Centre for Environmental Structu

ecology, sustainable development, biology, social science, and complexity theory

CES-Europe is being created to build projects which serve as models of new practice throughout the world. With regard to Architecture and Urban Planning, the Centre is addressing the gap between current destructive development practices and the alternative emerging paradigm articulated in Christopher Alexander’s acclaimed new work The Nature of Order. In the fields of Art, Science and Social Science, connections are being made to stimulate new research leading to a coherent body of work that provides directions for recovery of the Earth’s resources. This document provides background and context, and invites your participation in the creation of the Centre as a commitment to the future of people and places around the world.

The end purpose of the Centre, will be to create reproducible models of action and implementation, which can transform the building and development fields, all over the world. This huge task cannot be achieved overnight. However, the Centre will maintain the effort to have this effect, and to produce materials and examples which help people in different countries to create this effect, as its primary mission. Its association with The California Center for Environmental Structure, its broad record of influential publications through Oxford University Press and CES Publishing, and the extraordinary track record of Alexander’s A Pattern Language (now said to be the best selling architectural treatise of all time), give this aim credibility.

1) The Centre’s primary mission is to publish and distribute models of procedure that show the new paradigm in action, and provide people with replicable models that can be applied, copied, and modified, in different countries and different contexts, all over the world. These models are to be useful, to give people the power, which many do not have at present, to put new paradigms into practice. The desire to work according to a new paradigm, is widespread. Showing the practical steps which make it possible to do so, especially in the larger kinds of projects, presents many with tools to solve presently formidable, and occasionally insuperable challenges. The Centre’s first task is to empower people who seek to implement the new paradigm, in practice.

2) Second, the Centre has a necessary human purpose – that of creating a shared intellectual home. People who are working to build these models and apply them to new kinds of projects, need a place of shared work and daily discussion, where the concepts can be explored in greater depth, and where new ideas that change procedure and environment in different countries can emerge and be forged to become practical instruments. Such a place is very much needed. Our intent is to undertake large scale building projects and tackle these extremely difficult intellectual questions, and have the opportunity for a growing collegiality devoted to these matters, in large part built around the work on these projects.

3) Third, the Centre will provide a place for people from disciplines outside architecture and planning to interact, focus their efforts, and build theory and practice that is inter-related across disciplines. People in the Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Social Sciences, and Art have begun to recognize that the principles described in The Nature of Order challenge long-standing assumptions and practices, and wish to use these principles to explore new territory. Their work in applying these principles to their fields of endeavour has begun, and it directly supports efforts to change the built environment. Examples are in Sustainability, Complexity Theory, Computer Science and Software, International Development, and Organization Development.

4) Last, and still most important, CES-Europe will provide a professional organization which will undertake prototype building projects. These projects are necessary, as the fount and origin of the manuals which describe new methods of procedure, and as part of the ongoing research on implementation. But there is a deeper purpose. It is only built projects which can ultimately change the world. Theory alone cannot do it. The four volumes of The Nature of Order put forward new theoretical underpinnings for repairing the damage done to our world. At the same time they raise far-reaching and complex implementation questions that require careful, skilled and dedicated work. A substantial group of experienced professionals has begun to gather to address these questions. They are already developing a shared framework for undertaking research, accumulating knowledge and applying it in practice, to demonstrate the beauty and efficiency of the new kinds of projects which the paradigm shift produces.

For nearly forty years, The Center for Environmental Structure in Berkeley, California, undertook projects, led by Christopher Alexander and involving professionals and students, that established the principles now described in The Nature of Order, Alexander’s four-volume work.. CES-Europe will host regular, on-going dialogues with Professor Alexander and others who work with these principles and continue to develop practices and procedures that make fundamental change possible. These dialogues will be published, as will findings from research projects and innovations in theory and practice across disciplines.

Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 4

A Collegial Effort To Implement New Solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 5

Core Research Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 7

Elements of New Solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . page 8

Emphasis on Human Cultures and Cultural Variety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 9

Importance of Collegiality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 10

Board of Directors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 11

It has become commonplace to say that contemporary forms of development damage land, damage urban beauty, and that current attempts to solve this problem deliver only partial solutions. Efforts to construct codes or rules which solve the problem, produce, at best, technical simulacra of living environments which still ravage land and satisfy hardly anyone. The heritage of our world is being destroyed by contemporary land management and planning law.

In order to solve the problem, it is widely recognized that underlying and deeply entrenched aspects of planning and development procedure must be reformed. However, when one begins to contemplate ways of lifting the stranglehold of planning, zoning, fire access regulations, lending policy, construction procedure, and the lack of profound involvement of prospective inhabitants in the impersonal construction of new cities , the practical problems to be surmounted seem so vast, that one cannot truly see how to proceed in a practical and effective manner.

As a result, efforts are then made to patch up the damaged process, and to work within the framework of established procedure and planning law. But, for the very reasons stated above, this cannot work. The vicious cycle thus continues, and so far, new methods of procedure, including the widespread recent efforts to construct new kinds of physical or geometrical codes of new urbanism, are not capable of getting us out of the mess. Thus land pressure, and the perceived urgency of action, continue to be at loggerheads with a calm and clear-headed improvement of the underlying conditions – solving little, and leaving no one satisfied.

Thus government and developers, creating pressure to build in old and unsatisfactory ways, continue to destroy land, and continue being at odds with objections from the communities, borough councils, and other local authorities and the citizens who watch their own land and community torn up and damaged. In some cases, the application of outmoded damaging methods continues over the objections of 85% of the local residents (UK data from recent surveys, Stafford County Virginia, etc).

What it amounts to, is that processes that are capable of generating beauty, in the large happen as a result of the cooperative efforts of thousands of individual actions. This has escaped us in recent times, because of our primitive linear technological system.

The initiatives of CES-Europe, supported by the dynamic procedures pioneered by the Center for Environmental Structure in Berkeley, California, are designed to go deep enough into the established political and human infrastructure, to permit the solution of these problems, at high density and at low density.

With regard to Architecture and Planning, the aim of the CES-Europe, is to run prototype projects in different countries that go deeply into the established infrastructure, to permit the design and implementation of new solutions to our present urban and environmental problems. The intent is that a path may be established for wider action and reform in many parts of the world. In the four volumes of The Nature of Order (2002-5), Christopher Alexander has described a demonstrable, coherent approach, that can address these shortcomings. It is based on research and studies of building development, and on empirical and experimental work – all in all, scientific work. This approach has its roots in Professor Alexander’s long career of research, teaching, designing, building, master-planning, and writing seminal works such as A Pattern Language (1977), The Timeless Way of Building (1979), A New Theory of Urban Design (1987), and The Production of Houses (1985), and The Oregon Experiment (1975).

Sustainability activists have used A Pattern Language as a reference for creating the built environment for many years. More recently, The Nature of Order, which engages the life sciences and physical sciences, is being recognized as a strong theoretical and practical basis for sustainable building practices, as well as repairing the damage humans have done. It describes a vision of the world as one in which “the world itself – all of it – animals, plants, mountains, rivers, buildings, roads, terraces, rooms and windows – is part of a single system and a single way of understanding.”[1] As one reviewer has noted, “The Nature of Order provides the most powerful set of processes to date for unfolding a sustainable world. These processes affect the scale of activity, the flow of money, the sharing of understanding, and the way decisions are made.” [2] This orientation is at the heart of CES-Europe’s endeavours.

CES-Europe will offer a broad range of educational and practical activities, including the following:

Foundational Research to Consolidate Known Aspects of Successful Process, So That New Processes Can Lead To Changed Forms Of Practice

· Invent, study, and develop models for new forms of environment-generating process – sustainable morphogenesis – in the fields of architecture, construction, urban planning, development, and rural land management.

· Test these new forms of process in real projects, by using them in modified forms of design and planning, and construction of real projects, urban and rural, large scale and small scale.

· Build new projects in varying contexts of poverty and wealth, throughout the world, to demonstrate by example, what the new processes can achieve.

· Evaluate the processes, by evaluating the success of the results, for design, user value, cost, efficiency.

· Publish findings on the success of the processes, so that the successful processes may be replicated and followed.

To undertake these real world projects in the U.K. and around the world, the Centre will have a distributed staff of professionals -- providing services for architectural design, urban planning, urban development, engineering, general contracting and construction management -- and craft workshops.

A New Student Unit

Depending on how projects develop, there will be abundant opportunities for students to participate in research and building, primarily intended for post graduate students, this activity will draw on students from major British universities, and will provide a dedicated research-and-production opportunity, so that students can encounter, and solve problems, within the field of implementation, and generative processes. We propose that this kind of opportunity to study real systems of implementation, and to undertake research while testing new methods, will become a vital part of the architectural education system, starting with the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge.

A Home and Meeting Place for Professionals, Colleagues and Students, providing a Centre for Collaborative Work

The Centre will attract professionals and post-docs and students from all over the world, who are interested in Professor Alexander’s work. It will also serve to support them in their work as they build on the ideas set forth in The Nature of Order for their own disciplines and specialties, and discover partnerships between disciplines that enhance their on-going work.

Participants from the fields of Art, Science and Social Science will be encouraged to form discussion groups that support on-going work in their respective disciplines.

Professor Alexander will convene dialogues, some public and some informal, to work through issues and topics that arise as projects proceed at the Centre. Both problems and solutions will be explored with staff and visitors. New ideas and practices will be generated in this manner, as well as research findings evaluated, with those who wish to participate.

In collaboration with The Center for Environmental Structure in Berkeley, California, Professor Alexander’s published and unpublished work will be catalogued and made available to the public.

Having established new research as a priority for the Centre, we have identified topics that should be addressed as soon as funding to support them is located. We are also interested in pursuing collaborations with other institutions.

First and foremost, lies the further invention and development of generative processes, capable of generating environments at a variety of densities and under a variety of cultural and climatic conditions. The emphasis of the research lies in the creation of these new generative models, in the successful application of these generative models to real conditions, and in demonstration that the models and processes are replicable.

In addition, in order to meet the new paradigm of truly sustainable architecture, it is very plain that enormous changes must be made in geometry, in process and in procedure. Many of the required changes seem, on first examination, to be very difficult: there are conflicts with established law, planning law, engineering practice, transportation codes, building regulations, methods of defining the idea of a master plan, methods of procuring buildings, and so forth. An underlying research program for CES-Europe, will be to isolate the procedural difficulties especially in achieving the required kinds of geometry in a sustainable world, and demonstrate the feasibility of the types of changes that must be made. The list of types of issues to be addressed is enormously long, but will include, among many others, the following: bank loan conditions, insurance, transportation specifications, parking specifications, requirements about architectural practice, installation of complete sewer systems in advance of housing developments, insulation requirements, energy codes, and permitted construction materials.

It is our specific aim and purpose to remove these obstacles, not only by example, and through innovative methods of planning, design, and construction, but also to open the door to these new methods, in such a way that architects, planners, developers, and others concerned with the practical field of construction and implementation, will be able to overcome these obstacles.

The foundation for these research projects is well established by work done previously through the Center for Environmental Structure.

On the basis of work already done by Professor Alexander and his colleagues, we know that the elements listed below must ultimately be included in the solution. CES-Europe will build on these findings through its research and building projects.

- Greater focus on adaptation to the context of the land, as a primary necessity and a rich though unrecognised capital resource.

- Land, natural landscape, and trees are treated as inviolable, and urban geometry is fitted to them so that the land is improved.

- Every house and structure is uniquely adapted to its inhabitants, their dreams and different views of life.

- Roads and sewers come last, adapting to the natural morphology and not the reverse.

- More careful distribution of land within the open space to urban space hierarchy: more complex fractal structure, not crude chunks, governing the statistics of land development.

- The pedestrian/vehicular braid providing a better solution to problems of pedestrian-vehicle coexistence.

- Expenditure on pedestrian space is recognized as a new and vital element of urban services. A real pedestrian world is created: pedestrian areas that include walkways and urban furniture is a line-item in the development budget.

- These pedestrian areas must be seriously built to truly work; not just a few benches placed on a landscape plan.

- De-emphasis on style, re-focus upon practical forms of enjoyment and quality of everyday life.

- Dynamic codes that entitle the process and ensure that desired values are achieved, in place of rigid codes and zoning regulations.

- Modification of building and project procurement, moving towards public stewardship.

- Large scale effort is made to encourage an enlightened manner of contracting based on new forms of contract which support rather than suppress adaptive morphogenesis, and on new ethics for the design and building professions.

- The role of the developer is recast as an effective instrument of positive change.

- Modification of procurement methods including different interweaving of engineering, cost control, construction and real-time design.

It would be useless to undertake this ambitious program in too narrow a context. Different people in different parts of the world, experience different problems, have different ways of life and different traditions, and enjoy or suffer different levels of economic access to resources.

The Centre will work to span the range of human cultures, to seek processes and methods which honour, respect, and elevate the fascinating differences of temperament, religion, habit, and custom which have enriched the earth, and which have too often been rubbed out by the 20^th century march to progress.

It has been one of the features of Professor Alexander’s work that he has undertaken projects in many parts of the world, and always made a huge effort to enter into the variety of cultures he encountered, with sympathy, and in such a way as to support the uniqueness of the people he was working for.

We shall continue this tradition, and shall seek opportunities to make sure that, as far as possible, the people engaged in the work at the Centre represent our world community.

Many people in the world who seek a new way of doing things also recognize the immense challenge posed by the task of integrating new ways into society, made more difficult when working alone. The need for colleagues is vividly expressed in a short letter from one of our associates (a PhD student in Paris), who returned to his native France after attending a Conference and Masters Class on The Nature of Order in London.

“I returned from London yesterday evening. It was really three very interesting and productive days. …

“In fact, most of all, I met many persons who came to the Conference and the Master class, really very interesting people. It's incredible how I have so many things in common with all these people; our interactions were direct and we understood each other immediately. In the Master class we were slightly more than 20 and there were many persons who want to work and get organized so as to promote and apply Alexander's ideas, also many very intelligent people (which is rare ... ) from Germany, Sweden, Australia, South Africa, Israel, Ireland and England. I am really very happy to have met all these people and I believe that we need to meet again regularly. There is a lot of motivation. It's also very good that Alexander proposed a project for us to do together.

The Centre will provide a place of intellectual critical mass; a studio atmosphere where people can work together, converse about their respective projects whatever the field, in an environment of open-minded inquiry and conviviality.

* Professor Christopher Alexander is a professional architect, scientist, and builder who has built in many countries. He is Emeritus Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and winner of the first medal for research ever awarded by the American Institute of Architects. He studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge and worked in the cognitive sciences at Harvard, before earning the first Ph.D. in architecture awarded at Harvard University. Author of many books, including A Pattern Language (now reportedly the best-selling treatise on architecture of all time), he has recently published The Nature of Order, the culmination of a distinguished 40-year career in architectural research and building.

Dr. Stuart Cowan is an ecological designer trained in complex systems. He serves as principal of Sustainable Systems Design, an international firm devoted to sustainable project design, development, and finance that is based in Portland, Oregon. He is co-author of Ecological Design (Island Press, 1996), and a leader in the sustainability movement. He is also responsible for the website ConservationEconomy.net, which he made for Ecotrust, and for the bioregional pattern language that is represented in that system. He also worked for the Portland Development Commission at the City of Portland, attracting two hundred million dollars in financing for sustainable building projects.

Dr. Howard Davis is Professor of Architecture at the University of Oregon and author of The Culture of Building (Oxford University Press, 1999), a pioneering study of the grass-roots society-wide process which produces buildings in modern society. He is a professional architect, with experience in house construction, and in the conception of house-workshop buildings. He has built a low income community of houses in Kerala, India.

* Dr. Brian Hanson is an architectural historian and Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Religion, Ideas and Society at London University. He is author of a number of books including Architects and the “Building World” from Chambers to Ruskin: Constructing Authority (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and The Golden City (accompanying an RIBA exhibition, 1993). He is the former Director of the Prince of Wales’s Institute for Architecture and worked closely with Professor Alexander to build the West Dean Visitor’s Centre in West Sussex and on the design of The Mary Rose Museum.

* Michael Mehaffy is a specialist in construction management, an author on architecture and philosophy, a master builder of houses and other structures, and former Director of Education for The Prince’s Foundation. He is a former student of Christopher Alexander, and he continues to collaborate with him on projects. He studied 20^th Century art and music at the California Institute of the Arts before doing graduate work in philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, and architecture at the University of California at Berkeley.

* Maggie Moore Alexander is Vice President of The Center for Environmental Structure, and of the Center for Environmental Structure Publishing, both in Berkeley, California. She is a Social Scientist, has worked for three decades in Organization Development and Management Theory, and has been a consultant to major American corporations. Her area of expertise is in creating conditions for fundamental social change. For the last two years she has also been the Communications Director for The Nature of Order.

Randall Schmidt is the Chief Financial Officer of Center for Environmental Structure Publishing and Vice-President of PatternLanguage.com in Berkeley, California. He is an engineer, professional architect and builder, and has worked closely with Professor Alexander on many building projects throughout the world. He is co-author of the pioneering Brookings Plan, one of the first purely generative master plans, based on morphogenetic thinking, that is now being applied to the formation of a new community in Oregon.

[1] The Nature of Order: Book x, page y, CES Publishing.

[2] Dr. Stuart Cowan, “The Nature of Order: Unfolding a Sustainable World,” Resurgence, July/August 2004.