7 Christopher Alexander et al. – Mexicali Housing, Mexico, 1976. (Neil Jackson)

         Aside from the questionably “spiritual” qualities that might be present in Alexander’s architecture, in the context of modern Japan this project was seen as a threat to the economic system. In Alexander’s words this confrontation takes on the scale of a heroic encounter, but it does show the consequences of any attempt to subvert the system:

         We see the Japanese (construction) companies aware, for the first time, of the fact that our intention to implement system A, might have serious consequences for their own future in Japan. What we were doing, … in its pure form posed a threat to the whole Japanese construction industry. … They therefore set out to ensure that it must fail.37

5 Christopher Alexander et al. – Sala House, Albany, California, 1982-85: Interior.(Neil Jackson)

6 Christopher Alexander et al. – Sala House, Albany, California, 1982-85: Interior.(Neil Jackson)

discussing the Eishin campus, constructed in 1985, Alexander presents the project as a kind of civil war between two competing systems of buildings. The first – “world system A” – is based on his use of the Pattern Language, and the second – “world system B” – the conventional, professionally organized, construction process.

         World system A is based on human feelings. It is engaged in trying to create a world in which human feeling comes first, … and in which wholeness (and) rightness, … is the quality in the world, which embodies and depends on human feeling at every point. World system B is based on mechanical and unfeeling processes. It poses a world of money, opportunity and power, in which ultimate things – wholeness and spirit – are relegated to a very distant palce.36

4 Christopher Alexander et al. – Sala House, Albany, California, 1982-85. (Neil Jackson)

this can be seen in the involvement of users in design, and there are several cases worth considering, particularly for their curiously similar formal characteristics. These range from whole cities constructed by their inhabitants, such as Paolo Soler’s monumental Arcoscanti, down to the one-off house built by the client, with the architect acting as an onsite advisor. This latter scenario has been championed by Christopher Alexander, who started life as a mathematician, and then went on to analyse the process of design through a system of numerical variables. In his later work this approach softened somewhat into the more flexible method of designing with Patterns, which he then developed into a handbook or manual, which could be used by anyone to design a building to their own requirements. At the Sala House in California this was applied to a single family dwelling, but he has also worked on larger scale developments, such as a college campus in Japan. In

3 Paolo Soleri –“Arcosanti”, Arizona, 1969 onwards.(Neil Jackson)

         would be the equivalent of the rules of metre and rhyme for poets of earlier times: a body of constraints stimulating new discoveries, a set of rules with which improvisation plays.35

         This notion of improvisation recalls the architectural intentions of Herman Hertzberger, who also attempted to inspire this kind of engagement between buildings and their users. A more extreme example of 

level of every day “tactics”. This difference was theorized more specifically in the work of Michel de Certeau, who was also influenced by Lefebvre’s writing on everyday life, in the development of his notion (with reference also to Foucault) of an “anti-disciplinary” practice of resistance to authority:

         Many everyday practices (talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking, etc.) are tactical in character. And so are, more generally, many ‘ways of operating’; victories of the ‘weak’ over the ‘strong’(whether the strength be that of powerful people or the violence of things or of an imposed order, etc.), clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things, ‘hunter’s cunning,’ … The Greeks called these ‘ways of operating’ metis. But they go much further back to the immemorial intelligence displayed in the tricks and imitations of plants and fishes. From the depths of the oceans to the streets of modern megalopolises, there is a continuity and permanence in these tactics.34

         This idea of appropriation is described by de Certeau as a mode of resistance to the dominant practices of capitalism in modern society. This also parallels an idea of Barthes on the subversion of dominant discourses, and the ways in which the active reader reappropriates a text – as de Certeau would have it, reading as “poaching” – or meandering through a text like Benjamin’s wandering flâneur. This technique of creative reading, which becomes almost an act of rewriting, is likened by de Certeau to the inhabition of space, and he also connects this idea with improvisation in poetry:

         This mutation makes the text habitable, like a rented apartment. It transforms another person’s property into a space borrowed for the moment by a transient. Renters make comparable changes in an apartment they furnish with their acts and memories; … as do pedestrians, in the street they fill with their desires and goals. … The ruling order serves as a support for innumerable productive activities, while at the same time blinding its proprietors to this creativity … Carried to its limit this order