by Worldchanging Austin local blogger, Heath Rezabek
As we know from reading the containers of dishwashing detergents, something can be called ‘Green’ and not help to heal a tattered landscape or bring more life to an ecosystem. This is as true in our built ecosystems and architectures as anywhere else in product design, and this should not surprise us; ever since Le Corbusier’s ‘Machines for Living’ popularized the notion, the places we live, sleep, eat, love, celebrate and mourn have been products, commodities, marketed like any other.
But not until fairly recently have we been forced to be so discerning when judging the intent of greenwashing language and labels on building plans. With increasing concern over Global Climate Change, there has been a drive to frame new projects, of any kind, in environmental terms. Genuine concern over the direction of the climate has led to their adoption. Yet a building made of energy-efficient components can still work against the larger effort to create a living ecology of urban design, by breaking down the gradients of density needed to cultivate it. Until we can understand and articulate to others why uncharacteristic projects are not sustainable in a genuine sense, we will be at a loss when confronting these situations in our communities.
A Pattern Language is a unique work in the realm of built design, because its singular goal is to empower individuals and small communities to tackle monumental works through a commonly understood toolkit for building places at all scales.
What is a Pattern Language?
“The elements of this language are entities called Patterns. Each Pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.� - A Pattern Language, C.A., p.x
A Pattern Language describes the intense interrelation between acts of building which happen, each in response to those around it. Each Pattern names a spatial context, a problem, and a solution which resolves the conflicts at work there. In many cases, the name of the pattern itself conveys a directive version of its solution (ie, "Main Gateway" or "Roof Garden").
The built world did not pop into being at random; a door is a door (and is also a rudimentary pattern) because of the human events which shaped its form (in this example, the act of entering and exiting a space was then developed into a solution to the problem of keeping elements out and warmth in). “This does not mean that space creates events, or that it causes them,� writes Alexander. “It simply means that a pattern of events cannot be separated from the space where it occurs.� (The Timeless Way of Building, p72-73).
In many ways, Alexander is suggesting that form and function or style and substance cannot be so easily disentangled as we would believe. If we understand this, then we can understand why the character of a given neighborhood is so difficult to restore once it is destroyed: to destroy a neighborhood’s forms (houses, etc) is very much to destroy its functions (communities, etc). Before the decimation of old-growth neighborhoods in the latter half of the 20th century, the interwoven patterns of behavior which governed a cafe below an apartment, or a small park by a school, or a home with a garden of one’s own, were everywhere. They had taken years to build up, each in response to the ones around it.
A single highway, built to carry the cars which brought on much of our present climate crisis, also cut swaths through intricate urban environments. We understand this much. But as we race against unsustainability to restore the urban environments we clearcut, we are forgetting that the new places we build will impact their environments and neighborhoods just as massively as our highways did.
A Pattern Language names the pattern which applies to the 7th street tower situation: “Four Story Limit�. Yet it actually speaks to a question of proportion, and indeed can be reapplied at the larger level of the region, and at the smaller level of individual home design. Patterns of Home (Jacobson, Silverstein and Winslow) names it simply “Parts in Proportion�. Sarah Susanka, in her own home-scaled Pattern Language book Home By Design, simply infuses her entire Pattern Language with proportion and relative scale.
Patterns either strengthen or weaken those around them. To the extent that a pattern strengthens and contributes to the life of those around it, the pattern is sustainable. To the extent that a pattern weakens and detracts from the life of those around it, the pattern is unsustainable. Truly sustainable Patterns can be marked by the extent to which they contribute to the vitality of their surroundings.
Any place is inherently bound up with its surroundings; when it fails to help strengthen them, “The centre cannot hold.� (Yeats) As we begin to see that interdependence is just as much a factor in our urban as in our natural ecosystems, the concept of sustainability takes on a new urgency and import. For it is our neighborhoods and communities which will have to withstand and absorb the strain of future crises.
Just in time for large-scale action on Global Climate Change, words like ‘Green’ and ‘Sustainable’ have become political. But this leaves us needing to redefine the ways in which they are used for the creation or destruction of living neighborhoods, as much as living ecosystems. At the least, there is hope for defining sustainable in terms of a system’s synergy (which builds over time) or its self-defeating lack of it (which breaks a system down over time). Working on a Worldchanging Pattern Language will allow us to build a flexible but precise tool.
The task of redefining sustainable neighborhoods matters, because genuinely living neighborhoods will be called on to serve double and triple duty as the viability of outlying and sprawling areas become unable to support a culture shifting painfully away from an automotive basis. Until and unless we can hone our way of describing these problems and solutions, the crisis of inner-ring suburbs will intensify as disproportionate central urban projects continue to push outwards on those who cannot afford to live compactly.
If we do not have the coherence of language needed to protect our central urban neighborhoods from unsustainable design, then we certainly will not have the words to convert (for example) greyfield suburban mall areas into town centers. (See also Worldchanging p241) And if we cannot, we run the risk of looking back from desperately unsustainable and crumbling subdivisions, to 2007, when such ideas as mall inversions were seen simply as a forefront of progressive New Urban development and not a lifesaving adaptive measure.
As recent events demonstrate, the time for us to understand these things universally enough to communicate them with impact... is yesterday.
