Greg Bryant

Here's an attempt to explain 'unfolding sequences', and include computer people in the audience. Unfolding sequences are natural, pervasive, and extremely powerful. But we don't notice them or use them enough. youtube.com/watch?v=m1IZql…

Market-rate developers & investors purposely, continually raise prices & rents -- and stop building when prices stabilize. So, increasing the market-rate supply does NOT make housing affordable: quite the opposite. At the same time, we're destroying livability, and nature.

@davidsirota High-density is usually bad for the environment and people; low-density can be ecological. It all depends on the situation. New abundance-style upzoning has destroyed small, green, affordable owner-occupied neighborhoods to build wall-street owned extractive rental hellholes.

I've always said anti-density zoning laws are bad. I don't think theyre the *primary* driver of the housing crisis, but they're bad. Example of bad: "Zoning codes in Colorado overwhelmingly prohibit duplexes, townhouses, condominiums & apartment units." coloradosun.com/2025/07/01/nat…

@davidsirota That's great! But ... it's a new, good regulation. It's not predatory deregulation. So it's not YIMBY, which, again, is a marketing slogan injected into our conversation by corporate landlords, investors, real estate brokers, and developers. Who want a world of trapped renters.

And FYI I don't think we have to choose between housing & the environment. We can get more housing & not destroy the environment. I say that having recently participated in passing a pro-housing, pro-environment YIMBY law in my own city. denverite.com/2025/02/18/den…

@davidsirota NIMBY and YIMBY are capitalist marketing terms. NIMBY was invented to tarnish people who didn't want to live near toxic industries. YIMBY was invented to deregulate corporate construction of rentals, because profit and monopoly demand the "creative destruction" of neighborhoods.

@LeeHepner @matthewswspence Market developers stop building when prices stop rising. Their erstwhile investors have opportunities to extract profits elsewhere. So, the supply-side cannot provide affordability, unless there's a market collapse. Only public housing can. But corporations made that tough.

@matthewswspence I said building supply into a rigged market is not going to bring down rents. I have never said building new housing into a fair, unrigged market wouldn’t do so.

Kentucky saw the third largest increase in multifamily housing construction in 2022 - a 97.7% increase in approvals. Still, the percentage of rent-burdened residents increased to 47%. Building into a rigged market will not deliver lower rents. This week, Kentucky sued RealPage.

Nature of Order Webinar speakers for Spring term: buildingbeauty.org/news/2025/2/5/…

@rjs @andy_matuschak @ReductVideo A shortcut to the shortcut could be this short video of Alexander describing the simplicity of site diagnosis in the Oregon Experiment youtube.com/watch?v=2V4QYC… ... or this long lecture where he describes, in great detail, making decisions on site: youtube.com/watch?v=a8wPKs…

@andy_matuschak @ReductVideo The fullest treatment of that is in Nature of Order Book 2. Key topics like latent centers, unfolding, structure-preserving transformation, and generative process. A shortcut to that would be to first look at how he describes “site diagnosis” (iirc) in The Oregon Experiment.

I know many software designers are fond of Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Has anyone ever actually applied CA’s analytical hierarchical graph partition to a UI project? It strikes me as more useful in concept than in practice, but Appendix A implies he really used it. (though tbh those constructive diagrams don’t seem to specify nearly enough)

@andy_matuschak @ReductVideo While only one kind of an answer to your question, the useful process presented in this video is still quite thought-provoking: youtube.com/watch?v=vjWJBy…

Hm. In the preface, he says that he sees his subsequent work on patterns as an elaboration of the diagrams, which can be used without the formal independence analysis. But that still requires reasoning about which patterns to use for each ensemble—ie something like misfit/requirement enumeration?

@Talor_A Your point's still valid, though. He didn't write that much about successful community battles, even though he fought continuously, and was keenly interested in it. He wrote instead about the essence of the thing the fighting was about ... which was hard enough.

@greg_bryant thanks :) time for me to read this book

I love christopher alexander, but the thing I can’t get past is that the premier implementation of his work, community-driven development at University of Oregon, seems to directly contradict his idea of “piecemeal process”, because

@lymanstoneky @brianBoF @tracewoodgrains Alexander talks about the questions he asked that resulted in agreement, here: youtube.com/watch?v=xmlo0L… and here: youtube.com/watch?v=2V4QYC…

@brianBoF @tracewoodgrains 80% is really really high!!

I'm actually curious about research on this. If you show people from various cultures 30 paintings, how clustered are their preferences?

@Talor_A The Oregon Experiment was a report written after 5 years of fighting alongside the community to make it happen, to discover how to make it work. For only another decade, the administration went along, because of the good results. archive.org/details/oregon…

@greg_bryant but over a short time they made sweeping changes that realized this vision right? That is sort of what I’m getting at. (I’ll caveat this with the fact that I don’t have a copy of Oregon Exp to read in full yet, but this is my understanding)

@Talor_A He knew that active, cooperative, organized communities were needed. He fought for community power in all of his projects. He focused on helping them to grow places that support life and work in their neighborhoods. Maybe his last book was the most political.

I adore A Pattern Language, but I feel that there’s a gap in his work about the political side of community self-determination. Few places have the privilege of enacting change to the degree that UO did, and it’s not clear how to build that power in new places

@htmx_org Alexander was flattered that computer people listened more than architects. But in the late 90s he created software in a radically humane way, the way he approached building, unrelated to any tech movement inspired by his books. But, at the time, the software folks didn't listen.

many of The Patterns™ lead to over-engineering i wish the (physical) architects had listened to christopher alexander (will never forgive berkeley for how they treated him) and the software folks had listened to niklaus wirth & john ousterhout instead

A new lecture by architect Christopher Alexander from 1995, shown for the first time. 90 minutes of philosophy in action, as he wrestles with complex issues on a real building site, and with questions from an audience of mostly students. youtube.com/watch?v=a8wPKs…

The Christopher Alexander & Center for Environmental Structure Archive gives access to 50+ years of work by Alexander/CES, sharing ideas and projects to inspire all who wish to build and repair living environments in which people thrive. Visit at christopher-alexander-ces-archive.org.

@ryn__x @meekaale @simonsarris The sequence can be used analogously for structures of about the same complexity: youtube.com/watch?v=YEsJnM… There are other unfolding sequences -- we don't have videos for them yet. Here's 33 steps (with lots of substeps) for a house: patternlanguage.com/sequences/othe…

I wrote my own webapp for an interactive plan, but its still very rough around the edges, and missing lots of info and photos still garden.simonsarris.com if you hover over most plants you'll see the cultivar, and if someone sponsored a rose or tree, it will say their name

@RNG52 @designwithixdf I think Don Norman's questions would be mostly answered by reading Alexander's "The Nature of Order".

@designwithixdf Christopher Alexander's 'Notes on the Synthesis of Form' had something interesting to say about this issue. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_on_…

What size module should I use? How do I divide it up into modules? What are the best increments to start with? 🤔 These are questions that arise when doing #incrementalmodulardesign. There's no easy answer but here's what #DonNorman has to say. 🙌🏼

@csh01014 It's helpful to watch a living thing in nature: as it unfolds it gives us inspiration. A growing plant, for example, is beautiful, inventive, directed, and coherent. We call its development a 'sequence', but of course, we're referring to an amazing process, with great substance.

@greg_bryant Yes！ I Agree 。 I just I want say , I never ever know that the feeling which drive us to work better , it can explain by other things, there maybe is you say `unfold sequence`. But I just think is a abstract concept , no entity

Here's an attempt to explain 'unfolding sequences', and include computer people in the audience. Unfolding sequences are natural, pervasive, and extremely powerful. But we don't notice them or use them enough. youtube.com/watch?v=m1IZql…

@csh01014 You use your feeling to judge the quality of your work, with adjustments, at each step. Your feeling helps you to answer the question: "am I making the whole thing better?" The steps in a sequence should allow you to make these good decisions at the right time.

@greg_bryant I just feel this a feeling! and this is other video.. youtube.com/watch?v=2V4QYC… what the connection between unfold sequence and fellng?