Notes on How Buildings Learn, Part 4: Adaptation
A design professional of depth – his 1964 Notes on the Synthesis of Form [Amazon] is still in print – [Christopher] Alexander is inspired by how design occurs in the natural world. “Things that are good have a certain kind of structure,” he told me. “You can’t get that structure except dynamically. Period. In nature you’ve got continuous very-small-feedback-loop adaptation going on, which is why things get to be harmonious. That’s why they have the qualities we value. If it wasn’t for the time dimension, it wouldn’t happen. Yet here we are playing the major role in creating the world, and we haven’t figured this out. That is a very serious matter.”
Applying this approach to buildings, Alexander frames the design question so: “What does it take to build something so that it’s really easy to make comfortable little modifications in a way that once you’ve made them, they feel integral with the nature and structure of what is already there? [...] This kind of adaptation is a continuous process of gradually taking care.”
– Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn, p. 21-23.
The true goal of software architecture is ensuring that each modification, however small or big, ‘feel integral with the nature and structure of what is already there.’ But software architecture has for long been mixed up, approaching software development with a mindset of Corbusian pure order, thinking everything must be planned in advance if things are ever to be right.
Come the age of Enterprise Architecture, it does seem that IT is waking up to this reality. EA talk today revolves to a large extent around how you can never, in very large organizations, escape having heterogeneous IT environments, so the task becomes managing that heterogeneity. You are stuck with some systems, so how can you bring them all together and build new ones to add to the mix? And how can you bring this diverse environment into harmony? How can you make each legacy system feel integral with the new nature and structure?
Still, being serious about things goes hand in hand with exercising control. Or rather, we’re wired to think so. But postponing the planning of certain things does not mean neglecting them. We must dare to just focus on one small thing, and then start working on that one, then focus on the next small thing, then the next.
No progress is involved in the transformation of an acorn into an oak. But the acorn is a perfect acorn. And the sapling is a perfect sapling. And the big oak tree is a perfect oak. Which again produces acorns. Perfect acorns. At every stage it is there. Just as in the unfoldment of a musical composition, it is arrived at every stage.
– Alan Watts, Still the Mind.1
1 This quote is from a recording I have. In the book, the poetry has been edited out.