Introduction

This collection of articles describes how to use design patterns to create better — more emotionally-responsive and human — architectural environments. The pattern concept was introduced by Christopher Alexander and his collaborators in 1977, and has enjoyed wide success outside architectural culture. For various reasons, this design method and its accompanying philosophy of adaptation have not yet entered the architectural mainstream. Nor are design patterns taught at universities on a regular basis, since academics correctly perceive them as representing the opposite of formalistic design (and clearly privilege the second methodology).

This booklet has three rather ambitious aims:

• To educate practicing architects and the general public on why design patterns are both useful and necessary.
• To explain how the pattern method applied to the built environment contains the seeds for adaptive design.
• To establish the scientific validity for design patterns, while invalidating methods based on fashion.

A promised new era of unprecedented design innovation has as its goal to create a humane, healing environment for the user. Nevertheless, this aim conflicts with the construction industry’s drive to finance self-indulgent expressions for architects’ egos and personal whims. As such, this booklet is bound to generate controversy because it steps on many toes. Yet if our society wishes for a better future, it has to make a number of necessary changes.

The essays refer to scientific results that are published elsewhere in more technical language. Readers who wish for further detailed information, or to verify the claims made here, can follow up the references. The breadth and depth of this topic go far beyond visual design, to describe essential aspects of human life. Patterns are actually one small portion of a body of research by a large number of contributors spanning several decades.

Anyone eager to apply design patterns needs practical guidelines. The literature is unfortunately scanty on this topic. A book chapter reprinted here as an Appendix outlines how to use design patterns in practice. Even though design patterns were first published in 1977, they have a penetrating lesson to teach contemporary architecture. Design patterns were a remarkably prescient methodology that is only now finding its most profound expression. They contain the seeds of a new, adaptive approach to architecture.

1. The 21st Century Needs Its Own Paradigm Shift in Architecture

A cure for spatial design amnesia

For well above half a century, most new buildings delivered by architects to owners have had extremely poor spaces, both inside and out.

I blame this sad state of affairs on the criteria used for the critical evaluation of the built environment. Buildings that are expected to inspire other architects and evolve new building practices are assessed in the design media as well as in academia as the latest fashions in form. It’s hard to see them as major advancements in the art and science of creating human habitation. Excited write-ups and the latest round of design awards praise buildings seemingly intended to induce the greatest level of personal anxiety by those who use them. All this merely lays the ground for the next round of psychologically debilitating places. Such failures, on the part of academic institutions and professional designers, would not have been tolerated by architects operating in any other age of human history.

The early 20th century paradigm shift that came with replacing traditional ways of building by modernist design methods was a wrenching experience; it replaced centuries of cultural preference for humanly adaptive spaces, and imposed on us, instead, an acceptance of psychologically damaging ones. To undo the last century’s paradigm shift will be similarly traumatic for everyone involved in design and construction today. A whole set of practices and institutions need to be dismantled: Architecture prizes awarded by august committees of practitioners, academics and critics with long resumes, distinguished patrons smiling for photos next to pasteboard images of buildings — these are easily dispensable, but no less necessary to end than the decades of professional, academic, and critical myopia that have buttressed the industry’s ability to tilt the architectural playing field against a more healthy, humane way of building. The forces that validated deficient design would be, and should be, discredited in a new paradigm shift — the sooner the better.

We need to begin again from zero.

We do not merely require a new architecture. Such an objective would be immediately misinterpreted as simply a new design style. What is proposed here is the foundation of a new kind of architecture: an entirely novel way to think about and practice architecture, extending far beyond any superficial novelty of appearance. Triggering a new paradigm shift, one that revalues the value of living structures, won’t be easy. We recognize that a new shift in the way we evaluate the built environment would be as destabilizing to today’s established order as the one that occurred in the 1920s.

The 21st century solution is to re-discover and document the properties of responsive spaces that adapt naturally to human needs. Fortunately, we have tools that make this gigantic task much easier than before. The design patterns of Christopher Alexander from 40 years ago provide pieces of the solution that we can put together for a contemporary understanding of space (Alexander et al., 1977). And there is an enormous amount of new material from current research that was not available back then (Mehaffy & Salingaros, 2015).

But first, what can we do to motivate a paradigm shift? We cannot turn back the clock. To misinterpret our program as merely returning to pre-war traditional architecture is a mistake. Such an error is behind the most facile and intellectually empty arguments against change, used to block progress in adaptive design. In fact, we wish to leave the non-adaptive past behind us, and jump forward to a new, adaptive architecture in which spaces and surfaces are exquisitely responsive to human biology.

This movement is both motivated and justified by modern science, and has nothing to do with fashion or design ideology. Resistance to introducing an adaptive mode of design is extremely strong, because the cultural mainstream is invested in what is, not what could be. People are frightened of abandoning conventional ways of interpreting the world, even if those ways are demonstrably false. Here, convention and familiarity trump truth and science. It has always been thus with humankind.

The need for a new language

We require a new design language to describe the proposed paradigm shift because today’s design language is simply incapable of expressing the elements of “living” space. Our common language possesses neither the vocabulary nor the syntax to do so. Otherwise, we are forced to reach back to words and expressions from other topics, especially the romantic descriptions of the 19th century and beyond, to explain contemporary scientific results. That would be inaccurate and misleading. Furthermore, it risks condemning the whole effort to failure, from the beginning, because it gives the false impression that we are going back to those historical times instead of moving forward to a better future.

Already by 1977, when A Pattern Language was published (Alexander et al., 1977), the cultural mainstream had brushed aside living space as an irrelevant concept, and for this reason it was never assimilated. Consequently, there was no need to describe it in words.

The notion that space could be “alive” was relevant only to an antique worldview, which was considered valid until the 20th century. But the mass consciousness of the population has changed radically since then. There was no one within mainstream culture who was ready to assimilate this information in 1977. Even those individuals who recognized the tremendous potential for these ideas were hesitant to adopt them, because they would have to re-organize their mental structures in order to do so, and reject common cultural assumptions. The implied hierarchical re-organization was too radical. Society was not ready to abandon comfortable ways of thought.

Is society more receptive today? I believe it is. We have become technological, and ironically, advanced technology has revealed the inadequacies of the early industrial model. It is now possible to take the language of contemporary technology, and use it to describe a new kind of architecture.

Alexander recognized the need for a new language, which he addressed in his book, The Timeless Way of Building (1979). In it he describes the “Quality Without A Name” — the QWAN, as it is known in computer science — which for practical purposes can, indeed, be named. It is the quality of a living environment. It describes systemic harmony, organized complexity, and coherence in our surroundings, and can be distinguished from crude mechanical principles that have dominated design in the machine age. It is present in structures that make us feel healthier whenever we are exposed to them. We receive sustenance from artifacts and settings that possess this healing property, which reflects the processes of biological reproduction and development. This healing process occurs in environments whose positive emotional quality comes from innumerable mutually reinforcing and psychologically nourishing interactions.

But this did not solve the problem. While Alexander’s Zen-like treatment of the linguistic problem appealed to some — and continues to appeal to them very strongly — mainstream architects did not embrace it. And so, unfortunately, that opportunity was lost, and it was not picked up again until decades later by pragmatic computer scientists. After 20 years, with The Nature of Order (2001-2005), Alexander offered another solution, developed in great detail over four volumes, by introducing the concept of “wholeness” and his “theory of centers” as part of a new design vocabulary.

Designed monotony versus natural variety

Monotony and variety can apply to both the natural and the artificial environments. In our artificial or built environment are two distinct classes of object: copied and generated. A template, or set of design rules, that allows some freedom of execution generates objects; it does not copy them. A copy is literally stamped out. Designing and building in a generative process involves many steps, each of which addresses a range of factors, introducing variety, just as in nature. Variations are the result of environmental forces that differ from place to place and in the same place at different times.

In The Nature of Order (2001–2005), Alexander emphasizes that traditional and vernacular architecture is of this generative type. We see enormous variety and little monotony in tribal settlements, in traditional urban fabric, in historical and vernacular buildings, even in architecture designed according to rigorous classical orders of ancient pedigree. The reason is that, as a natural function of their production over and over again by humans, they adapt to the complexity of the actual conditions in place.

With industrialization, our design paradigm underwent a drastic shift: from generating form to copying form. This was the point of early mass production. Identical copies, with their supposed high degree of simplicity and low cost, became the norm and the primary objective of industrial design. But producing identical copies means isolating design from local forces — indeed, any adaptive forces. The industrial age came to insist on linear, monotonous alignment of identical copies (Salingaros, 2011). This triggered monotony as society’s principal psychological reaction to the ideals of repetition and mechanical alignment.

Monotony in our environment has profound consequences on our psyche. A worldview that exalts visual monotony has taken over an earlier environment shaped by the variety of natural forms. If industrial production tied to economic growth and prosperity necessarily generates monotony, then design variety is sure to be considered a drag on the operation of our economy. Indeed, this substitution of monotony for variety now dominates our society, especially in fields that claim to exalt creativity, including architecture.

Nature certainly shows little monotony (Salingaros, 2011). This might appear surprising, since geological mechanisms follow the same basic tectonic forces to produce change — erosion, pressure, glaciation, heat, plate shift, fracture, etc. — while biological mechanisms follow the same basic organic principles to grow, reproduce, and decay. Organisms use DNA to generate copies. One would expect the results to be identical, but they are not. Everything in nature is “generated” but is, in fact, never “copied”. Each example of an object or organism is created from the same design template, yet the result differs slightly each time. Individual objects and organisms differ because step-by-step generation creates small variations. Thus, the positioning on the evolutionary timeline of each natural entity, be it a rock formation or a salamander, is always complex, never monotonous.

2. Architecture For People, Not Machines

How machines differ from organisms

Throughout their lives, people are continually exposed to entirely distinct types of architectural experiences. Explaining the difference comes down to the contrast between the machine and the organism; these definitions are crucial for understanding and judging architecture (Salingaros & Masden, 2008; 2015).

The crucial distinction between machines and organisms goes far beyond architecture, of course, and is nicely clarified in the “Santiago School of Cognition” (Hallowell, 2009). Let me summarize this important work by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela here.

First, organisms evolve in a competitive and hostile natural setting. A living organism is defined as a fairly self-contained entity that possesses mechanisms for responding and adapting to its environment. Biological forces continuously triggered by environmental factors help keep the organism alive, and determine the living system’s behavior. A mobile organism decides where to move and where to stay, using an exquisitely developed sensory system to navigate its surroundings. Recurring physical situations that enhance the organism’s life define its living patterns: the organism will seek those out of instinct. Conversely, the absence of living patterns puts an organism on alert.

The organism senses external agents that influence its environment and could interfere with the organism’s natural response-driven choices. Any departure from living patterns triggers survival mechanisms. Forcing an organism to deviate from its innate living patterns only results in disturbing the organism’s natural complex functions and actions. It reacts to our interventions in unexpected ways — unexpected, yet perfectly logical according to the organism’s own program for survival. We might think that an animal or person would love cantilevered overhangs, for example, yet those create alarm if you are underneath them. Our design choices change the dynamics of the living structures the environment contains, in ways we need to understand.

In contrast to an organism, which responds to stimuli and thus is difficult to control, a simple machine or inanimate entity is entirely subject to control from external agents. It can be molded or changed in many different ways: it has no intrinsic patterns that it prefers or falls back on. With rare exceptions, a machine does not interact with its environment, and so transforming its immediate setting has no effect.

Designing for organisms vs. machines

Designing for organisms is challenging: in adaptive design, we cannot control intrinsic biological needs and sensitivities to the environment. We need to first discover the organism’s repertoire of living patterns, and then develop design rules for achieving them in practice. We must gather primary feedback in order to shape an accommodating environment and determine whether a building adapts to its users. Discoverable tools, such as design patterns, must be filed away and used to help identify potential reactions to design before it is even built (Alexander et al., 1977). It’s up to the designer to anticipate a user’s negative and positive responses.

In comparison, designing for machines is easy: this is the industrial approach to form. Design thinking focuses primarily on cost, efficiency, and materials. It requires no feedback. The architect quickly invents whatever shapes, spaces, and surfaces are minimally sufficient for what one wants the machine to do, or what one thinks the machine should be doing, and this is built without any questioning or testing. It’s safest just to copy previous industrial typologies. Efficiency suppresses emergence, lacks awareness of living structure, and certainly does not admit living patterns into the design process.

The contemporary built environment tends to be dominated by monotonous repetition of industrial typologies, interspersed with unique singular forms, yet neither follows any adaptive logic. These pervasive practices represent the antitheses of responsive environments anchored on living patterns. We create machines but not organisms.

Following Maturana and Varela, design decisions come down to interference and control versus feedback and learning. Does one wish to dominate the environment and all it contains, or to acknowledge, respect, and accommodate its living patterns? If we choose the latter, then we have to document and interpret the effects that interventions in the built environment have on humans and nature. Our design goal is then to support, through a material framework, the natural patterns of living structure.

3. Living Structures Should Come From Living Patterns

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.

Table 1. Twelve living patterns for space:
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 (going out), are totally exposed or entirely cantilevered, 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. This is a primal, biological sense of space, freed from often-irrelevant architectural accretions. It is what architects have long sought, but few have actually grasped. The hard, empirical facts encoded in patterns nonetheless lead us towards understanding the elusive properties of “living” spaces, which exist on a higher level than we are used to thinking about.

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. 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.

Closely related to biophilic design patterns, spatial design patterns also enjoy scientific support (Browning et al., 2014; Kellert et al., 2008; Ryan et al., 2014; Salingaros, 2015). First, the inherited memory from our ancestral evolutionary environment certainly includes clearings, tree canopies, and caves as prototypes. 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. Adaptive design relies on these two qualities of what made us human.

4. How do we create healing spaces?

Space can liberate us from stress

An environment that embodies living structure allows us to live life fully. We are encouraged, not inhibited by architecture. Freed from anxiety and feelings of unease induced by hostile buildings, spaces, and surfaces, our positive emotions blossom in our subconscious.

A building designed with sufficient attention paid to the natural rhythms of human neurobiology can result in conscious joy. Think of how the tectonics of the human body, our physical appearance, can trigger sexual excitement — or not. There are many examples of physical form, properly attuned to natural structure that can evoke a human response everywhere along the continuum of conscious to subconscious emotion (Salingaros, 2015).

Christopher Alexander and others have put considerable effort into cataloguing design patterns that resonate with and actualize our humanity (Alexander et al., 1977). Living patterns free us from environmental stresses, which 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 keeps us healthy in the long term.

Living patterns underlay all successfully evolved design solutions. Generations of humans have built 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 “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. Their main criterion for selection was the healing experienced when a pattern is successfully applied 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 that don’t naturally interact with their users or 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’s cheap or industrially efficient, or because it serves the interests of some group — but it doesn’t lead to a healing environment for its users. It’s not a living pattern. In fact 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 (called “anti-patterns”). One list 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 sensitivity and judgment (Salingaros, 2005: Chapter 8).

Table 2. How to observe a pattern in existing design:
1.	Living patterns usually work together as a group: they are rarely isolated.
2.	When patterns 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). So 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, you 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, and makes a user wish to experience its implementation as much as possible. Obviously, this living pattern will be difficult to locate. An architect must learn to identify patterns, 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 very finest seashell or antique coin specimen. This process of discovery presupposes experience, and a highly tuned sensitivity to healing environments.

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. While living patterns reinforce each other, they do 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. You choose from among an infinite number of generated options that satisfy an interrelated group of patterns. All of these solutions are adaptive. The more constraints you impose, 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.

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

Nevertheless, the most paradoxical (and 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 is encouraged to violate living patterns, producing buildings whose primary result is a violation of nature.

5. Living Patterns and the Principle of Concavity

Spaces that reassure our body

A well-designed space offers psychological “reassurance” to us, its users. We find such healthy characteristics predominantly in traditional places. Of course, we can perform an action in any volume barely large enough to contain it. But it should be our goal to design spaces that make us comfortable enough to enact our roles in life without feeling anxiety caused by strict geometry. A successful space, then, is shaped in such a way that it “reassures” our body and mind — not necessarily with its aesthetics, but the medical/psychological response it elicits.

 We have all experienced the sense of emotional elation inside a truly great space. That elation has little to do with the room’s size. Yet many Modernist architects seem strangely uninterested in the factors that are responsible for this effect. But we have evidence that the rules for designing such spaces can be discovered, and then tested. Some environments possessing modest dimensions invite us to linger there, yet other spaces of similar shape and size somehow disturb us. Some 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.

Spaces that nourish human emotions with built geometries can be documented as living patterns (Alexander et al., 1977), but much of this research remains to be done. Architects trained in conventional methods tend to resist design solutions that employ living patterns. Why? Mostly because they tend to value appearance above utility. They don’t want to be told that their designs might displease or even hurt users’ sensibilities. That would imply failure. So they ignore feedback and insist on judging design exclusively by abstract aesthetics. For them, design patterns are anathema.

Space is experienced as positive when it is coherent

We find spaces that embrace us gently inviting. Such spaces, formed from concave boundaries, embody the “principle of concavity”, which tells us that we prefer surfaces that enclose us in a more or less organic manner.

 Experiments in psychology document that we have a built-in aversion to sharp objects, especially to those that point at us. Most of us prefer rounded moldings to angular moldings in window frames and sills. At the next architectural scale, walls that are not vertical and ceilings that are neither symmetric nor horizontal, and re-entrant walls and ceilings bulging towards us instead of yielding outward cause alarm. Emotional discomfort can be triggered by protruding design details meant for purely aesthetic effect — undoing real or apparent structural utility of elements such as columns, pilasters, or beams.

If we are to use urban space with pleasure and make us feel reassured, it must be partly surrounded by an enveloping perimeter. It cannot just be leftover space between stand-alone “look-at-me” buildings. In those leftover spaces, we tend to feel exposed and threatened because the nodes and paths they contain are not defined coherently (Alexander et al., 1977: Pattern 106; Salingaros, 2005: Chapter 2). Such exterior space lacks internal connectivity and fails to fit into the expectations formed by our instinctive judgment of space. This expectation is built up over generations, passed down to us by previous users of the built environment as well as originating in our own experiences.

Many showcase 20th and early 21st Century buildings tend to be surrounded by lots of open space that is never used. Hard plazas and green areas designed around the buildings violate all the living patterns for urban space; therefore those areas tend to be unpopulated, hence they are wasted spaces. Sometimes vast in dimension, these spaces tend to be too open; part of them may be semi-enclosed but threatened by an overhanging roof that creates a feeling of alarm.

 For decades, architectural space has been compromised by mistaken assumptions (anti-patterns). Furthermore, the industrialized world continues to create formally striking places that skimp on essential human values. Whether cramped, splintered, or so vast as to engulf human scale, those environments are ultimately useless. The proper connected intimacy of space, offering the psychological protection essential for inviting people to use it, is absent.

Urban space is not two-dimensional. It is not simply a ground plan. Additional geometrical elements are needed to complete the sense of a three-dimensional enveloping boundary. Those elements 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 messages that are either psychologically friendly or hostile to those who visit the 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. On the other hand permeable solid façades showing organized complexity (as defined by their aligned symmetric doors, windows, and other details) improve the functionality of an urban space.

Like a framed picture, every useful and satisfying urban space reaches visual completion at a certain height off the ground. A roof cornice, for example, 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). Yet such framing edges are dismissed as inessential because their original function is not understood; yet they play a major supportive role in the definition of reassuring urban space through the principle of concavity.

In Volume 3 of The Nature of Order (2005) Christopher Alexander introduces the concept of “hulls” (as in the concave hull of a boat) in public space. This reinforces 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 psychological wellbeing. Altogether, we possess a set of powerful tools for creating coherent living space, interior or exterior, defined by the characteristics of its enveloping and sheltering boundary.

Living patterns enhance our lives and health

Humans have used patterns for millennia, extending biology to shape the built environment. 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.

Living patterns have immediate consequences for human health and life. They are not simply a matter of individual preference. The relationships embodied in living patterns help create an environment with healing properties. Faster healing after surgery, for instance, depends on exposure to natural environments, and buildings that have the right mathematical qualities mimic this effect. The backstory became evident with research on the concept of biophilia and evidence-based design that arose from it (Browning et al., 2014; Kellert et al., 2008; Mehaffy & Salingaros, 2015: Chapters 11 & 12; Ryan et al., 2014; Salingaros, 2015). Patterns not directly linked to biology may still be interactive or social, acting together on different scales in a way that mimics nature.

To read the 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. 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 instead of uncomfortable in different types of settings. Others relate to our visual and spoken communication with passersby, be these sight lines, proximity, and other factors that promote or discourage interaction. Human contact is required for the wellbeing of adults, and especially, at either end of lifespan, for both the emotional formation of children and emotional health of the elderly.

The pattern format recommends a set of design constraints; relationships that narrow the specific expression of any given design solution. This constraining specificity enables the transmission of such healing knowledge from one culture, historical time and place to another (Salingaros, 2005: Chapter 8).

Patterns are an adaptive design tool — already available, developed previously by someone else. Their documentation saves architects an enormous amount of work. They need not rethink everything to implement a new project. 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).

6. Why Do Some People Choose Oppressive Environments?

Our emotions validate adaptive design

The act of building, a man-made transformation of the natural environment, is 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. The difference between natural and artificial is fundamental. Architecture and planning that use unnatural geometric methodologies will inevitably conflict with nature. Often, forms that rely upon visual innovation as their sole inspiration reap acclaim for their architects. Unfortunately, structures that conflict with the processes of nature are ultimately unsustainable.

Traditional design approaches are utilitarian. Their processes and forms arose over generations by selection among natural alternatives, hence they are more sustainable. The most effective designs use evolved energy-saving solutions for building — factoring in local climate, local materials, and knowledge of local customs. Taking this more scientific approach, we can solve, dependably, problems of sustainability and human health.

Some environments soothe and heal; others induce anxiety and illness.

When people complain that our built 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 and practice, are able to override deeper biological instincts telling them that a structure is hostile (Salingaros, 2014). Architects have long used formal criteria to design and build structures that do not accommodate human sensibilities. They treat criticism by the public as proof that their designs succeed in provocation, which they equate with originality.

The root cause of profound disagreement on architecture between trained architects and the public boils down to whether or not a design embodies living structure (Mehaffy & Salingaros, 2011). Reconciliation on this point is impossible. Living structure is the antithesis of provocative. Like it or not, the search for innovation through provocation renounces life-enhancing environments. And those architects who insist that better education will teach the public to love the same buildings they love do not understand human nature.

We could change our design criteria and adopt a set of mechanisms and relationships, such as design patterns, shared by all “living” creations (Alexander et al., 1977). 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. That would solve the problem.

Table 3. Criteria for adaptive design success:
1.	The basis for judgment is both practical and psychological.
2.	Created forms and spaces are adapted to the human function they aim to accommodate.
3.	The forms and spaces make people feel secure rather than stressed.
4.	This complex network of sensations acts subconsciously.
5.	Body signals tell the truth, especially when they contradict the user’s expressed opinion.

A positive emotional reaction is not usually noticed because it is largely instinctive. It aligns with human neurobiological response, which leads to a healthy state. On the other hand, a negative reaction to an unnatural form and space triggers shock and anxiety. Our body is warning us of danger in the environment.

Yet in most contemporary architecture, innovation is based strictly on visual appeal. 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. Therefore, design professionals 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).

Design rules that arise from the study of biological form, and also from traditional and vernacular architectures, produce a human-scaled environment. Most of the world continues to build its modest houses and complex urban fabric according to adaptive, intuitive rules. The vitality of traditional cities the world over is due to unwritten patterns. Self-building, or vernacular building, which lies outside the officially-sanctioned architectural paradigm, nevertheless has the possibility of variation to adapt it to human needs. The problem is how to get the profession to accept what the rest of humanity is doing, and identify the essential qualities of a healthy built environment.

Ceiling height and emotional wellbeing in rooms

So far we have not sufficiently reflected on architects’ responsibility for how they influence the emotional lives and long-term health of their fellow human beings. In fact the 20th century industrial paradigm does not take into account the inevitable reactions of the natural system in general, and the human actors in particular. Denying human nature (and the very mechanism of life) becomes an essential precondition for shielding inhuman environments against legitimate criticism. The architectural media ignore scientific results that point to adaptive design errors in buildings that architects have been in the habit of erecting during several decades.

How can a more subtle attention to the malleability of built form create living space? Psychology suggests strong constraints on the shape of ceilings as they define the experience of indoor space. We tend to feel more at ease under a domed ceiling rather than a flat ceiling. Depending on the dimensions, a dome or vault gives a comfortable sense of being enveloped in the space. Variations of ceiling geometry and curvature cause major changes in user wellbeing (Alexander et al., 1977: Patterns 190 & 191, see Section 3, Living Structures Should Come From Living Patterns). Flat, horizontal ceilings have a generally neutral effect on users. Symmetric pitched ceilings are also acceptable: they approximate the perceived enveloping effect of a cylindrical vault.

Departures from vaulted, symmetric, and flat horizontal ceilings generate a feeling of unease. Flat slanted mono-pitched ceilings sloping only to one side could make us feel anxious — their lack of bilateral symmetry pulls us horizontally. Then, anxiety definitely increases under a ceiling that drops downward in the middle. A sagging ceiling perceived as “coming down” on our head produces considerable alarm. This ominous effect is felt with a ceiling whose center hangs, such as a catenary sheet that is experienced from below as convex, or a symmetric negative pitched ceiling angled downwardly.

For the standard flat horizontal ceiling, the floor-to-ceiling height is very important for shaping our psychological response. Traditional ceiling heights originally followed sensible, commonly agreed upon standards. For example, in the East people sit on the floor, so domestic ceilings tend to be lower. Rooms in owner-built dwellings in Europe were sized to satisfy the psychological comfort of their occupants, and ranged from 2.6 m to 3.3 m (8 feet, 6 inches to 10 feet, 10 inches). These dimensions were established as minimum standards in many European municipal building codes. For those who could afford them, even more generous residential ceilings prevailed before World War II, with many measuring 3.50 m to 3.66 m (11 feet, 6 inches to 12 feet) or more.

Ideally, rooms should have ceiling heights that vary according to function and intended degree of public use or private intimacy. Several discourses are devoted to this crucial topic (Alexander et al., 1977; Salingaros, 2005), broadly defined. Practical results for design come from a more general investigation of how living patterns help to define a psychologically secure space.

Le Corbusier’s monomaniacal insistence on ceilings that he could touch, which he justified with a mystical numerical system that has since been debunked as nonsensical (Salingaros, 2012), set a floor-to-ceiling height of 2.26 m (7 feet, 5 inches) that violated French building standards, which were waived for him by the housing minister himself. We are still stuck with those low ceilings today!

Construction in the 20th and early 21st centuries, fueled by opportunism and extreme cost cutting, squashed people under oppressive ceiling heights of 2.13 m to 2.44 m (7 to 8 feet), turning dimensions below historically minimum limits into present-day standards. This violation was reinforced by an industrial design aesthetic. User reaction based on human feelings was no longer recognized by the industry after commercial motives were accepted as a priority.

7. Living Patterns As Tools Of Adaptive Design

Traditional design incorporates mental safety mechanisms

Our world is dominated by typologies promoted by an ideology linked to industrial materials. Simplistic forms — the opposite of living patterns that embody ordered complexity — are widely used as non-adaptive design prototypes. Those represent the most rigid type of design constraint, divorced from human life. These typologies have been declared by so-called experts as: “healthy”, “socially liberating”, “designs of the future”. Applied and spread through copying, they survive because they are judged against an image, not from actual feedback during use. They continue to be part of design vocabulary out of habit; people repeat them without asking whether they work or not. But now it has become obvious that the once-celebrated simplistic forms have failed to achieve whatever marvelous effect was promised.

A tradition that precedes Modernism evaluates emotional responses to shapes, spaces, and surfaces in the built environment. It is a tradition that privileges living patterns: “good” and robust solutions developed independently by different people at different times. This tradition prevented living patterns from being ignored or replaced under the pretext of design innovation. That safety mechanism — as important as our body’s immune system — has been abandoned, encouraging the proliferation of unhealthy typologies. Nevertheless, design problems that arise again and again may still find their solutions in living patterns.

Table 4. Five patterns on gardens and parks from “A Pattern Language” (Alexander et al., 1977) with my own summaries:
Pattern 60:	Accessible Green. People will only use green spaces when those are very close to where they live and work, accessible by a pedestrian path.
Pattern 111:	Half-Hidden Garden. For a garden to be used, it must not be too exposed by being out front, nor completely hidden by being in the back.
Pattern 171:	Tree Places. Trees shape social places, so shape buildings around existing trees, and plant new trees to generate a usable, inviting urban space.
Pattern 172:	Garden Growing Wild. To be useful, a garden must be closer to growing wild, according to nature’s rules, than conforming to an artificial image.
Pattern 176:	Garden Seat. One cannot enjoy a garden if it does not have a semi-secluded place to sit and contemplate the plant growth.

What makes a living pattern is the fact that it’s repeated in a variety of times and places; it forgoes selecting solutions that do not enhance human life. The criterion for judging the effectiveness of any pattern is its usefulness to the overall project, including its setting, and not on narrow considerations of style or ideology.

After selecting a pattern, the designer must figure out the correct combinatorics of other patterns to be used, and make sure that those patterns enhance human health while solving the problem at hand. This checklist relies on the broader organization of complexity in which the patterns are components (Salingaros, 2005). Adaptive design is a problem in mathematical complexity and human physiology/psychology, not in visual aesthetics.

 Repetition does not make a pattern

Difficulties in applying patterns to design arise from a misunderstanding of what a pattern is. Many wrongly believe that a pattern is just a repeating solution, so they tend to look at the most common solutions to solve specific design problems. As a result the solution they end up examining is often a mediocre typology; it’s a pattern that has become embedded in design practice for reasons independent of its capacity for healing. Its implementation has never undergone adequate scientific evaluation, or any evaluation at all. Worse yet, the result of applying it may be disastrous.

We lived through an era when unhealthy typologies replaced living patterns. These typologies are selected by criteria other than the enhancement of the wellbeing of the largest number of users.

Patterns are the basic tools for organizing complexity. They do not erase complexity. Patterns are used by those who build complex systems. During the 20^th century, modern patterns became popular as architectural and urban forms were oversimplified. The design disciplines as a whole became reductionistic (Bhat & Salingaros, 2013) and professionals learned to ignore the complaints of users. Users, in turn, had to learn to numb themselves to the work of professionals — sadly, a necessary defense mechanism in an unresponsive built environment.

Evaluating new patterns

Simple tests can validate a living pattern and distinguish it from a non-adaptive typology prior to implementation. For instance, check to see if a pattern links to tested patterns outside its immediate domain. Focus on emotional feedback from real-life instances where it has been applied. These measures can give clues to whether we are dealing with a pattern or an arbitrary typology, and predict if it is going to be useful or harmful (Salingaros, 2005).

In order to discover optimal solutions quickly, design students may look at simple situations rather than explore all possible variants and precedents. Furthermore, mainstream design culture abhors looking to pre-industrial solutions and re-using them to shape the contemporary built environment. As a result, fundamental patterns are often missed altogether.

Because a living pattern solves a group of linked problems, its complexity is often underestimated. Most living patterns have evolved in context, embedded in highly complex adaptive systems from which they cannot be easily isolated. They work because they satisfy many different system dynamics (some of which may not even be known). Ignoring adaptation and complexity can lead to superficial solutions that prove inadequate or wrong. Typologies that fail to solve a problem adaptively, yet are tried again and again despite their poor utility, fool us because they could solve one part of a problem. They also generate some serious problems in other parts of the system.

Case in point: Social housing, everywhere, is invariably built by following the principle of monotonous repetition (Salingaros, 2011a). But this simple geometrical ordering precludes adaptation to locality, climate, solar orientation, inclusion of usable urban space, etc. It solves only one problem — cost-cutting through repeating the same design endlessly. But it ends up creating an inhuman living environment. Monotonously repeating forms cannot satisfy the multiple emotional and physical needs of the occupants; instead, we can generate inexpensive urban fabric through a step-wise adaptive sequence that uses feedback from occupants at every step of the design process (Alexander, 2001-2005; Salingaros, 2011b).

We need to select precisely those patterns required for any adaptive solution. Do we have all the relevant patterns ready, worked out and documented? It might be that, while we have access to some living patterns, no pattern has yet been discovered for each of the new problems we face in the 21^st century. The task of the designer, architect, and planner is to invent or extract such living patterns before proceeding further.

How many living patterns do we include in trying to solve a design problem? Work with too many, and we confuse user and over-burden the designer (Salingaros, 2005). So use only a small set of the most relevant patterns at any one time.

The most robust links among individual patterns are not always obvious, nor do techniques for combining them necessarily follow a simple logic. Here is where Christopher Alexander’s work on organizational coherence provides the tools to solve the problem (Alexander, 2001-2005). The strategy is to take steps to combine the chosen patterns in increasingly coherent geometrical and functional configurations. And remember, it’s impossible to achieve such coherence in one step.

8. Abandoning Hostile Design for a Living Architecture

Living architecture relies upon emergence

Spaces that feel the most alive, and catalyze the highest intensity of human life, are the result of emergence. This phenomenon requires that an enormous number of environmental forces align and collaborate to generate “flow”, “coherence”, or “wholeness”. Three conditions are necessary for emergence to occur, although their presence does not guarantee it.

Table 5. Conditions for emergence:
1.	A tectonic framework of volumes and supports whose basic components are additive: i.e. the parts relate to each other. In this setting, other, less permanent additive components can be introduced in a way that maintains coherence.
2.	An emotional connection established with spaces, details, and surfaces of the built environment, and with other persons and life forms within that space. This requires a number of positive forces — above some threshold — coming from the surroundings.
3.	The coordination and integration of all these forces. If many forces are randomly present and cancel each other, they won’t lead to any emergence. For that to happen, the forces will have to be additive.

Since emergent properties arise from real interactions at the physical level, they are never evident in a building’s rendering and construction drawings. You can control all the components of a design or building, and imagine that everything together will combine into a harmonious whole, yet when it’s assembled, it has strange and surprising qualities — sometimes interesting, but more often not good at all. Emergence could be positive or negative (while its absence is neutral). The built space acquires a character of its own — either hostile, or welcoming — but never planned for. The complex dynamic system, comprising building-plus-user, generates unexpected effects on the real scale. In the negative case, our visceral response to such emergent properties might turn out to be deleterious to our wellbeing and sensory experience of space.

Emergence, coming from complex interactions among design components, spaces, and users, spells the beginnings of autonomy, and that threatens systems that work with top-down control. When shaping the built environment strictly for machines, the design process requires no feedback. Machines are not usually additive with their environment. And yet complex machines themselves exhibit internal emergence.

It has been discovered in computer science and large electrical power grids that increasing complexity does tend to nudge artificial systems slightly closer to organisms. Emergent properties in very large complex networks and software make intervention tricky: beyond a certain high threshold of complexity, those artificial systems begin to react in unexpected ways. Even though we build up their complexity piecewise, the total complexity eventually becomes too large for us to grasp all at once. Interactions that we never anticipated or programmed for could occur (Mehaffy & Salingaros, 2015; Salingaros, 2005).

Such a complex system somehow generates behavioral patterns. In those cases we (the system’s creators) must switch from trying to understand exactly why the system behaves the way it does, to running rigorous tests that make sure the system does what it’s supposed to do. This utilitarian approach reassures us that the system performs its designated tasks as we try to understand and catalogue its emergent patterns. We accept some degree of emerging autonomy while instituting a separate pragmatic mechanism for checking out the system’s behavior.

Emergent phenomena in highly complex artificial systems should not be uncritically confused with the onset of intelligence as occurs in organisms, however. This question is crucial to designing intelligent buildings. Evolved responses consist of emergent properties that help an organism’s survival, and those have long-term value when documented as patterns. Emergence in complex machines, on the other hand, acts randomly (like random mutations) and in general doesn’t help anything. Emergence is useless without a selection mechanism in place that maintains system coherence.

Intentionally hostile environments

Emergence strongly shapes our experience of architecture. It would be wonderful if we could create inviting, healing environments through design coherence; at the same time, we need to understand how negative emergent properties can create a hostile space.

A current trend in contemporary architectural culture is to use biophilia, biomimicry, and various techniques aimed towards sustainability. This is a marvelous step forward, away from the crude industrial typologies we have been subjected to for over a century. To more sensitive users, those buildings and urban spaces were hostile and soul-destroying. Hopefully, we are at last breaking out of that highly restrictive design paradigm.

And yet, something doesn’t always click. Despite the best efforts and intentions of eager young architects, the results of biologically-based design can still turn out to be surprisingly ugly. This is not a trivial observation, nor is it an aesthetic critique. It goes to the fundamentals of how we are built as organisms. Our body is hard-wired to respond with empathy to structures that truly incorporate biophilia (Browning et al., 2014; Kellert et al., 2008; Ryan et al., 2014; Salingaros, 2015). Therefore, if we perceive something as ugly, then it was not designed by following the principles of biophilic design carefully enough. Perhaps it contains vestiges of sterile industrial design, simply because that habit is so hard to break.

The model of early industrial modernism is still almost universally applied to our living and working environments. It is thought sufficient to provide minimal living conditions, as in the notorious Bauhaus existenzminimum, meant to accommodate “der neue Mensch” (the new man). Design does not pay attention to forces that shape our emotions and influence our long-term health. Present-day architectural culture accepts this approach as being perfectly legitimate, twisting philosophical discourse to make it seem inevitable.

A specific hostile style of design is founded upon violating the three conditions listed at the beginning of this essay: its rules are to just do the opposite. Individual components are not additive; or additive components are used but are not allowed to connect into a coherent whole, and we instinctively perceive this fragmentation and conflict as a condition that creates anxiety. This approach to form derives from neglecting human feelings and focusing on machine-like efficiency. Our world is being built according to an architectural fashion that shatters wholeness by disconnecting everything from everything else.

Design with disconnected components has its own disturbing philosophy. It consciously uses known human responses to our environment, but applies those to disturb the user. Deliberate violations of reassuring space were hardly contemplated before the beginning of the 20th Century. We would not have dreamt of erecting shapes that alarm us — it goes against the human desire to seek safety in the built environment. Furthermore, when using traditional materials, such forms would not stand up for long.

Some architects even go so far as to intuit the factors responsible for hostile environments and then purposefully strive to build those into projects. This is probably not done out of pure malice, but rather in the pursuit of innovation: of creating shapes, spaces, and surfaces that were never seen before. Taken as a distinct set of rules, hostile design extends industrial design—which does not care to adapt to human sensibilities — one step further. It still seeks to dominate. But in this instance, we can no longer say that cost and efficiency damage the environment simply through ignorance or negligence. Industrial built environments may be uncomfortable by coincidence, whereas hostile design seeks out disturbing effects by intention. Its very goal is to arouse and disturb the psychology of the user. Judged exclusively as a commercial product, as long as clients commission such negative environments, mainstream culture has to accept them; it moreover privileges them for their undoubted novelty. Physiological and psychological comfort is abandoned for anxiety-inducing forms that break both with nature and with traditional vernacular architectures and artifacts.

9. On Cognitive Dissonance and The Architectural Canon

When dominant culture lost its spatial sensibility

The whole point of having a predictive theory of architecture is to successfully explain and anticipate user reactions. Condensed into some checklist, a theoretical formulation of positive versus negative architectural properties could, in practice, be applied to images and renderings of existing and as yet unrealized buildings. If the theory is correct, then the predicted reaction to a building should correlate very strongly to the user’s physical experience when he/she has a chance to visit it.

Such a predictive theory already exists (Alexander, 2001). It is not widely known to design professionals because it remains so far at the margins of architectural culture. By contrast, currently-accepted architectural theories have no predictive capacity, but are instead intended to justify built forms after-the-fact.

Evaluating historical buildings with such a checklist validates the method. We already know that those are “great buildings”. What really interests us is the predictive value as far as buildings not yet built. Why spend millions to erect something that generates an anxious or depressing atmosphere, when that quality could be detected and fixed before construction? This analytic approach bypasses professional practice, where the success of a building is supposedly guaranteed by the architect’s name.

While our concern here is with prediction, even evaluation after-the-fact is problematic. Standard methods of post-occupancy evaluation are neither rigorous nor uniformly applied, so embarrassing design mistakes are often made that could have been easily corrected beforehand.

Applying a predictive theory will save money presently wasted on building non-adaptive environments, than in having to modify them later. But society is loath to change the way it does things, especially when a global industry is involved. If it makes a huge profit and keeps construction and engineering companies happy, why take any unnecessary risks by changing the model? And no one dares come back and touch a building by a celebrity architect, even though it is an abject failure. That would imply that someone had made a mistake. More than protecting any individual architect, architectural culture vehemently affirms its own infallibility.

A teaching experiment with unexpected (and frightening) results

I recently gave some guest lectures in a colleague’s “Great Buildings” survey course. Both of us were convinced that introducing geometrical criteria for judgment would lend a unifying theme to all the disparate buildings covering the history of humankind. We needed some compact set of relations that link to living patterns. I explained Alexander’s “Fifteen Fundamental Properties” (Alexander, 2001; Leitner, 2015; Salingaros, 2015a) to the class, and how to identify these properties in buildings. Teams of students then presented one building at a time, identifying as many of the fifteen geometrical properties as possible.

This method worked marvelously for the historical buildings, as students discovered all of the expected geometrical qualities built into the designs. Finding that dissimilar “great buildings” share common geometrical features — that, moreover, generate the buildings’ appeal — helps to unify our understanding of design and the history of architecture. Those criteria contribute subconsciously to our perception of what makes a building “great” but are not normally noticed. It was especially interesting to see early modernist buildings embodying some of the desirable geometrical properties. (After all, their architects were trained in the classical idiom.)

A surprise came with modernist icons and more recent buildings. I expected the students to discover that many famous modernist and contemporary buildings do not satisfy Alexander’s “Fifteen Fundamental Properties”. Architectural culture judges those using totally distinct (and sometimes opposite) criteria. I watched and listened with amazement while students presented iconic buildings lacking any of the fifteen fundamental properties, yet the teams showed diagrams illustrating geometrical features that were simply not there!

What caused this bizarre misunderstanding? Actually, a binding judgment was made before the class had even begun. All the buildings included in the picture textbook used for this course had automatically acquired the status of “great”. At the same time, the geometrical checklist made an intuitive sense, reinforced by the fact that well-loved buildings relied on these properties. These positive geometrical characteristics were correctly identified as universal; hence the contemporary “great” buildings, it was assumed, must satisfy them.

Table 6. The present-day process of choosing canonical buildings:
1.	Canonical buildings are chosen by consensus.
2.	There is no consistent set of criteria for choosing canonical buildings.
3.	Architectural culture forbids individuals from questioning the validity of canonical buildings.

The students faced a contradiction that had to be resolved in either of two ways: (i) admitting that recent buildings violate universal geometrical properties which older great buildings satisfied, thus labeling modernist and contemporary icons as deficient; or (ii) convincing themselves that the desirable properties were actually present, and making up nonsensical diagrams to “prove” this. Questioning the authority of a textbook that validates iconic buildings as “great” was inconceivable. Of the two possible resolutions to cognitive dissonance, the second one — inventing a fictitious reality — is actually the least painful.

The next year I also presented guest lectures to a similar architecture class. This time, I taught a slightly different set of criteria with which to judge buildings: biophilic design properties (Salingaros, 2015b). I thought we would have more success with those, since architectural culture has begun to embrace Biophilia (but not yet Alexander’s Fifteen Fundamental Properties). The results were much the same, however. Again, the students described imaginary properties in their buildings.

This very disturbing experience parallels the biased cognition experiments of Solomon Asch (Salingaros, 2014). There, a subject was convinced by group pressure to say that the obviously shorter of two lines was in fact longer. People did so willingly, even though their response contradicted their own eyes and intelligence! The experiment included a large group of subjects who responded orally, one after another. Everyone in the room except the one true subject was instructed to say, quite naturally: “line B is longer”. The experimental setup was maneuvered so the unsuspecting subject was the last to answer.

Conforming to group opinion reduces stress due to cognitive dissonance, which is an inconsistency between one’s own direct experience and the authoritative opinion of others. A person experiences a state of intense discomfort, and will seek to restore cognitive consistency through any means, even if the resolution turns out to disagree with reality and the person’s own senses! This conclusion is frightening. After architecture critics declare unanimously that some building of negligible architectural value is a “masterpiece”, then the rest of the world has to meekly follow suit, and invent spurious reasons to justify this opinion.

Architectural culture’s basic value system resists analytical approaches. Trying to introduce useful geometric criteria as an analytical tool inevitably leads students into a psychological quandary. Newer canonical buildings chosen exclusively because of their industrial form language become exempt from any further evaluation. Are students encouraged to exercise their own free will and intelligence in judging what is good architecture, or pressured instead to blindly trust received authority?

10. What Ancient Chinese Philosopher Mo-Tzu Can Teach Designers Today

Precedent is useful when it can be verified independently

The teachings of ancient Chinese philosopher Mo-Tzu (also known as Mozi, Mo Di, or Micius, 470–391 BCE) are based on identifying truth by comparing ideas and practices to Patterns (which he called models, or standards). Those are not Confucian ritualistic standards, but practices that have been verified and tested in actual use. His books did not survive the totalitarian governments that followed the period when Mo-Tzu lived; however, Mo-Tzu’s “three-prong method” remains highly relevant to design today as a precursor to Living Patterns, and points to how we must use an empirical basis to shape our world (Veryard, 2015).

Mo-Tzu did not consider everything set by the ancients to be worth following simply because of precedent. He tried to teach ordinary people how to determine whether ideas behind practices are true or not. This is the opposite of performing some established ritual, which is repetition without analysis. Mo-Tzu evaluated actions that benefit the population as a whole, not some tiny elite. The measure is how well they contribute to the “greatest good of the greatest number”. (Mozi, 2016). Mo-Tzu opposed Confucianism because he considered conforming to ritual and following elaborate celebrations to be mindless. Celebrating rituals with great pomp presupposes an aristocracy that directs such practices, and which could also dictate artistic and architectural taste.

Mo-Tzu’s conception of knowledge is eminently practical, not theoretical or abstract, and derives from hands-on experience with the world. The Patterns of Mo-Tzu are verified by appeal to nature and to natural processes, not from some divine command — and even less so from political authority. As with design patterns (Alexander et al., 1977), the truths by which people ought to live by are shared discoveries that connect directly to experience.

Architectural ritual shapes everyday life

Design methods that incorporate discovered information on adaptive design rely on the principle of collaborative testing because they have already been shared by and with generations of builders from the past. Patterns re-use known tools, so that we don’t have to re-invent and adapt every component for each project each time. Collaborative/investigative design based upon inquiry and verification nevertheless generates opposition from these other approaches: (i) design that prioritizes individuality and visual innovation without testing, (ii) design that is closed to input from others, living or dead, (iii) design that ignores context, and (iv) design that remains within strictly prescribed architectural ritual.

Ritual is a set of actions to be performed without thinking. It is monolithic and cannot be taken apart or reassembled. The ritual itself is handed top-down, being the opposite of a collaborative or adaptive evolution. Today’s practitioners don’t normally employ living patterns, precisely because that design method is exploratory and iterative: it generates a large number of solutions, which are then selected according to their adaptivity (plus the fixed external constraints of the project specifics). It’s so much easier to employ fixed ritual images and fit the project to them in a minimally-satisfactory manner. One gets almost instant results without bothering with steps towards adaptation. But that practice detaches the actual result from what is claimed to be the intent and achievement.

I’m not talking here of everyday social rituals that a building can adapt to and contain, but about a very different architectural ritual that generates the building irrespective of its intended uses. This type of ritual is practiced by the architect, not the user, and is meant exclusively for the benefit of other architects. Since the spaces in a building shape the social activities they contain, once built, the structure exerts an enormous influence on the life of the users. In this way, architectural rituals shape our social rituals in ways we don’t normally notice.

A designer needs constraints. Otherwise, there is no convergence, and the design process cannot stop. Those who don’t use patterns as constraints necessarily use something as a substitute — constraints that are not living patterns tend to be visual and stylistic ones instead. Entirely non-adaptive constraints do not relate to human life, and therefore have to be remembered as an abstract ritual. Those constraints are fixed in one’s subconscious during training. Internalized images shape output — a designer is unaware that he or she is following a ritual (Salingaros, 2014a; 2014b).

What are the architectural rituals practiced today, which need to be re-examined, and if necessary, abandoned? I suggest the industrial minimalism of the International Style, including plate-glass coffee tables, curtain walls, punched-out borderless doors and windows, horizontal strip windows, flat roofs, brutalist concrete or shiny metal surfaces, etc. Every student of architecture has been taught that those generate good architecture. Do these practices contribute to our health and wellbeing? No. They are merely elements of a ritual that our dominant culture believes will make us “modern”.

Since the early 20^th century, the ritual of architecture has focused on formalism and what could be interpreted as a form of sacred symbolism. Although architectural ritual governs the world within architecture, and the media make a huge effort to extend it to society at large, much of it doesn’t make sense to common people (Mehaffy & Salingaros, 2011). Nevertheless, the cultural mainstream expects that people conform to whatever spaces are designed for them. Just as in religious ritual, opposition by outsiders only helps to solidify the group practicing the ritual (Salingaros, 2014a, 2014b). Celebrating specific rituals holds the dominant architectural culture together, but closes it to external innovations. This is why architectural expressions in the ritual’s idiom all tend to look very similar.

Since ritual imposed on architectural expression is not open to creativity, innovative architects have to turn to other means such as pointless non-adaptive expressions to show any individual difference. Contemporary architects love to detach and twist forms, pretend that some piece is about to fall down, and reference older architectonic elements in an “ironic” way — but such jokes fall flat with the general public, which is not in the “in-group”. Those elements are never helpful for a building’s function, or for the wellbeing of the users. A trillion-dollar global building industry has bought into design as ritual, thus encouraging and perpetuating this practice. But that ignores any possibility for living systems to respond.

Conclusion

These essays argued for a re-validation of the original “pattern” method of design. The approach is meant to liberate architecture from restricting geometries and thinking that actually prevent living environments. Over the past several decades dominant architectural culture has grown very far apart from adaptive design, so that now it is extremely difficult to connect the two. Nevertheless, for our own health, a substantial body of work needs to be brought back into mainstream architectural practice, starting from design patterns.

Out of many important related discoveries, both practical and theoretical, the design pattern concept remains, to my mind, the most readily accessible. This is because a living pattern appeals immediately to the emotions: one’s own body verifies a design pattern to a large extent, and the reality and value of the application are immediately felt. Therefore, even though many researchers and practitioners (starting with Christopher Alexander himself) have gone much further to develop a theory of design complexity linked to human biology, it is still useful to begin with design patterns.

I realize that dominant architectural culture is pretty happy to do what it presently does, and does not feel the need to learn methods of adaptive design. This booklet explains how easily design could be made more human and healing, so that the discipline gains in practical value. Every architect can profit by incorporating the design methods formulated here to improve their work; that is, make it more healing for the users. For interested practitioners, therefore, a useful toolbox exists ready to employ towards creating a healthier and more human built environment.

Afterword: Health prompts a new approach

“And what is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?” asks Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Architects like to look at pictures rather than read text. Students learn to copy the famous architects visually, while what is now taught as theory in architecture schools tries to justify those buildings rather than offer any logical framework for understanding them.

The motives and thoughts driving conventional design for close to a century are rooted in an entirely different basis from the methods needed for adaptive design. Very specific design tools contribute to make the built environment healthy again in a deep sense. The present essays on design patterns represent one aspect of this new framework, based on science and the experimental method. Patterns are also based on human feelings and our visceral response to structures in the built environment.

The writings by Christopher Alexander and other collaborators contain details of the adaptive design method, as well as background of how the discipline has evolved to its present stage. This is essential material for future designers to learn. Young architects now find this practical material readily available, much of it free on the Internet. That knowledge remains, for the most part, outside the conventional architectural paradigm of image-based formalistic design.

Do we need another book on architecture? Aren’t the rows of books full of photos of the latest award-winning buildings more than enough to define what good architecture is? If we have any doubts, the leading architecture critics (Western, that is) will tell us in no uncertain terms who is a great architect today: world architecture is defined exclusively by their projects. After all, they are champions of the largest construction companies and the biggest multinational engineering firms, and they do the most prestigious projects around the world.

But... there is a nagging doubt. What if we look at or visit an award-winning building by a star architect and find the experience unsettling? Why don’t we appreciate this piece of architecture by a famous person (universally praised, or at least the global media make it seem that way), and just can’t feel comfortable with it? What if the building makes us ill-at-ease and, in extreme cases, sick to our stomach? Or even if nothing is obviously wrong with it — perhaps it merely feels odd and awkward to be in — yet long-term exposure makes us increasingly depressed, and we find that we get ill much more often than before?

Is architecture truly a service profession providing housing, working spaces, and environmental wellbeing for humanity? Architecture schools loudly proclaim that their real goal is to better serve humankind; instead, they teach students to copy famous architects. Architectural academia errs in equating what’s good for the star architects and their multinational clients with what’s good for people. There is in fact no correlation. The discipline fails to resolve a basic contradiction between architecture that’s good for us, and an extremely expensive fetish of erecting giant sculptures that look stunning on the covers of architectural magazines.

A groundswell is taking place, with socially-responsible people turning to nature and science for techniques of building that will not destroy our planet. New architectural principles such as Biophilia and Evidence-Based Design produce substantially healthier environments for the inhabitants of buildings. Certainly, this is a criterion that many architects wish to apply. Students and practitioners from all over the world are searching for precisely such methods, to free their creative potential while designing adaptive spaces with healing properties.

Here we run into trouble. My architectural colleagues get excited whenever analytical methods explain a successful aspect of a building by a famous architect. They immediately appreciate that we indeed possess useful new tools to analyze form and users’ response to it. However, they recoil from those same methods if an iconic building is judged as deficient. They have a strongly negative reaction whenever the value of an architectural icon is questioned. They are terrified by the risk that new methods pose for the established order. Their admiration for the wonderful explanatory and predictive power of those methods and their results turns into alarm: the implications are far too dangerous.

In my experience with architecture students, I find serious conceptual obstacles to teaching them adaptive design. Knowledge and training from their previous courses proves an obstacle to learning the new things I’m trying to get across. But it is not knowledge itself that is the problem, since incorrect facts are easily corrected through an explanation; it is rather resistance coming from the current paradigm. Something is happening here that is never mentioned. Prior education and exposure to others’ opinions (falsely taught as authoritative) narrows the students’ worldview so much that it proves extremely difficult, if not impossible, for them to learn new ideas.

What is now taught almost everywhere fits into a very narrow and restricted niche, studiously skirting the topic of human adaptation and emotion. Instead of being taught methods of architectural analysis, students are spoon-fed what they have to accept as paradigmatic good buildings. Most architecture professors typically adopt for the standard theory course several books chosen from literature, music criticism, philosophy, etc. While interesting in themselves, those readings thoroughly distract the student from the meaning of architecture. The course consists of being shown buildings by famous architects, while the instructor praises their supposedly outstanding qualities. Those qualities are never explained, yet students are expected to emulate them.

Another course beginning students take is the “Great Buildings” survey. Here, the instructor describes the morphological features of buildings chosen from a big picture textbook. More recent buildings with seriously deficient appearance, performance, and environmental quality are included among the truly outstanding architectural creations of humankind. Students accept the textbook’s authority uncritically, hence those mediocre or unhealthy buildings will remain “great” and no criticism of them can be tolerated.

Any building judged to be poorly designed according to its patterns should not be copied just because its architect is famous. Criteria for judging adaptive value cannot be restricted to post-occupancy evaluation, when it is too late to fix major problems, but applied already in the design stage. Patterns tell us with some degree of accuracy beforehand whether or not a building will provide a physiologically and psychologically healthy environment, and therefore we can anticipate difficulties in how it will interact with its users.

Some of my friends express doubts: “Can inexperienced students actually comprehend scientific arguments? How can young people decide what is true or not true? They will become confused and frightened and will dismiss facts. They want to be architects so as to emulate today’s famous architects: therefore, you cannot criticize those architects!” But this is precisely why it is imperative to reach out to students at the very beginning of their architectural education. The concepts they pick up then will forever determine how they design.