Cover of Alexander rug book: transparent plastic dust jacket with brown printing on patterned cloth binding. Very strange, more pleasant to handle without plastic dust jacket.
Cover of Alexander rug book: transparent plastic dust jacket with brown printing on patterned cloth binding. Very strange, more pleasant to handle without plastic dust jacket.
Note: Italics in quotations from the book are not my italics, but original italics in the text.
Christopher Alexander's much frowned-upon rug book deserves a chapter on its own. I am not interested in judging whether its ideas are right or wrong—I am not interested in attacking Alexander's theory or argue about fine points. What counts for me is whether the system of ideas exposed in this book triggers thoughts and becomes productive. So my approach is rather to apply the ideas and the instruments (the structural analysis proposed), and see whether they work for me (and notice what I may find missing).
The book presents an approach to rugs which is decidedly a-historic. Alexander does not consider technicalities of weaving or the 'use value' and 'exchange value' of rugs, i.e., the social and economic context of their production. He is also neutral regarding discussions of design origins, i.e., the various theories regarding the migration and development of patterns (as coarser 'degenerate' renderings of court and manufactured rugs; as import from Chinese designs passing through central Asia on the silk road; as offspring of archaic tribal totemic symbology; or as a repertoire brought about and constrained by technical characteristics of the weaving technique)—all theories that have been argued about in many other rug books.
Intense colour in the Yellow and blue carpet with griffin and archaic border. (Picture quotation, Alexander: A Foreshadowing.., p16)
Technicalities count only inasmuch as Alexander emphasises the knot—roughly 1/8 inch x 1/8 inch—as the smallest visual design element. These elements then make up the 2-dimensional plane on which color and geometry alone produce the impact of the rug (Alexander refers to 'carpets', I see myself slipping back to 'rug'). In other words, the texture and handle are not really part of the discussion: 'There is really nothing else: just the geometry and the color of the plane' (p15).
Alexander maintains that the quality of wholeness or oneness, the god-like quality of a carpet is 'not merely a matter of preference or taste for different observers, but instead a definite, tangible, and objective quality, which really does exist to a greater or lesser degree in a carpet' (p26). This hinges on a carpet's 'structure of centres', qualitative phenomena which Alexander maintains can be recognised objectively, based on sufficient experience. He likens this experience to the situation of a geologist who, based on experience, can glimpse the possibility of oil being contained within a certain rock formation.
As one empirical way to get past the overlay of preferences to an objective assessment of the quality of a carpet, Alexander proposes a peculiar method: '(..) we must construct a question which is so concrete that it shocks the system, and forces more direct, more true, and more accurate response' (p28). 'The question asks: "If you had to choose one of these two carpets, as a picture of your own self, then which one of the two carpets would you choose?"' (p28). (...) 'In case you find it hard to ask the question, let me clarify by asking you to choose the one which seems better able to represent your whole being, the essence of yourself, good and bad, all that is human in you' (p29). I include a scan of the illustration of the two carpets as image quotation.
The question to determine objective wholeness: 'Which of these two carpets would you choose as picture of your own self?' (Picture quotation, Alexander: A Foreshadowing.., p28)
According to Alexander, most people faced with this question choose the Berlin prayer rug over the Kazak. 'This happens essentially because the question focuses awareness on the real oneness of the person, and compares it with the oneness of the carpet. The carpet with greater oneness seems more like "me" because I am comparing it against my own oneness' (p29). Alexander contends that this feeling of greater depth 'is an objective judgement—not a subjective preference—and that it arises because indeed, the left-hand carpet has a deeper and more significant structure' (p30).
The structural analysis first focuses on centres: 'a "center" may be defined as a psychological entity which is perceived as a whole, and which creates the feeling of a centre, in the visual field.' These are, for example, blossoms in frontal and side view, stars, niches with double hook accents, or arrowheads. Alexander then proposes that these centres organise smaller centres. Alexander compares rugs, counting centres, in order to objectify his assertion that those rugs which have more centres (despite being not necessarily more complex) achieve a higher degree of integration. In some cases I would not identify an 'atomic' centre where he counts one, e.g., to prove his point that the Seljuk rug has the most centres.
Multiplicity of centres: comparing counting centres of three rugs. Click on image for a larger view. (Picture quotation, Alexander: A Foreshadowing.., p38-39)
When closely looking at the three carpets that Alexander presents to show that the oldest—a Seljuk prayer carpet, Konya, from the 13th–14th c.—has more centres than a Konja coupled column prayer rug and that both surpass a Yellow bordered Konya prayer rug from the 18th century, I agree with the overall judgement, but would arrive at it using a different approach. One element of that would be what might be called the 'structural statics', another the efficiency of organising figure and ground of the rug, i.e. the distribution of well measured 'strokes' that create 'the shape that carries' and at the same time, the ground. This seems not necessarily linked with the number of centres but more with the proportions and directions of elements as they link up to form a two-dimensional archiecture. In the Seljuk rug, the structure of beams looks very sound, even though the central mihrab arch is suspended on horizontal links to the two side beams. In the Yellow-bordered prayer rug, for example, the mihrab hovers in thin air above the field, which itself is adorned with non-structural elements. In the 16th c. coupled columns prayer rug, the array of arrow-shapes of the upper parapet seems to weigh down on the light field, from which it is separated by a thin horizontal (non-supporting) line. You can nearly see the line giving way under the weight of the parapet's elements. While strucural statics are strictly unnecessary in a two-dimensional horizontal object with no supporting function (except for the soundness of weave and pile) I feel that I import expectations of structural soundness into the design which have been formed during childhood, when tinkering with wood and other materials and making discoveries about the soundness (and failure) of structure.
The structural soundness and efficiency of the Seljuk border is even more evident, compared to the heavy cartouches of the coupled column prayer rug which swim on the background, and thin scaffolding around the octagons of the yellow-bordered prayer rug with its unsuccessful corner turn (I guess this was the top of the rug when it was woven).
Another concept which is not identical to centres is that of structural echoes that integrate the design. In discussing the Seljuk prayer rug, Alexander includes these under centres, remarking that 'the reflections and echoes of one shape in another create further invisible centres, by making invisible cross-link lines, that connect similar but not identical components to one another' (p40). Including invisible centres seems not so helpful to me, these may proliferate with no end, the exact opposite of the 'countable centres' at the outset of the analysis. Instead, what creates the strength and integration here seems to be the reduction of the design repertoire to a small number of basic elements (the T-shape, the related Y-shape). It might then be the smaller count of basic design elements rather than the larger count of centres that would explain greater oneness (integration).
(An aside: I do not wish to suggest that 'higher integration' or 'reduced repertoire' are timeless qualities characterising good or great art, or even art alone; here, I simply suggest a different analysis within a particular paradigm of art where quality judgements are based on the (partly measurable) degree of aesthetic perfection—Vollkommenheit—within a well defined repertoire of expression.)
Alexander then shows the role of local symmetries in integrating design motives and creating centres; some symmetries are axial (one or more axes), some point-symmetric (here called rotational symmetry). Beyond local symmetries within a motive (or centre) it is also symmetries across the visual plane, relating distant but symmetrical centres, which tie the design together. Alexander goes on to show that even floral designs are governed by these local symmetries. Based on an experiment conducted together with Bill Huggins at Harward University in the early 1960's which investigated the role of symmetries in perceiving coherence, he summarises that 'the most coherent patterns are the ones which contain the largest number of local symmetries or "subsymmetries"' (p49)
Applied to the analysis of carpet design, ALexander proposes that 'the more local symmetries a center contains, the better it is as a center' (p49). Which would mean that a rosette is a better centre than a boteh or a palmette (flower in profile). The same notion he applies to the carpet as a whole, obtaining the following formulation: 'Every carpet is, at one and the same time, a system of centers, and itself a center. Its goodness depends on the number of centers it contains, and on the number of local symmetries which each of the center is made of' (p49). And further: 'There is a curious bootstrap effect, an almost circular proposition, at the basis of the phenomenon which we are studying. Centers are made up of other centers. A center is an organization (or field) of other centers. It achieves its significance to the degree that each of these other centers which it is made of, is itself significant. And an entire carpet, being merely yet another center in the endless hierarchy of centers, also achieves its significance to the degree that it, itself, is also made of other centers which are significant' (p49).
The paradox of this concept of significance is that at bottom, its fundamental 'atomic' elements are no more signficant than 1-0-1 or 0-1-0 or even 1-1 and 0-0 (the smallest axial symmetry). If significance is taken literally, it means that it signals something against a dicernable background; that it stands out as 'information' against the redundancy of likeness, repetition, noise. This competing concept of significance is of course related to Shannon's mathematical information theory which was motivated by the need to secure the maximum compression and safe transmission of messages across communication channels which might introduce noise or distortion. I am not going to delve in this any further; the aesthetic reverberations have been expored extensively in a book by Kurd Alsleben, "Aesthetische Redundanz" (with luck still available second-hand). In this contrasting view, the significance of design elements would result in a dialectic relationship between redundant elements and disruptive elements (e.g., asymmetries introduced into symmetries).
(to be continued)