The format of our art

We may start from the fact, obvious enough, that we do not start each new design from scratch. Somehow, we learn, over years, the ingredients that make a building good. Somehow, this knowledge is kept by us, occasionally transmitted to others, but mainly kept by us, in our minds, as a store of knowledge, which we may draw upon.
All this is a roundabout way of saying that more important than anything, in our work, is the combinatory system we grow in our own minds, the form language we use to speak the words that come out as buildings.

And what format must this form language have?
It is the box of tricks, the elements, rules, ways of making roofs, edges, windows, steps, the ceiling of a room. The way to make a wall, the way to make a column. The shape of the edge where the building meets the sky. The ways which will not only make a coherent and beautiful work, but one which can be built, in our time, by means we understand, control, and can execute for not impossible amounts of money.
More accurately put, at any given period of history, in any particular society, there are a certain number of schemata which provide rules of thumb for designing and constructing buildings.
The form-language is the (usually unspoken) combinatory system of these schemata (social, technological, geometric, stylistic, etc.) which architects and builders have in their minds about how buildings ought to be organized, how built, how they must look. We may even call form-language the repository of style.

Footnote about schemata

1. Sir Frederick Bartlett, Jerome Bruner, Ernst Gombrich, and others, established half a century ago that human beings cannot undertake complex cognitive tasks without what they called “schemata”. Whenever human beings create buildings — indeed when we solve any kind of recurrent problems — we always rely on pre-existing forms and patterns in our minds. Whenever we try to solve a problem, or create new design, we do it, necessarily, by relying on some language of forms which we already have available to us, and then combining and rearranging these forms to get new results. It is in the process of combining and recombining schemata, that we actually make progress. That is how creation actually occurs.
   • Look for recent research with references to the references Alexander provides in this footnote!

The most basic fact of all concerning the schemata is the following: At any given time in our history, we are able to create only what can be “made” from the schemata which we already have in our form-language. This is true even if we have been thinking in a very good way, with intelligence, concerning living structure. It is inevitable, therefore, that since we cannot help working within an existing form-language — itself, of course, based on the available processes of our time — then even with the best will in the world, we shall only be able to reproduce versions and combinations of what can be “reached” by that form language.

The nature of human cognition is such that people will, in any case, use schemata as the basis of their building operations. It is, in essence, the shared form language of society. Good, bad, or indifferent, some kind of form language will be used. This is true whether is was a good period of architecture or a bad period. The schemata can be good or bad; the stylistic components available for recombination may be good or bad; but no matter which, it is the traces of the then-current form language of combinable schemata, which, dictate and shape the form of the world in any given period.

The kind of geometry which is needed for living structure, and which must emanate from proper use of any living process, is not necessarily attainable within the combinations of today’s form-language.
There are reasons to believe that the form languages of traditional societies helped people to work in living process, allowed them to form buildings well adapted, and truthfully differentiated from the whole, in harmony with the whole. […]
The form languages of recent periods, for various reasons, do not serve this purpose well, and in fact often even prevent the process of living process, and the natural process of differentiation.

It is reasonable to ask, therefore, what a modern form language would need to be like, if it were to help us reach the goal of living process in our highly modern and technically sophisticated society?
[…] If we want a living world, and we want one which is created and generated by living process, it is imperative that the form languages we use, and the form languages available to us, help us and support us in this task.
[…] Unless we have a form language which supports the necessities of living structure, then living structure is simply out of our reach. […] If a society has inadequate style, inadequate shapes and forms, then no matter how hard the builders and architects try, the environment they create will not be, and cannot be a living structure.

In order to make living process possible, we must take at least first steps toward a new form language — in effect, steps toward a new architectural style, which is general and which follows from the nature of living process.
How, in practice, is such a language to be discovered?
What are the strokes, the brush strokes, the gestures, the lines, the shapes, with which we are to paint our pictures, conceive our buildings?
What are the materials, techniques, in which we execute these buildings?
In what style should they, must they, might they, be executed?
What is the language of shape and form in which we may create the stones of a living architecture in our time?
[…] I shall indicate the general lines of a solution, but I cannot claim to solve it fully.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/16 Form language and style#