Can Buildings Smile?
(The following quote is from Christopher Alexander when interviewed by Stephen Grabow)
From THE EVOLUTION OF A NEW PARADIGM IN ARCHITECTURE, Routledge Kegan Paul, London, 1983
“I am trying to make a building which is like a smile on a person’s face, and which has that kind of rightness about it, and which is really like that and not just saying it is like that.
If you just take that very simple idea for a moment and try to imagine what it would mean to do that, you can see at once that it is very, very difficult. Admittedly it is somewhat nebulous put that way, but knowing the sort of incredible way you reverberate when a person smiles at you, and how you feel, and the opening and relaxation which takes place – in that person and in you – and you actually imagine simply trying to do that, then it is an accurate description. It is not simply a metaphor.
When someone smiles it is as though the fabric of the universe seems to melt. In other words, something happens in that the order of things actually relaxes in a peculiar way. And it can happen in a million different ways. But one would not ordinarily say that such things are beautiful, except in some incredibly rarefied sense of the word. And yet, the fact is that somehow, at such moments, things are completely orderly and at peace with themselves – not at all in the pretentious sense that we tend to call beautiful, but in an incredibly simple and straightforward and at the same time deep and mysterious sense.
If you contrast the beauty of a person’s face (which roughly parallels the ordinary use of the word) with the beauty of a smile on a person’s face (which is much closer to what I am talking about), then what I am trying to do bears the same relation to what one normally calls “beautiful” as the smile does to the face. Of course it is infinitely more wonderful and more precious, I think. It is also much more serious and closer to the hearts of everybody. Because if you think about the smile, the question of whether it is a beautiful face, in the ordinary sense of the word, is completely irrelevant. By the standards of the smile, the actual contents of a person’s face are incredibly unimportant.