Hi Chris Alexander. Somebody at the New York Times wants me to tell her why I think that pattern language is important. I think that I will send her this. I will sleep on it and send it tomorrow, but I thought I would send it to you and see what you think. Sometimes I write things which I disgard the next day, for being too long-winded or in the wrong context (or, grin, written with too much wine in me ...). What do you think? Laura

I think that Pattern Language is extremely important. I think that there are only 3 *large* questions in life: 1. Why is that correct/incorrect? (epistemological truth) 2. Why is that good/evil? (moral truth) and 3. Why is that beautiful/ugly? (aesthetic truth). I'd be interested in finding other big questions, but so far these are the only ones I have found. Every other question is in some way or other derived from one or more of these. Right now, in the west at any rate, questions of aesthetic truth are not treated with the same degree of seriousness as questions of moral or epistemological truth. If your child cannot do basic mathematics, or follow simple logical rules, or is a bully, or is a coward, then nearly every parent will be very aware that the child is not developing properly. A child who has no sense of beauty, or propoportion, on the other hand, is usually not perceived as having a problem. Art is given a status in school roughly akin to ``hobby''; it is about as important as collecting sports trading cards, or liking ice cream. People who are particularily good at something artistic are often seen as being mildly talented, and talents are something which are God or biologically given, and thus no credit to oneself. Certainly, one thinks, musicians practice a lot; but after all, they are *talented*. It is not as if they got where they are going through *hard work*. As a result, most people think that art is simply a matter of opinion, and, especially in the United States, most people believe that their opinion is in general as good as the next person's. This produces statements such as ``There is no bad art, only art that is not to your taste.'' When one defines away the ability to actually condemn something as *ugly*, because ugliness is a matter of taste, one loses something vitally important to being human. And, of course, one condones an awful lot of ugliness. Once one admits that one has not only the right, but indeed the duty to destringuish between the ugly and the beautiful in the same way one distinguishes between the correct and the incorrect and the evil and the good one is off to a good start. Common belief to the contrary, an aesthetic sense is not a magical talent from God, but an ability which you can train and develop. This is a good thing. It means that we are not stuck with all of the ugliness we have in this world; the world is indeed improvable. So ... back to the question. Why do we have such ugliness? Ugly houses, and toilets that break every 3 weeks or so, and buildings which nobody wants to work in because they make them uncomfortable, or the roof leaks? Why do some buildings, on the other hand, feel just right? One of the most important reasons why we have ugliness is that we just didn't know any better. It is sheer ignorance. People did the best they could, but the best they could wasn't very good. This is tragically the result you get even if you think that what you are doing is very important. No amount of desiring a very comfortable home could actually give you one if you do not know what it is that makes homes comfortable. There is a skill to doing it, and learning these skills has been very hard. Most people make do with reading the ``right sort'' of magazines. Eventually they find a look which they like, and, if they are lucky, they can internalise what they learn from magazines well enough to come up with some sort of design. Then they try it out. Sometimes after great expense they discover that they actually have learned how to build rooms which photograph well but which are impossible to live in. (``Those huge glass windows which let in all the light! I spend my whole life *on a stepladder*, *cleaning* the wretched things!!'') Many more people, all the more unfortunately, live in ugliness because they give up almost at once. Beauty is for other people; and besides, it isn't all that important anyway. Beauty is seen as a luxury good, not a staple of existence. And I think that this is very wrong. But what can you do about this? Christopher Alexander, whose aesthetic sense is in fine working order decided to find out why some buildings are beautiful; and *document* it. Which means, now, for the first time ever, we can tackle the problem of aesthetic ignorance head on. Making a beautiful building, or bathroom, or entrance-way, or park, becomes something that anybody can learn how to do, without everybody ending up with the same building, for instance, or a hideously non-functional one. (Today we get both properties in the same group of buildings, to our shame.) People who make soup by following a recipe exactly end up with exactly the same thing every time, and exactly what their recipe- following neighbours get. This is boring. Also, neither they nor their neighbours may get the soup they would have preferred if they knew how to make soup, for they may like cabbage more and garlic less, for example. On the other hand, they can be pretty certain that they are not getting turpentine, or cyanide, or even an overspiced soup. Good cooks can make soups and then despense with the recipes because they understand how tastes go together. What if you knew that you could learn how to make buildings as well as you made soups? And that you didn't have to make a hundred of them before you got any good at it? Would you learn how? Would you not want to live in communities where people are living in the sort of buildings they desired to live in? This is what you can learn from Pattern Language, the books and from the website. In addition you can learn some techniques which are universally good for designing *anything*. But if we only fixed the ugly house problem; would that not in itself be enough worthwhile? Pattern Language is a frontal assault on the huge problem of aethetic ignorance and ugliness. Most people say that they would like to make the world a better place. Christopher Alexander is actually doing it. And armed with the knowledge one can gather from his site, *anybody* can actually make the world a better place; one room, one building, one community at a time. There are other worthwhile things which one could fund, probably some which are as worthy of funding but can you actually think of something which is *more* worthwhile? Think of an entire world where everybody lived and worked in the sort of environment they liked to live and work in. Laura