Hi folks,

I had a great time at the Pattern Languages symposium sponsored by the Univ. of Oregon architecture school this on Halloween weekend in Portland.  I thought y'all might appreciate hearing a few highlights.  Sue Woehrlin from Seattle was there too, which was delightful.

First of all, the process design was abysmal.  Sessions scheduled all across dinnertime with little to no food, lecture after lecture without any breaks, and no real discussion sessions until the final session Sunday which took place after the conference was officially supposed to have already ended but was running late.  Nonetheless, i had a really good time.  Fascinating people, dedicated to their craft; diverse presenters, several from outside the US; and lively conversation over dinner at a restaurant Saturday night.

I met Doug Schuler for the first time in person after various phone conversations and emails, and saw the cards he's been talking about.  Unlike the book, the cards have pictures on them--yea!  Speaking of pictures, i chatted a bit with Katy Langstaff (Stuart Cowan's partner) who it turns out provided all the images for the conservation economy PL.  They are right in Portland and open to future sharing.

Four of the original 6 authors of the PL book were present, and they spoke about their experiences on a panel Friday evening.  They were all very humble about their own personal contributions (i presume that Alexander, who was too sick to travel from England, was the charismatic visionary of the group), but it's clear that this project was a vast commitment from each of them.  Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, for example, joined the project a few years in and ended up spending 2 years immersed in library archives to find a picture to illustrate each pattern that both signified accurately what the pattern needed to convey and had itself "the quality that has no name," an ordinariness that felt alive.  She jokingly said that she'd "looked at every image produced since the beginning of time."  With admirable success, i might add.

I was naturally interested in the social dynamics of spending 7 years immersed collaboratively together.  It sounds like it was incredibly intense, more like a family than anything else, and then once the project was complete the team rapidly dispersed, while the book took 3 more years to reach publication.  One of them spoke of how in preparing for this symposium, he pulled the book off the shelf for the first time in over a decade . . . thumbing through the pages, he said to himself, "Wow, that's a damn good book."  I think they each gave themslves wholly to the work in the moment, then let it go, like classic Taoist masters.  Murray Silverstein also said, "Not one of us six would agree with everything in the book."

While the PL obviously had a huge influence on each of them, none of them have remained wedded to it.  After it was finished, Max Jacobson & Murray Silverstein set off to form their own joint for-profit business based on the strength of the book but with no knowledge of how to actually swing a hammer, build anything, or do construction drawings, not to mention knowing anything about budgets or city inspections.  Noting that Chris Alexander said (in 2008, as quoted by Stuart Cowan), "You can only create wholeness if it is the sole aim of a project; you can never start with profit," one gets the impression Alexander was less than thrilled with their attempt.

I also noted the multicultural backgrounds of the 6 authors.  Alexander is British, Fiksdahl-King is Norwegian.  Ishikawa i presume is Japanese-American, and actually a year or two older than Alexander it turns out.  Silverstein & Jacobson seem like east coast Jews (like me).  Angel didn't make it there so i'm not sure about him.  And they drew examples from work in Peru, Mexico, and elsewhere.  I'm confident the diverse perspectives contributed to the strength of the work.

The social context the group worked in was also incredibly rich.  They were at UC Berkeley, and said that during the period of the creation of this book not a year went by that an American city was not in flames.  They referred to the Blake poem on p. xlii, pointing to the need for a passionate response to industrialism.  They consciously set out to make a difference, giving it the best they had to offer.  In spite of jokes about its thin pages, the book was never intended as a bible.  In fact--and this is probably the most interesting thing i discovered at the event--they originally planned to release it as a looseleaf binder that could be continually updated in the light of new discoveries, later abandoning that idea as impractical.

Several panelists pointed out features that would be desirable if doing the project today that were not available in the 1970s due to earlier technology.  You can imagine my pride and joy when, on Sunday when i finally had a brief chance to address the gathering, i was able to say that every single thing they had pointed to, we were in fact incorporating in our group process PL:  internet-based, collaborative writing, visual mapping of the connections among patterns, etc.  Ward Cunningham (inventor of the wiki) was enthused at the prospect of the mapping module that Vine is adding to Wagn, i talked with him about this one-on-one and thanked him for the good advice he gave me last Feb. at Recent Changes Camp, where he said to just get going on the project and not wait until we had the perfect software.

Some other quotes & highlights:

"Because we considered every pattern a falsifiable hypothesis, it allowed us to say anything we wanted," to be liberated, to take risks.

From a review of the book by William Saunders:  "Both the intelligence and the foolishness of APL are tied to its radical utopianism."

"The book presents itself simultaneously as a first draft and as a bible."

Ingrid F-K:  It was not a linear process, there was an iterative relationship among problem, context, solution.  Whenever we got stuck, the answer was to get out of the office and into the real world, to measure, pace, and look.

Murray S.:  By looking at examples in APL, people figure out what a pattern is.  Flipping around the book gives a native understanding, intuitively people start to play with the concept without a definition, without prelude.

Moving on to other presentations at the conference, one of the best in my opinion was by an architecture student who lives in university housing here in Eugene (Agate Apts., a few blocks from my house) that was supposed to get built according to the APL book and had significant involvement by designers who were present at the conference.  The presentation consisted of slides of the facility juxtaposed with patterns from the book, showing how far short the implementation fell.  Humorous and to the point.

I enjoyed this quote by Stuart Cowan from Robinson Jeffers, "Our task is a simple one:  to fall in love outward."  The organization Stuart is affiliated with, Eco-Trust, works in what they call Salmon Nation, which is comprised of "wherever the salmon can swim to"--surely an excellent example of a truly bioregional approach.

Another quote, this one from Thoreau (offered up by Ward C.):  "The greatest art is to shape the quality of the day."

Well, there was lots more, but that's at least some of it.  Perhaps Sue will write in with her own impressions.

I'm home now for a week or two, then back to the east coast for more time with my family, then back here for quiet holiday time during which i hope to get more actual pattern writing done.  My father is likely to pass sometime in the next few months, obviously that affects things for me a lot.  I hope life is well with all of you.

Peace,

--Tree