Domestic Architecture
CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER

Though I've asked several people, I haven't been able to determine the cross-section of participants in this congress. But I've gathered that very few of you are in the same business as me--an architect and a general contractor. I build buildings. In this speech, I want to invite you to share the problem I face, in the hope that you will see the immense difficulties it entails.

In my view, the biggest problem in architecture in the 2nd half of the 20th century is the connection between people and the physical world--the building of streets and so forth. Essentially, what we miss right now is the connection that one could call `belonging' or possession in the true emotional sense.

Ask yourself, for instance, how you feel about the area right outside this congress hall, the open space where you drive up to this place, or about the foyers here where we stand around in the intervals. They may be adequate to their functions. This is a very efficient place. But I think it's obvious that you do not feel any sense of deep belonging to either one of those places. A tragic problem, but you might say: we have to accept this as an inevitable consequence of the tremendous practical problems involved in making a meeting centre this size work. But the truth of the matter is that the houses and apartments that we have now been building for half a century essentially have the same problem. It is very rare that a relationship of belonging exists between the family and the apartment or house they inherit. On some levels it exists, as always. But my aim is to construct a situation where a deep, profound belonging exists. That has proved incredibly hard to do.

By having people play a very large role in the design, layout and construction of their own houses and apartments, I've undertaken what are probably radical innovations in the evolution of new kinds of construction contracts that allow a building to evolve and adapt organically during construction. The sort of meaningful adaptation necessary to create this real home can exist, but it is incredibly hard to implement the kind of innovations in construction, administrative, financial and other processes that allow fluid adaptational construction contracts and still keep a tight hold on time and money.

I'll show you examples of process innovations I've been carrying out during the last 15 to 20 years. Increasingly, during the last year or two, I've become convinced that these proposals that I've made and to some extent succeeded in implementing are nowhere radical enough. And that the deep connection that would allow a place to be a real home requires innovations that I think I have not yet even dreamed of and that I don't fully understand. But what I am aware of is the enormity of the change needed for us to have even a hope of doing these things.

What I hope to make clear is that our existence in its openness, clearness and limpidity depends to an immense degree on very minute traces in the physical environment.

So when I say: you don't have a sense of belonging in that place outside this hall, I mean much more than that. I mean that it's very difficult to be yourself in that place. Places have the capacity to allow or to deny us to be ourselves, even an apartment or house we furnished and where we put stuff that belongs to us and so forth. Just because we put that stuff there and arranged it does not mean that it will create the potential for this kind of blissful being. The adaptation of all kinds of subtle minutiae in the environment allows that to emerge in us. Although it's very subtle, it has a huge effect. The sort of simple happiness I mean comes about because of something that we largely do not know how to attain.

This is where I want you to share my understanding of my task. You may say: well, I think I know how to do that in my own house. But as an architect and builder, I feel it's my responsibility to try to allow these processes to exist in society at large, to show how they can exist and to create circumstances which will indeed permit them to exist on a large scale. So it's not merely the problem of how can it be done in the small that I'm asking you to carry about with me, it's the problem of how can it be done in the large.

A certain kind of post-modern house embodies the opposite of what I'm talking about (it's not so funny, because many members of my profession consider this kind of thing to be a goal). When I compare it to a house in Bangkok that is considered a slum, a remarkable thing becomes apparent: there is poverty in the house in Bangkok, maybe even miserable conditions, but it is actually a home. But, of course, our understanding of architecture today has nothing to do with the creation of that kind of house. In a sense, it actually tries to get away from this and produce housing like the post-modern example. I view that as absurd.

My question is: what does it really take to build up a world in which our houses sustain and enlarge childish, innocent life in us? One of the most obvious things that comes to mind when one compares mass housing, tract developers' suburban homes, public housing and expensive architect design houses, for example, is the question: what if people did this for themselves? If they really got involved in making, shaping the environment? Things would be a lot better. Of course, this is what happened for centuries at virtually all times in most cultures.

One of our projects was mass housing for the city of Nagoya in Japan. Each separate dwelling was 2 1/2 stories, two stories and then one story in the roof. The building was about 6 meters wide. There were lots of windows because the building was long and thin. Each family got on the order of 70 square meters: a rectangle 6 meters wide and 12 meters long.

We invited many families in the community in Nagoya, gave them a piece of graph paper--6 meters wide by 12 meters long in scale--and told them to draw the house they wanted. We told them to put whatever they wanted in there, that we weren't going to bother them at all. I had the necessary contractual and construction ability to put that into effect without increasing the price.

In each case, a formal architectural drawing was produced from something that a particular person drew for or with their family. Of course, these two things are immensely different. They are very particular to each individual family. I had a remarkable experience with some of the families in Cheekasadia, the area in Nagoya where this was going on. I gave a group of about 7 or 8 people a piece of paper and told them: Here's 6 meters by 12 meters. Put what you want in it. It didn't take very long for them to put down what they thought would be an ideal world. This was not for the real thing--it was just to make sure it would work out comfortably for people. Two of them were openly weeping while they did it. These were people who had been living in mass housing in Nagoya. It was unthinkable to them that their ordinary necessities could be put into a building in such a direct way, because they had assumed, in effect, that it was something that the municipality would give them. I was surprised that it had such a direct impact: there were tears in these people's eyes and they were overcome with emotion, just at being able to draw what they thought was the ideal apartment for their family. So that tells you in a way what a tremendous well spring is being touched just be this sort of issue.

In the project that we're building at the moment in Texas, families simply laid out the houses in a small neighbourhood. We have a very fast way of doing this. Even though each house takes on a beautiful character of its own according to the particular wishes that that family has, it's not expensive. It doesn't take any more time to build. This does get good results up to a point. I know that from experience. One gets what I suppose could be called a more true kind of character. People do feel happy and there are some beginnings of that sense of belonging I was speaking about.

But it doesn't come automatically. For example, we built some student housing for the University of Oregon. It looks rather nice. It has quite a sweet, pleasant appearance. Not as good as the other example I mentioned, but the quality of belonging is present to a degree. However, the apartments in those buildings that look so pleasant from the outside have a very stark character. The reason for that is the administrative procedures involved in building a building of that sort in a public situation, for a public company or institution. The contracting and other procedures have an unbelievable ability to kill every joy. The central thing to understand here is that the micro-structure of the process, although it produced superficially good results on the outside of this particular building, is unable to deal with the problem of creating that rich, adaptive environment that is really needed in order for somebody to say: this is my home, I belong to this, this belongs to me.

During construction, rather than making up a complete set of drawings in advance and then building them, we spend a great deal of time making mark-ups, modifying things, preferably with the family, if we are not building for an unknown client. Cardboard, paper, sticks and so forth are used to gradually approximate the nature of the space that will really create that comfortable feeling as opposed to what one thought at the time of making the drawings. One of the things that I've discovered is that while making the drawings, no matter how much experience you have, you are wrong about an immense number of things. These become visible during construction. In a more adaptive process, you can correct these things and achieve reasonably good results with these kind of mark-ups.

However, my experience is that that process alone is by no means enough. Appearances can sometimes be deceiving, even when one feels one has made great progress by the involvement of the users, changing contracting methods and so forth. The really profound connection that allows a spontaneous life to spring forth does not come easily.

There are some circumstances that give rise to the feelings I'm speaking about. They have nothing to do with user design and contracting procedures. The beach is an obvious example of a classic place where people feel that joyful freedom in themselves. It is possible for places to have this quality independently of the modifications and processes I mentioned earlier.

There is a third thing I believe to be very important. That is that it is characteristics of the actual space itself that create a luminous simplicity in which the human spirit can take hold and make it mine. That quality exists independently of what may be produced by the other two methods.

As a civilisation, we are very uptight. Even my wife gasped when I mentioned that I was going to show a slide of part of our house with the cracks in the plaster, the disarray of the stone and so forth. Yet, in her eyes, character has arisen in that place. It didn't need the perfect, plastic table of the suburban tract. Not only that--it could not have existed there. That situation depends on the junk. It depends on the raw roughness of the situation

No architect will look at a family sitting on a broken-down jetty and proudly say: I did this. And yet, this is where that inner something starts to live and breathe.

Occasionally, I've managed to get that thing to happen because the people I was working with were deeply conscious of the need for it and somehow understood it from the inside. One example is a campus I built in Japan. The people who asked me to build this place for them had a profound awareness that they were building a world in which they could be free. Because of their actions, immense patience and continual effort, something like that actually did begin to occur in conjunction with all the other processes I've mentioned.

There was a family who came and asked me if I could diagnose what was wrong with their house. Their family life was not working and they wanted to know if I could help them to understand what had to be done. I spent some time with them and I told them that I thought I could, if I was able to rebuild the whole house from the inside out. I discovered very early on that Steve, the man of this family, was a little more passionate on a daily basis about this thing. He and his wife actually had no idea what it meant to be comfortable. He knew something was wrong with his house, but as we began working on it I realised that he just did not understand his own, his wife's, or his children's comfort. He was in a complete muddle of images of $2000 naugahyde sofas and certain kinds of TV sets and this and that and the other. His mind was filled with these things. It took a year or two of working together before he began, very gradually, to understand what his own comfort actually was.

In my work, I've become aware that progress towards that blissful state cannot be accomplished except by a large and conscious effort by people themselves, interacting with their environment through time. The two major things I've mentioned are the participation of people in their own house design and a drastic modification of construction procedures. But the kind of process that I'm talking about now is much more drastic than that. To create that kind of process is a huge undertaking. After 20 years work, even though I have achieved something, I feel I'm really only at the beginning of a very different kind of journey. One aimed at finding the ways that more conscious process is taking place. One of the ways I've begun to explore it is simply through painting. Trying to paint the kind of world in which this blissful state might or can exist.

Honestly, this is a immense task. Very easy to describe, but there is almost nothing in our contemporary society that can produce this spiritual, ordinary world. That's my quest. I hope that in some fashion, even though you might not be builders or architects, this concern means something to you and may help you in what ever particular thing you are doing.