10 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2024
    1. “Next, several acts of building, each one done to repair and magnify the product of the previous acts, will slowly generate a larger and more complex whole than any single act can generate,”
    2. In an interview with his biographer, Alexander noted, “We give names to things but we don’t give many names to relationships.”
  2. Oct 2023
    1. The seeds of the Columbus myth seem to grow from Washington Irving’s biography of Columbus, A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) (online here). Alexander Everett, Minister Plenipotentiary to Spain, had invited Irving to Madrid in the hopes that Irving would translate a recently published collection of documents on Columbus.

      Source of the Columbus/Flat Earth portion of the bunk theory.

  3. Aug 2022
  4. Jun 2021
    1. I feel like I may have just stumbled on a back alley book club on design.

      It's digital books+Hypothes.is+Fight Club...

      The rules of Back Alley Book Club:

      1. We don't talk about Back Alley Book Club.
      2. We don't talk about Back Alley Book Club.

      ...

      1. If this is your first night at Back Alley Book Club, you have to annotate.

  5. Dec 2020
    1. Each unit in each tree that I have described, moreover, is the fixed, unchanging residue of some system in the living city (just as a house is the residue of the interactions between the members of a family, their emotions and their belongings; and a freeway is the residue of movement and commercial exchange).

      Residue of human activity When a city is conceived of as a tree, each unit represents the fixed residue of some system in the living city. Similarly, a house is the residue of the interactions between members of a family, their emotions, their belongings. A freeway is the residue of movement and commercial exchange.

  6. Nov 2020
    1. Before the publication of the ‘Gang of Four’ book that popularised software patterns [4], Richard Gabriel described Christopher Alexander’s patterns in 1993 as a basis for reusable object‐oriented software in the following way:Habitabilityisthecharacteristicofsourcecodethatenablesprogrammers,coders,bug­fixers,andpeoplecomingtothecodelaterinitslifetounderstanditsconstructionandintentionsandtochangeitcomfortablyandconfidently.

      Interesting concept for how easy to maintain a piece of software is.

  7. Oct 2020
    1. Wiki is perhaps the only web idiom that is not a child of BBS culture. It derives historically from pre-web models of hypertext, with an emphasis on the pre. The immediate ancestor of wiki was a Hypercard stack maintained by Ward Cunningham that attempted to capture community knowledge among programmers. Its philosophical godfather was the dead-tree hypertext A Pattern Language written by Christopher Alexander in the 1970s.
  8. Oct 2019
  9. Jan 2016
    1. “participation architectures.”

      I much prefer this nomenclature especially since it allows me to add Christopher Alexander to the mix. He argued that there are machine systems and growing systems. Or perhaps we can think of the distinction as between engineered and rhizomatic? Or using James Scott's terms: legible v illegible.