Remember, the primary-colored building blocks, Tinker toys, and log cabin sets? With these you could build anything… house or starship.
Each block, stick, log, was perfect, and could be combined in infinite ways..CA called these blocks, diagrams….then he called them patterns.
Eventually he combined these patterns, as you would link words like into a sentence,
Alexander defined 256 of these blocks, patterns, to build great houses.
He called it action a Pattern Language. And it became a massively famous, book of all architects… one the great Architecture books now and in the future… sort of timeless…. it was that fundamental
Alexander never used the words “building blocks’ to describe his work… he was a high level Austrian born, Oxford/MIT trained genius. Patterns was the word he liked to use… no matter how obtuse, soft, difficult that word is to connect with…we have to get used to it. PATTERNS… not building blocks…
This was the foundation of his goal for a perfect, house, built, designed to please Human Nature. Combining perfect bocks, patterns , in any combination of ways, SHOULD result in a perfect house.
Oddly, after trying this a few times, one piece was missing….BEAUTY!
And he chased that ephemeral, elusive, mirage the rest of his days.
Not just him, but a team of brilliant Berkley students worked on this for 6 years…EVERYDAY, till the spell of this cult wore off, and this phase of inquiry, leader/mentor ourgrew each other.
“First, the taking in of scattered particulars under one Idea, so that everyone understands what is being talked about … Sec ond, the separation of the Idea into parts, by dividing it at the carver might.”
Plato, Phaedrus, 265D