone does not ensure that people can make places live. The fact is, that the creation of a town, and the creation of the individual buildings in a town, is fundamentally a genetic process. So long as the people of society are separated from the language which is being used to shape their buildings, the buildings cannot be alive.
Discovering patterns In order to discover patterns which are alive we must always start with observation. Try to discover some property which is common to all the solutions which feel good, and missing from all the ones which don’t feel good. Knowledge of the problem then helps shed light on the invariant which solves the problem. Sometimes we find our way to this invariant by starting with a set of positive examples. At other times, we may discover the invariant by starting from the negative examples, and resolving them. Occasionally, we do not start from concrete observation at all, but build up the invariant by purely abstract argument.
How things ought to be It is hard to give up preconceptions of what things “ought to be,” and recognize things as they really are. The way of things wisdom
You must make the language first It is the structure and content of the language which determine the design. The individual buildings which you make will live, or not, according to the depth and wholeness of the language which you use to make them with. One you have it, this language is general. If it has the power to make a single building which lives, it can be used a thousand times, to make a thousand buildings live.
It must constantly be re-created A language is a living language only when each person in society, or in the town, has his own version of this language. To reach this deeper state, in which each person has a pattern language in his mind as an expression of his attitude to life, we cannot expect people just to copy patterns from a book. A living language must constantly be re-created in each person’s mind. As he modifies his language, and improves it, depends it, throughout his life - he does it, always, by creating, and improving rules which he invents. Once people share a language in this way, the language will begin evolving of its own accord. The language will evolve, because it can evolve piecemeal, one pattern at a time. As people exchange ideas about the environment, and exchange patterns, the overall inventory of patterns in the pattern pool keeps changing. Of course, this evolution will never end. evolution
Repair Within the larger language, it is impossible for any act not to help repair the larger whole. It is impossible for any act of building to remain an isolated act: it always becomes a portion of the flux of acts which is helping to maintain the whole. Even the laying of a brick, to mend a wall, will not only be used to mend that wall, but will be used to help repair the seat, the terrace, or the fireplace which that wall helps to form. 104. Site Repair repair
The process of unfolding The sequence of the patterns for a design - as generated by the language - is therefore the key to that design. The process of unfolding goes step by step, one pattern at a time.
Chopped and disfigured The details of a building cannot be made alive when they are made from modular parts If the builder wants to build the room from modular four-foot panels, he must change the size of the rooms, and change their shape, to fit his panels. In such a building system, it is impossible for a person to create a plan which reflects the larger subtleties of site or plan. Each plan will always be chopped and disfigured to make it fit the building details. To make the building live, its patterns must be generated on the site, so that each one takes its own shape according to its context. What's suitable for each unique condition modularity
Until we leave the gate behind And yet the timeless way is not complete, and will not fully generate the quality without a name, until we leave the gate behind. Indeed this ageless character has nothing, in the end, to do with languages. The language, and the processes which stem from it, merely release the fundamental order which is native to us. They do not teach us, they only remind us of what we know already, and of what we shall discover time and time again, when we give up our ideas and opinions, and do exactly what emerges from ourselves. At this final stage, the patterns are no longer important: the patterns have taught you to be receptive to what is real. It is the gate which leads you to the state of mind, in which you live so close to your own heart that you no longer need a language. This is the final lesson of the timeless way. The natural thing to do zenending