[Originally published in Impressions, 1987]
Christopher Alexander, The Production of Houses. New York: Oxford University Press, l985. $39.95.
Christopher Alexander is the Berkeley architect seeking to rediscover a way of living, thinking, and designing which will lead to more humane buildings and places which harmonize the needs of people and nature. The theory behind his work, described in his earlier books, Pattern Language and Timeless Way of Building, is that modern architectural design has been severed from bodily action and higher creativity. The needs are, first, a conceptual means for thinking about environmental concerns in a holisitic way and, second, a practical method by which thinking and designing can be integrated with building. Alexander has attempted to demonstrate this "Pattern Language" approach practically in two books: The Oregon Experiment, which uses the method to develop a master plan for the University of Oregon; and The Linz Cafe, which applies the approach to a restaurant design in Linz, Austria.
Production of Houses is the latest of Alexander's published efforts to create a more humane environment. In terms of the current world situation, this book is clearly the most important, since attempts a building approach that not only improves the physical environment but deepens people's humanity as well. Alexander's focus is low‑income housing in Mexacali, Mexico. The aim is to create inexpensive but comfortable homes which families design and construct themselves. With the support of regional and local authorities, Alexander is contracted to build homes for thirty families. He uses architectural students from the local university to be architect/builders who help the families build their homes. Over time, there are bureacratic and governmental problems, and only five of the thirty houses are finished. These houses look like a connected set of thin, vaulted breadboxes wrapped around a central outdoor plaza turned away from the street.
Though the full project is not finished, one must see Alexander's completion of even five houses as a miraculous accomplishment. Alexander is what one might call a reformer—one of those individuals between the powerful few and the passive many who try to bring about creative change in society. Alexander's work is concerned with harmony and beauty in human life, especially as these can be fostered and helped by the built environment. His work points toward one potential way whereby through building people can get in touch with higher parts of themselves and harmonize body, feelings, and thinking: "it is axiomatic for us that the people who build the houses must be active, mentally and spiritually, while they are building, so that of course they must have the power to make design decisions while they are building, and must have an active relation to the conception of the building, not a passive one" (p. 74).
Alexander believes that the design and building process must be made more alive and humane, so that people will become more active and reach higher parts of themselves through the designing and building process. The result is not only be a more pleasant built environment, but also people who are more confident and self‑actualized:
We therefore propose to replace the mechanical building operation of present systems of production with a more human operation in which the joy of building becomes paramount, in which the builders have a direct human relation to the work itself, to the houses, to the place of the houses, and to the people that the houses are for, and in which the families themselves may enter in, as much or as little as they want to, in the process, so that the building process as a whole becomes a record of achievement, a human struggle to be remembered, a memory, a moment of life, which will remain in the houses, once occupied, a process which will continue, in the years that follow, in the slow improvement, growth, and maintenance of the same houses‑‑and in which, above all, the houses take their place in the community as part of a living process, a source of life, which spreads into the life of the society (p. 298).
The largest part of Production describes the process underlying the building of the five houses in Mexacali, and in this sense the book points toward a systematics of self‑help housing. Alexander depicts the process in terms of seven elements which are each described in individual chapters:
(l) the architect‑builder;
(2) the builder yard;
(3) the collective design of common land;
(4) the layout of individual houses;
(5) step‑by‑step construction;
(6) cost control;
(7) the human rhythm of the process.
The architect‑builder deals with the question of who is in charge of the building operation itself. In the modern production system, no one person usally has responsibility; rather, there are a series of government officials, architects, engineers, contractors, and so forth who have no thorough sense of the needs of people and site. Alexander calls for a new kind of "master builder" who has complete charge of no more than a few dozen houses at a time and therefore can deal with families' wishes directly. In the Mexacali project, these master‑builders are Alexander and his student‑architects, who work side by side with the families and help them solve any design or construction problems. The result here, claims Alexander, is that the house is no longer a manufactured object, "but a thing of love, which is nurtured, made, grown, and personal. . . The building is shaped in a human way, where its shaping is a human act, related directly to the family and to the men and women who actually build it. . . All of this requires that houses be treated as unique, separate things, each one built according to its own special nature; and this requires in turn that the architect have an amount of time available which is inconceivable in today's mass housing projects" (p. 67, p. 70).
The physical heart of this concernful building process is a system of decentralized builder's yards, one or more every few blocks and each responsible for the buildings in the local neighborhood. Unlike today, where construction is normally carried out by large, remote corporate firms, such building yards would return building control to the locality and give people a more active interest in their community. For Mexacali, the builder's yard was the first structure constructed by Alexander and his team of architects. It became the seedbed of the project‑‑a place for the builders to live, a place for manufacturing building blocks and for storage, a place to instruct the families in construction and to experiment with untried building technologies. Without this yard, Alexander claims, the project would have quickly collapsed because it would have been without a center: "The yard was the physical and spiritual starting point for the whole process, and it remained so throughout the process of production" (p. ll2).
Once the builder's yard was complete, the next step was to establish contact with interested families (done through a local credit union) and lay out the the collective design of common land, which is normally done by government officials. Instead, Alexander believes that families laying out their own neighborhood is a much more human approach, since these people can talk to each other, reach agreements, and, therefore, work out an arrangement which will best work for them. In Mexacali, the families met at the site early one morning and used wooden stakes to work out lot arrangements and shared common space. Although there were difficulties‑‑e.g., some families wanted the same plot location‑‑an agreement was eventually made. The five houses were arranged as a "cluster"‑‑i.e., a group of homes sharing common land which is under their control. Alexander points out that the effort which goes into the making of a cluster is human effort: "It lies in the human process by which a group of people come to know each other, work together, trust each other, and together make their world" (p. l27).
With the layout of common land complete, the next step was the layout of individual houses. Here, the aim was to help each family design their house in such a way that it "becomes a genuine life base, a place for the heart, a place in which the family, as a unique being in society, may be anchored and nourished" (p. l65).
To build such houses, Alexander's team worked closely with each family, using a housing Pattern Language which the team had written before design and building began. The families were asked to study this Pattern Language, which included twenty‑one patterns such as "northeast outdoor space," "positive outdoor space," "long thin house," "main entrance," half‑hidden garden," "front porch," "bed alcoves," "natural doors and windows," and so forth.
This pattern language allowed the families to produce the specific house they needed, each one essentially a variant of the basic house type described by the twenty‑one patterns. The families worked with these patterns in the order of larger to smaller, and Alexander devotes considerable discussion to the relative success the families had with each of them. For example, all the families were successfully able to locate effective "main entrances," but none of them took advantage of "couple's realm"‑‑a pattern which calls for a private part of the house creating a separate domain for husband and wife.
The next stage in the process is step‑by‑step construction, in which Alexander's team provides a system of building operations to be performed one after another. For Mexacali, there are twenty‑three procedures, which include: (l) lay out stakes; (2) excavate and neutralize soil; (3) place corner stones; (4)place wall foundations; (5) prepare slab, and so forth. These operations are applied freely to each family plan and, when carried out correctly, lead to a structurally sound building without the need of construction drawings.
Again, Alexander claims that this method of building is much more rewarding than conventional construction methods that rely more on standardized building components assembled in the same mechanical way time after time. Alexander argues that his method of construction is more creative since it "produces things which were not known before they were done. . . The building grows slowly, step by step, the way a living organism does‑‑with no contortions having to be made along the way" (p. 226. 229).
The sixth element of the Mexacali experience, cost control, involves the issue of how houses quite different in design can be constructed at reasonable cost. Alexander's method of cost control is based on his procedure of step‑by‑step construction whereby costs can be geared to each of these operations. The last element of the process is human rhythm, and here, again, Alexander points out how building can become a creative act in which people grow and discover new parts of themselves.
This rhythm, Alexander concludes, includes five important aspects which are probably invaluable in any group building process anywhere: first, that people work together a definite hour every day; second, that each family contribute at least some physical labor; third, that something definite be completed each day; fourth, that people help each other on the more arduous operations; fifth, that there is a celebration at the end of every operation. The sense of the effectiveness of this way of working for the families is captured poignantly in Alexander's description of the celebration which follows completion of the houses' foundations:
Last night, at the fiesta which the five families had to celebrate the completion of the foundation, Jose Tapia came up to me and told me in words of almost inexplicable warmth and fervor that this was the most wonderful process he had ever experienced, that he had only the desire to work more, that he wanted to help the other families complete their houses; that when the group of five houses was finished, he wanted to help other families have the same experience; that it was an honor and a wonderful thing for him to be part of this process; and that he wanted to thank me from the bottom of his heart, over and over again‑‑and that words could not adequately express his feelings . . . In the singing around the fire, he became almost wild, singing a high‑pitched shout of joy at the end of each phrase‑‑almost a shout of liberty (p. 3l0).
Ultimately, the full project fails and, by the end of 1976, only five houses are completed and occupied. In a 1983 article in Places, Alexander and his colleagues describe a visit back to the five families seven years later. The team discovers that, overall, the families are very happy with their houses and look back on the experiment as a great time in their lifes.
On the other hand, the sense of community which Alexander had hoped would be facilitated by sharing the common space joining the five houses spatially does not happen. The families have built fences around their lots and have withdrawn from neighborly interaction. As one of the families explained: "It didn't work well because the families were not well chosen. There was a problem when company came over because of the other families. One particular family took over the communal space and there was no privacy. So we didn't usually use the porch. . . All the families ended up closing themselves off."
Alexander's experiment, therefore, is only partially successful, particularly his effort to create a sense of neighborhood and community through shared labors and common space. Yet Production must be seen as an extraordinary achievement, since it provides a pathway within ordinary life to deepen people's sense of themselves and making them feel more alive as persons.