Sketchbook
Noting Plants
Enjoy some plant sketches I did for Plants class as well as some Christopher Alexander excerpts. The quotes are taken from his book "The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth" (2012) describing the building of a High School and College Campus in Japan that his firm was tasked with. Its a very profound Case Study in Industry politics and the violence of crony capitalism.
"An environment or community will not come to life unless each building, each street, each room becomes unique, as a result of careful and piecemeal processes of adaptation."
On Type A "Adaptive" Design
"Type A... relies on feedback and correction,... not unlike the way a good cook tastes a soup while cooking it, checking it, modifying it until it tastes just right."
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"Even small buildings take years to grow, and often take centuries before they reach their peak. It cannot be hurried. Even the small Gate of the Eishin Campus has taken years to grow...(roughly 25 years)."
Adaption
"A geometrically adaptive process is missing altogether from the contemporary production process of society. And that robs the environment of all subtlety, of its flavour, of feeling, of poetry - of pleasantness and utility in the most ordinary sense - the sense of being comfortable on a bench by the wall on a sunny day."
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"An environment can only be made healthy, and good for human life, if the process mobilizes vital adaptions at many scales, and thus generates the intricate geometry and structure that are needed to support life."
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"In short, the production process is finely graded. It has a hierarchy of nested processes, and each place and element is shaped and adapted, by virtue of these processes, to become fine-tuned to its context, and gently fitted to the peculiarity of the particular place where it exists."
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"These kinds of subtle, fractal, and organic adaptations are entirely different from typical geometrics of architecture, planning and development in the 20th Century Machine age."
