What is a living pattern?

Patterns describe essential relationships among the elements of systems, and provide a unique and useful tool for handling and organizing complexity. This truth, embodied for centuries in the practice of creating human habitation, has in recent years been dissected and catalogued by science. Computer researchers have adopted the pattern method both to understand and to manipulate complexity. Advances in our knowledge of how patterns reflect the ordered complexity of nature has led to breakthroughs in computer technology that continue to fuel economic growth and development not just in industry but in every realm of our society (Leitner, 2015; Mehaffy & Salingaros, 2015).

Patterns of behavior, and of practice in any field of human endeavor, evolve over time with constant repetition, each repetition embedded in and learning from its predecessors. Any pattern arising from such evolutionary selection over generations is irreducible; that is, it cannot be understood in terms of simpler components. It is not a multiplication of a prior component but an accretion to its complexity. It grows ever more subtle, ever more useful, and comes closer and closer to reflecting how nature works: It is a living pattern. Such a pattern can be combined with others into a system that reflects an ever-higher level of useful relationships (Salingaros, 2005: Chapter 8).

We rely on techniques akin to genetic programming to discover evolved solutions as general methods for manipulating complexity without destroying its order. By examining an enormous number of possible small variations, a pattern is selected as the optimal configuration, the one that provides the most useful feedback. Direct simulated evolution is computationally very intensive, so the results, once obtained, are worth documenting in a pattern format.

Twelve living patterns help define human spaces

The key question in architecture is how to design a space that feels reassuring on at least an unconscious level. Incredibly, we have been producing hostile, anxiety-inducing spaces or dreary, depressing spaces for decades, at least as judged by their users. A dozen living patterns selected from Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language (Alexander et al., 1977) can help architects get beyond this deplorable practice. The following pattern summaries are my own, and they focus on spatial aspects. The reader is urged to consult the original, lengthier version of each numbered pattern, which includes research material giving detailed arguments and/or scientific validation for the patterns.

Pattern 61: Small Public Squares. Build public squares with a width of approximately 60 feet. Their length can vary. The walls enclosing the space, whether partially or wholly surrounding it, should make us feel as if we are in a large open public room.

Pattern 106: Positive Outdoor Space. The built structures partially surrounding an outdoor space, be it rectangular or circular, must define, in its wall elements, a concave perimeter boundary, making the space itself convex overall.

Pattern 115: Courtyards Which Live. The best courtyards have many entry points, a view to the streets beyond, and enclosing walls that are fenestrated, not blank. These are used most often.

Pattern 124: Activity Pockets. The success of urban space depends on what can occur along its boundaries. A space will be lively only if there are pockets of activity all around its inner edges.

Pattern 167: Six-Foot Balcony. The minimum depth of social space for a balcony is six feet, preferably with its space partly enclosed, either canopied, protected from nearby observers by side screens, or partly recessed into the facade. Recessed balconies provide an excellent sense of enclosure. But if balconies are narrower than six feet, are totally exposed or entirely cantilevered (sticking out), they are rarely used.

Pattern 179: Alcoves. To heighten the sense of intimacy indoors, build a useful smaller space within a larger space, partially enclosed with concave boundaries and a lower ceiling. Its width and depth could both be approximately six feet.

Pattern 180: Window Place. A concave boundary can incorporate windows. Examples range from (small) a window seat where the wall is deepened to create a space around the window, to (medium) a bay window where windows wrap around an extruded portion of the space, to (large) a glazed alcove where windows partially wrap around a room.

Pattern 183: Workspace Enclosure. The best place for working has no more than 50 to 75 percent of its perimeter enclosed by walls or windows. A workspace needs at least 60 square feet of floor area for each person.

Pattern 188: Bed Alcove. Give the bed its own partial enclosure. The space should feel comfortable, not too small, with a lower ceiling than the main part of the bedroom.

Pattern 190: Ceiling Height Variety. Give a building’s rooms different ceiling heights to enhance comfort at every scale of activity. High ceilings contribute to formality, low ceilings to informality, with the lowest height for the greater intimacy of alcoves.

Pattern 191: The Shape of Indoor Space. Indoor space should be roughly rectangular in plan with straight, vertical walls for practicality, but with concave wall portions where possible, and a roughly symmetrical vaulted ceiling. One-sided, sloped ceilings and sharp, slanted, or re-entrant angles in walls generate discomfort.

Pattern 203: Child Caves. Create small “cave-like” spaces in a house, or outside, for children to experience and play in.

Reading these living patterns should evoke a sense of human space that envelops and nourishes us; it goes far beyond strict mechanical utility. We need a new methodology for adaptive design, to re-awaken our lost spatial sensitivity and focus once again on creating “reassuring” spaces. These are vital for health and comfort in the built environment. If an architect expresses repulsion at the supposed “sentimentality” of these patterns, that is merely evidence of ideological conditioning to reject healing spaces.

Recurring themes run throughout the above spatial pattern summaries, such as partial enclosure balanced between too little and too much, and the need for concave boundaries to create convex space — Alexander called it “positive” space. Like biophilic design patterns, spatial design patterns enjoy scientific support. First, the inherited memory from our ancestral evolutionary environment certainly includes clearings, tree canopies, and caves as prototypes (Salingaros, 2015). Those settings provided a reassuring sense of enclosure at the right dimension. Second, neurological responses that were developed for our general survival long ago act now to interpret a space’s geometry as either friendly or hostile.

Experienced space and the principle of concavity

Spaces that embrace us gently are spaces we find inviting. Such spaces formed from concave boundaries embody the “principle of concavity”, which determines at all scales how we experience space. It tells us that we prefer surfaces that enclose us in a more or less organic manner. Urban space must be partly surrounded by an enveloping perimeter if it is to be used with pleasure and reassurance. It cannot just be leftover space between stand-alone “look-at-me” buildings. Humans tend to feel exposed and threatened in those leftover spaces because they are not defined coherently (Salingaros, 2005: Chapter 2). They fail to fit into the expectations formed by our instinctive judgment of space, which is built up over time — over generations — by our experience and that passed down to us by generations of users of the built environment. So people avoid fractured and incoherent open spaces in obedience to perfectly rational psychological imperatives.

Moreover, urban space is not two-dimensional. It is not enough to define it by means of a ground plan. Additional geometrical elements are needed to complete the sense of a three-dimensional enveloping boundary. Those work in the vertical dimension, and arise from the scales of architecture, not urbanism. Much depends on whether the details of the surrounding walls transmit either psychologically friendly or hostile messages to users of an open space. Mirrored or transparent curtain-wall façades diminish the visual sense of enclosure of a public space, making it less informative, less interesting, less friendly, less functional. Contrarily, solid façades showing organized complexity (as defined by their windows, doors, and other details) improve the functionality of an urban space.

Every useful, satisfying urban space reaches visual completion at a certain height off the ground, like framing a picture. For example, a roof cornice on facing buildings adds a horizontal lip to the built perimeter of urban space, creating a degree of concavity that enhances the feeling of enclosure (Salingaros, 2005: Chapter 2). Such framing edges are nowadays dismissed as inessential because their original function is not understood; yet they play a major supportive role in the definition of reassuring urban space.

In Volume 3 of The Nature of Order (Alexander, 2005) Alexander introduces the concept of “hulls” (as in the concave hull of a boat) in public space. This is again the idea of coherent public space that promotes the sensation of being in a giant outdoor room, a room without a ceiling. Alexander also describes the process of designing indoor rooms whose volume and boundaries offer the qualities necessary to induce comfort. Altogether, we have a set of new tools for creating coherent living space, interior or exterior, defined by the characteristics of its enveloping and sheltering boundary.

How do we create healing spaces?

An essential group of patterns describes the shape of the space we experience, the volume in which living actually occurs. A space or collection of spaces that is well designed offers psychological “reassurance” to its users (Salingaros, 2015). We find such healthy characteristics predominantly in traditional places. Of course, we could literally perform an action in any volume large enough to contain it. But a space should make us comfortable enough to enact our roles in life without feeling anxiety from aspects of the built environment’s geometry. Such a space is shaped so that it “reassures” our body and mind — not necessarily as an aesthetic response but as a medical/psychological response (Salingaros, 2015).

All of us have experienced the sense of emotional elation inside a truly great space. This has little to do with its size. And yet many architects seem strangely uninterested in the factors that are responsible for this effect. The rules for designing such spaces can be researched, and then documented as design patterns. Certain environments — usually of rather modest dimensions — invite us to work and linger in them, whereas other spaces of similar size somehow disturb us. Specific geometric components and features, which we might not notice until they are brought to our attention, make all the difference in the world to the adaptive quality of spaces that contain human activity.

Mental and emotional well-being is a function of adaptive architecture. Experiments in human psychology document that we have a built-in aversion to sharp objects in general, and in particular to those pointing at us. Most people prefer rounded moldings to sharp, angular moldings in window frames and sills. At the next architectural scale, walls that are not vertical and ceilings that are not horizontal, and re-entrant walls and ceilings bulging towards us instead of yielding outwards, cause alarm. Emotional discomfort can be triggered by design elements of a wall meant for purely aesthetic effect — rather than for real or apparent structural utility such as columns, pilasters, or beams.

All of this information can be documented as living patterns. Some of it already has, although much research remains to be done.

Architects trained in conventional methods tend to resist design solutions that employ living patterns. They don’t want to be told that their designs might displease or even hurt the users’ sensibilities. That would imply failure, so they ignore feedback and insist on judging design exclusively by abstract aesthetics. They value appearance above utility. For them, design patterns are anathema.

Living patterns enhance our lives and health

Patterns are an adaptive design tool for today — already available, developed previously by someone else. Its existence saves an enormous amount of work. We need not rethink everything to implement a new project. Yet the flexibility of living patterns means that what is re-used is only the most relevant structural relationship, conveyed as an evidence-based proposition. A living pattern does not merely copy an image from the past but implements the latest upgrade. In this sense, living patterns are tools of evolutionary, adaptive design (Leitner, 2015; Mehaffy & Salingaros, 2015: Chapter 18).

The relationships embodied in living patterns help create an environment with healing properties. Humans have used patterns for millennia. The backstory became evident with research on the concept of biophilia and evidence-based design that arose from it (Kellert et al., 2008; Mehaffy & Salingaros, 2015: Chapters 11 & 12; Salingaros, 2015). Faster patient healing after surgery depends on exposure to natural environments, and buildings that have the right mathematical qualities mimic this effect. Living patterns have immediate consequences for human health and life. They are not simply a matter of individual preference.

The pattern format expresses a design constraint, a relationship that expresses what a design element can accomplish — and cannot. It narrows down the specific purpose of any given design solution. This constraining specificity enables the transmission of such knowledge from one culture, historical time and place to another (Salingaros, 2005: Chapter 8). But living patterns as studied relationships among design elements may seem irrelevant when interpreted, as they often are, in the framework of a purely formal, sculptural architecture.

To read Alexander’s design framework of 253 socio-geometric patterns (Alexander et al., 1977), is to immediately feel the patterns, especially the biophilic ones, to be true in a visceral sense. Patterns not directly linked to biology may still be interactive or social in type, acting together on different scales in a way that mimics nature. Many non-architects in fact learn architecture from A Pattern Language, even practicing as amateur architects. Living patterns make design a more participatory, vernacular, even democratic process, working to push back against the myth of the “genius” (and often authoritarian) architect.

Some patterns rely on experiential psychology, driving humans to feel comfortable or uncomfortable in different types of setting. Others relate to human visual and spoken communication with passersby, whether sight lines, proximity, and other factors that promote or discourage interaction. Human contact is required for the well-being of adults, and especially, at either end of lifespan, for both the emotional formation of children and emotional health of the elderly. Meanwhile, the industrialized world continues to create formally striking places that skimp on human values. Whether cramped or so vast as to engulf human scale, they are ultimately useless. A proper intimacy of space, offering the psychological protection essential for inviting people to use it, is absent.

Planning regulations in recent decades have made it extremely difficult to implement living patterns. But as these outmoded codes are gradually reformed or discarded, living patterns are available to soften the rigidity of the 20th Century built environment. A more humane worldview can upend the paradigm that has guided the post-war development of cities and their surroundings. The sterile city versus the verdant suburbs is an increasingly strained dichotomy of post-industrialized development. Research shows that the luxuriant suburban landscape already in retreat before decades of overdevelopment grows less and less trustworthy as compensation for the stress of traffic jams, social isolation, and visual clutter endemic to suburban sprawl. The house with its moat of green, repeated up and down a coagulated system of streets, has been a disappointing design solution. Because of its scarcity of living patterns, suburbia has violated its promise of a healing effect.

Information and communications technology patterns

Looking at the pattern phenomenon through the lens of computer science can help us to understand how design and building are related to the intrinsic structures of nature’s development.

Software is becoming more not less complex. Software patterns provide a very useful tool to organize the complexity of large programs. Interface patterns simplify the human use of complex programs. Social patterns, in turn, help us to organize and then carry out productive group interactions. Pattern applications in information and communications technology cover a large variety of purposes, including the following:

1. Software patterns help us to organize the complexity of computer programs by identifying re-usable complex modules. Patterns can be shared and re-combined into new, more complex programs.
2. Antipatterns are perceived solutions that seem workable because they are novel and have one or more appealing features. And yet they fail for reasons that are not obvious. They are useful to document to avoid re-inventing them and repeating the same mistake over and over.
3. Real-time human interaction patterns are a resource for teams developing software. These organizational patterns help to manage and optimize group collaboration projects.
4. Design patterns for human interaction with machines are crucial for hardware and software development. Pattern language that links us more intuitively to our computers and our program applications lies at the heart of the information revolution.
5. Design patterns for human interaction with other humans in virtual space are crucial for developing social media platforms. These patterns are abstracted from and translated from documented interaction patterns in physical space.

The software community discovers valuable, re-usable solutions and codifies them in pattern format; this shared information saves much duplicate effort. The corollary is also true: cataloguing antipatterns that recur in software and yet do not work helps to avoid re-inventing the square wheel again and again. Beyond software itself, human interaction patterns organize development teams to work more effectively on large software projects. Patterns guarantee efficiency through specific types of relationships developed over time. This has proved superior to top-down, command-style management in many fields, including politics and industry, throughout history. Knowledge of the patterns of human interaction with other humans is necessary to develop platforms for social media. Finally, interface patterns document the best discoveries from years of work on human interaction with computers.

Patterns help us run modern society by organizing massive and continuous exchanges of information. None of these interaction patterns have any direct relation to biology. And yet the quality of a “healing environment” has its parallel in computer science. A piece of hardware or software can be judged as possessing desirable properties: usable, intuitive, friendly, natural, thoughtful, elegant, graceful, accommodating without imposing its own “attitude”, a tool that blends with the user’s subconscious, etc. These descriptors do not apply to how a computer looks but to how it works.

Living patterns document healthy design solutions

An environment that embodies living structure allows people to live life more fully, encouraged rather than inhibited by architecture. Freed from anxiety and the feelings of unease induced by hostile buildings, spaces, and surfaces, positive emotions are allowed to blossom on the basic level of our subconscious. A building designed with sufficient attention to the natural rhythms of human neurobiology can result in conscious joy. Think of how the tectonics of the human body, mere surface physical appearance (occasionally augmented by a glance), can trigger sexual excitement — or not. Many are the examples of how physical form, properly attuned to natural structure, can evoke a human response everywhere along the continuum of conscious to subconscious emotion (Salingaros, 2015).

The architectural theorist Christopher Alexander and others have put considerable effort into cataloguing design patterns that resonate with and actualize people’s humanity. Living patterns free people from environmental stresses that come from an incoherent geometry of objects and spaces. Architecture’s capacity to protect us from stress liberates us to be more fully human, and also keeps us healthy in the long term.

Living patterns represent structures of useful constraint underlying all successfully evolved design solutions. Generations of people, building up their surroundings by trial and error, discovered configurations that made them feel healthy both physiologically and psychologically. Living patterns arose through the evolution of built form, a long process of selection arising from thousands of experiments. The choice of a healthy architectural solution over other possibilities uses feedback to identify a state of increased wellbeing leading to long-term health. This process is the same as in genetic programming, where a piece of “software” evolves after millions of iterations, with variants continually selected and re-selected so the result performs the required task optimally (Leitner, 2015).

Most living patterns documented by Alexander in A Pattern Language (Alexander et al., 1977) were derived from looking at solutions that unify the user within his or her immediate environment. The main criterion for selection was the healing experienced when a pattern is successfully applied to constrain — that is, to identify useful limits to — a design. The mind-set in which this phenomenon is recognized and appreciated considers human beings interacting with their surroundings strongly enough to affect their health. A living pattern is meaningless, however, in a mind-set that treats buildings as sculptural objects interacting naturally with neither their users nor their surroundings.

Successfully evolved design solutions lie embedded in traditional architectures. The functional correctness of living patterns considered as a set of design constraints depends on their widespread occurrence globally. The proof is in their re-discovery among people isolated from each other in geographically separated societies. Everything else in those cultures may be totally different, but since the human body is more or less the same all over the world, socio-geometric solutions for a particular design problem ought to obey identical constraints — and they do! The sense of wellbeing generated by a living socio-geometric pattern is shared across distinct times and cultures.

Extracting patterns from observations

Since life-enhancing patterns recur in traditional buildings, some people assume that a living pattern is merely a design solution that has been used repeatedly. But that’s not necessarily so. Many repeating design typologies are expedient for some purposes, but do not enhance human life in any way. A design template may be widely adopted because it is very cheap, industrially efficient, or because it serves the interests of some group — but it doesn’t lead to a healing environment for its users. In many cases, it could actually degrade the living qualities of the environment.

An enlightened approach to healthy design therefore requires a catalogue of tested living patterns for handy reference. Such a list would help to avoid confusing them with repeating inhuman typologies that are not alive.

One list already exists in A Pattern Language (Alexander et al., 1977). Yet how do we document other living patterns from existing buildings and urban fabric? Extracting patterns from traditional practice and deriving totally new patterns both require judgment. The following help explain how to observe a pattern in design (Salingaros, 2005: Chapter 8):

1. Living patterns usually work together as a group, and are rarely isolated.
2. Some appear in a weak form: we need to find the strongest example.
3. Patterns organize complexity and are not found in simplistic environments.

The complexity of the best, most humanly adapted living configurations, which solve more than one design problem simultaneously, is high. A setting that has positive effects on the user’s wellbeing probably has several patterns working together to satisfy a combination of system dynamics (some of which are not obvious). A researcher trying to document patterns must first disentangle them from one another. As in most scientific research, you first detect known patterns; what is left contains the new patterns. This discovery process is necessarily sequential, and cannot be achieved all at once.

Then, one may discover a set of similar but distinct solutions to a specific design problem whose common features identify them as possible living patterns. Suppose each related application shows undeniable healing effects on the user. But which particular constraint is the archetypal pattern? A choice among several variations of a common theme must be made. The optimal living pattern is the most “wonderful” — the one that works best, that gives the most healing feedback, that makes a user wish to experience its implementation as much as possible. Obviously, this singular living pattern will be difficult to locate. An architect must learn to identify them, and then design a solution that takes advantage of the mutual adaptivity arising from the ordered complexity common to living patterns.

An archetypal living pattern must deliver the strongest and most positive effect on human health and comfort for that particular circumstance. That way, it can reproduce the same healing effect when built into something new. Competing forces of expediency, fashion, short-term economy, or misguided architectural codes and zoning laws are likely to dilute a pattern in many of its applications. Finding a living pattern requires looking for the best possible built example, like a collector searching for the best seashell or antique coin specimen. This process of discovery presupposes experience, and a highly tuned sensitivity to healing environments.

Inventing new patterns

A socio-geometric pattern can be invented, of course, and is not limited to what is observed as already built elsewhere. The architect or urbanist has full freedom to propose a new pattern as a conjecture based upon experiments and intuition. The hard task is its verification: the living pattern must enhance human life whenever it is used. Otherwise, it is just a design whim with no healing potential, and it could even seriously degrade the psychological qualities of the built environment. A new pattern must pass a rigorous set of tests and trials, preferably with full-scale models and mock-ups, before it is built.

Another point is a supposedly new pattern’s overlap with existing patterns: after the continuous emergence of thousands of living patterns over millennia of human building, we can’t expect any novel pattern to be a total break from the past (Salingaros, 2005: Chapter 8). And it is the user — not the architect — who decides when a living pattern, old or new, has been implemented successfully. An invented design pattern can be called a “living pattern” only if it clearly enhances the life of its users. It will take repeated implementations to decide whether it works well or not. Even so, an architect should be careful when transferring a new pattern to another project, just in case its success is due to local rather than universal factors.

The following summarize the requirements for deriving new living patterns:

(i) A pattern is very easy to propose, but it requires extensive testing before it can be adopted for use.

(ii) A living pattern has to significantly enhance the wellbeing and lives of users who experience it directly.

(iii) It is expected that any new pattern will connect to existing patterns; otherwise there is something wrong with it.

(iv) A proposed design scheme that draws attention to itself, or to the ego of its designer, is most probably not a living pattern.

(v) A living pattern acts on our subconscious: it frees us from environmental stress, even if we never notice it.

Coming up with new living patterns is an essential part of innovative design that is reliably adaptive. Students and practitioners should first learn to work with the original set drawn from Alexander’s Pattern Language, and then explore other pattern lists compiled afterwards. Finally, they should try their hand at creating innovative patterns needed for a project at hand. Even though each design problem is necessarily specific, the living pattern has to be general. Guidelines for comparable discovered patterns are available in the literature of computer science, where new patterns are being written all the time (Leitner, 2015).

Patterns are basic tools for organizing complexity — without erasing it. They are used in all fields by those who study and build complex systems of all kinds. Their usefulness was proved in the 20th Century after designers and planners oversimplified forms in the fields of architecture and urbanism. They believed that abstract forms rendered tools used to organize complexity obsolete. The discipline as a whole became reductionistic (Bhat & Salingaros, 2013). Practitioners learned to ignore the complaints of users, and users have had to learn to numb themselves to the work of practitioners — a sadly necessary defense mechanism amid a deteriorating built environment. Practitioners are no longer trained to tackle complexity: they invariably think in terms of non-adaptive simplistic situations.

Patterns as design constraints

Living patterns contribute to successful design solutions. But an architect cannot just pop a living pattern into a building design and expect it to work without any relation to a coherent organizing principle. Inserting living patterns into a rambling, incoherent building will not fix its rambling, incoherent design. Living patterns reinforce each other, and they need to be embedded in an interrelated web of adaptive structure. They are not a quick fix-it for bad design.

Alexander’s The Nature of Order (Alexander, 2001-2005) correctly understands such patterns as constraints in a sophisticated system of computational design. One chooses from among an infinite number of generated options that satisfy an interrelated group of patterns. All of these solutions are adaptive. The more constraints one imposes, the narrower the set of good solutions. The design process may include adaptive constraints such as climate, site, orientation, interaction with the environment and surrounding structures, etc.

Architects trained in mainstream practice claim to reject design constraints of any sort. They are intoxicated with the promise of absolute power to control human lives by determining the shape and dimensions of the spaces in which people will live and work. Architects expect to indulge themselves freely, exerting personal will on the environment. Not surprisingly, they react to the idea of living patterns with apprehension.

Architects believe that they possess an awesome and incredible power, based on pure whim, to decide exactly how people will use their buildings. They don’t! The myth of the architect’s absolute and total control over the user’s life is a cruel and dangerous fantasy. Human nature reacts against willful impositions (Salingaros, 2015). People are enticed, not forced, to use spaces and paths whose design makes them feel comfortable; they must be compelled to use spaces and paths that fail to generate such positive feelings. Or they will avoid hostile environments altogether. Such matters are rarely if ever considered prior to construction. Will a design function the way its architect naively expects? The answer —yes or no — depends upon the living patterns embedded within its design.

Moreover, the most paradoxical (and also most embarrassing) aspect of conventional design is never mentioned. The creative freedom permitted in contemporary architecture is dictated by trendsetters, power brokers, and influential critics, and is therefore severely constrained: infinitely more than the constraints implied by living patterns. For decades architects have been allowed to create anything except what has the qualities of living structure. This restriction is socialized into architectural education and in media coverage of architecture. Indeed, the architect can violate living patterns, producing an architecture whose primary result is a violation of nature.

Shouldn’t architects be creating healing environments?

When people complain that the environment makes them feel uncomfortable, they are dismissed as “old-fashioned” or “unappreciative of contemporary design”. But ordinary people’s reactions are in fact correct. Only architects and other design professionals, after years of conditioning in architecture school, are able to override deeper instincts telling them that a structure is hostile. Architects have long used formal criteria to design and build structures that do not accommodate human sensibilities. They are taught to judge by their own lights and to treat criticism by the public as a feather in their caps.

The root cause of profound disagreement between trained architects and the common people on architecture boils down to whether a design embodies living structure. Reconciliation on this point is impossible. Architects who call for more education of the public so that it will love the same buildings they love do not understand human nature.

We could change our design criteria and adopt a set of mechanisms shared by all “living” creations. If the design of a city, a neighborhood, a plaza, a building, a room, or a window shares these living qualities, then we can be fairly sure the built structure will work well for its users. The criteria for success are both practical and psychological: the created form and space are adapted to the human function they aim to accommodate, and they make people feel comfortable rather than stressed. This network of sensations acts subconsciously. A positive emotional reaction is not usually noticed because it is largely instinctive, aligning with human neurobiological response, yet it leads to a healthy state. But a negative reaction to an unnatural form and space triggers shock and anxiety.

Our body is warning us of danger in the environment.

The difference between natural and artificial is fundamental. The act of building is a man-made transformation of the natural environment, an imposition on nature necessary for human habitation. The process of assembling architectural and urban form, along with its underlying geometry, can differ radically: either it is inspired by and sympathetic to natural processes, or it is deliberately opposed to them. Architecture and planning that use unnatural methodologies will inevitably conflict with nature. Often, forms that rely upon innovation as their inspiration reap acclaim for their architects. Unfortunately, structures that conflict with the processes of nature are ultimately unsustainable.

Yet in most contemporary architecture, innovation is based strictly on visual appeal. Traditional design approaches, however, are utilitarian. Their processes and forms arose over generations by selection among natural alternatives, hence they are more sustainable. They use evolved energy-saving solutions for building — factoring in local climate, local materials, and knowledge of local customs to determine, by trial and error, the most effective designs. Taking this more scientific approach, we can dependably solve more problems of sustainability and human health. Some environments soothe and heal, whereas others induce anxiety and illness. By rejecting practices based on science and utility, architects have opened a deep and perilous gulf between innovation that celebrates an abstract image and innovation that provides a healing environment.

To force the public to put up with dysfunctional, unhealthy design solutions is not an accomplishment that architects should be proud of. The design professions must break out of their conventional thinking and embrace living patterns in their work if they want to help reconstitute what every human deserves: a healing environment (Salingaros, 2015).

Why living patterns are not applied today

For much of the twentieth century, mainstream architects were concerned primarily with applying formal design criteria having to do with severe and simplistic forms, and focused on the exclusive use of industrial materials such as plate glass curtain walls, etc. Those typologies and design rules have an opposite goal from living patterns, which seek human well-being and health through adaptive geometry.

In a new human-oriented design paradigm that relies on useful interaction among the elements of architecture, a building’s image and form are not the top concern. Architects today equate humans with “scalies” — human figurines available in CAD design programs and placed artistically to “humanize” otherwise sterile renderings. That’s phony, and fools the client, often pumping fresh air into a project that turns out to be dead on arrival. Let the architect instead ask: “Will any real person actually want to sit, stand, or walk right there, on that spot where we see happy and smiling figures?” This is the key to predicting actual uses, and it depends on living patterns.

Simple forms — the opposite of design patterns that embody ordered complexity — are widely used as non-adaptive design prototypes. They represent the most rigid type of design constraint. They are divorced from human life. Our world today is dominated by such typologies promoted by an ideology linked to industrial materials. These typologies were declared “healthy”, “socially liberating”, and “the design of the future” long ago by self-anointed “experts”. Society repeated these shibboleths without ever asking whether they work or not. They have obviously failed to achieve whatever marvelous effect was promised. But many with evident self-interest desperately wish to continue to believe in non-adaptive typologies that have no healing effect on the user.

The continuing dominance in design of minimally-satisfactory and even unhealthy typologies contradicts the process of historical selection that normally would favor the healthiest living patterns. How is this so? Selection stopped after nobody was allowed to test design variants! The reason that unhealthy design typologies thrive all over the world is because they have been institutionalized. Once non-adaptive design typologies become established, convention and regulations decree what designers are allowed to use. Society gets used to hostile spaces and urban dysfunction, and cannot imagine anything different. People accept an unhealthy status quo, ignoring direct physical evidence that demolishes false promises now almost a century old.

So long as practitioners, professional groups, the media, and academia all consider buildings primarily as isolated sculptural objects, attempts to introduce living patterns into the design of human habitat will be extraordinarily difficult and frustrating. When, at last, enlightened clients, public or private, learn the benefits of a healing environment, they will demand it from architects — who will discover an incentive to know how it can be delivered. The new defining paradigm of our technological society is connectivity, not isolation. This is where living patterns come in. Future trends must and will reflect the essential healing connection between people and their environment.