The Oregon experiment

What Hacker News says

1. crabmusketMay 2024
   > it's about lives and how people fit together more than how bricks fit together

   That's a great way of putting it!

   > Le Corbusier, for example, deriving systems for living and modular approaches to constructing space

   I agree the comparison is apt, but I much prefer Alexander's humane, bottom-up, anarchistic approach than Le Corbusier's authoritarian high modernism.

   Reading The Oregon Experiment is great context for A Pattern Language, seeing the way they envisioned the pattern language being used by a community. And the kinds of organisation they needed to couch it in, the way they needed to change the budgeting process to enable many more smaller projects, the way they co-opted staff and students into planning groups rather than have a siloed professional office.

   But, sadly it doesn't seem like this approach has been influential. I can't think of many other places that work this way! So while I do also wish more software people had read and appreciated this work, I don't think it's the immaturity of the software industry that prevents us from appreciating these ideas.

   In the introduction to A Pattern Language, the authors write "towns and buildings will not be able to come alive, unless they are made by all the people in society". I wonder if this is also true of software.

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2. twicDec 2022
   A Pattern Language is the second half of a single work, of which The Timeless Way of Building is the first. From the introduction to A Pattern Language:

   > Volume 1, The Timeless Way of Building, and Volume 2, A Pattern Language, are two halves of a single work. This book provides a language, for building and planning; the other book provides the theory and instructions for the use of the language. This book describes the detailed patterns for towns and neighborhoods, houses, gardens, and rooms. The other book explains the discipline which makes it possible to use these patterns to create a building or a town. This book is the sourcebook of the timeless way; the other is its practice and its origin.

   > The two books have evolved very much in parallel. They have been growing over the last eight years, as we have worked on the one hand to understand the nature of the building process, and on the other hand to construct an actual, possible pattern language. We have been forced by practical considerations, to publish these two books under separate covers; but in fact, they form an indivisible whole. It is possible to read them separately. But to gain the insight which we have tried to communicate in them, it is essential that you read them both.

   The former book expounds the ideas. But it is a weird pile of ideas. Somewhat moral and ethical, also somewhat practical, and also rather mystical. The combination has a religious feel.

   The Oregon Experiment is a sort of prequel to The Timeless Way of Building and A Pattern Language. It's an account of the development and application of those ideas to building projects at the University of Oregon. It might be the most approachable explanation of the ideas. It has the considerable advantage of being a ninth the length of the other two combined.

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3. ghrDec 2022
   +1 to The Oregon Experiment. It was the first I read and I think gave a great taste of a lot of the ideas in a way that was reasonably understandable. I wrote up some notes at https://www.garethrees.co.uk/2020/03/08/book-notes-the-orego...
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4. tdoniaOct 2008
   Haven't read the author's book, but the ideas sound very much like Christopher Alexander's work in systemizing collaborative design. If you're not familiar, i highly recommend these:

   http://www.google.com/books?id=Kh3T3XFUfPQC&printsec=fro...

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Experiment

   and finally: http://web.archive.org/web/20070528030431/http://www.rainmag...

   basically, alexander pointed out back in the 60s/70s that the simplest design problems, when approached from a conscious design perspective & properly considered, spiral out to millions of small relationships that are well beyond any one human's grasp. and so he formulates a system for organizing the people involved with the project & defining a hierarchy that enables the big problems to be settled before the small problems & for individual domain specific/'problem owners' to be established at the right place within overall the process.

   that said, for all the beauty in his theories, in practice (in architecture at least) political issues often affect the design process far more significantly than he anticipated - which is why this article is interesting, as it addresses the political value of this approach first.

   +1 for social hacking.

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5. kolektivMay 2024
   I agree entirely on Le Corbusier, while I love the eventual outcome of his work in many senses (aesthetically certainly), his approach to actual people was (as you say) far less humane than Alexander. Alexander I think saw himself as a part of "the people" - from what I know of Le Corbusier, I don't imagine he did.

   I've not yet read The Oregon Experiment (it's in one of the waiting piles) but I've skimmed it. Funnily enough, the comparison you make around changing budgeting processes to enable smaller projects, having users working as part of planning, etc. reminds me of some of the original intents of agile before it was co-opted. For agile to work it couldn't just be isolated as software delivery - it had to change the organisations it worked with/within. I remember having just such an argument many years ago about governments building software using ostensibly "agile" approaches, and yet still requiring three-year budget approaches from the national treasury - they simply weren't compatible!

   That final quote is wonderful, and I do feel the same about software in many ways - all the true wonder of computers and the things they can do for people will never really benefit everyone fully unless it spans the national, the corporate, and the personal.

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6. brudgersJun 2021
   A Pattern Language is applicable when putting lines on paper or nails in wood, i.e. actually designing and/or building. Though interesting, A Timeless Way of Building tends to be mostly useful for complaining about the way something has been built. Nobody talks about the third book in the trilogy The Oregon Experiment because the resulting buildings don't look like what people want to be the result of A Timeless Way of Building.

   Anyway, in the actual practice of architecture, A Pattern Language is by far the best of the set. There are other books that make approximately the same case as Timeless Way of Building. [1] Most of it's fame is from standing in relation to A Pattern Language.

   [1] e.g. How Buildings Learn, The Timeless Way of Seeing, Structure of the Ordinary, etc.

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