Fresno Farmers Market, by Christopher Alexander. (patternlanguage.com)

Common/Edge may the most edgy design website because of its willingness to engage traditional viewpoints. Most such sites altogether ignore tradition in architecture. One of its editors, Martin C. Pedersen, has assembled an intriguing digital interview with Nikos Salingaros, the mathematician and architectural theorist at the University of Texas in San Antonio. He has long been a partner in the research by the noted architectural theorist Christo- pher Alexander. Here is an excerpt from “Calling For an Architecture that Connects Us to Our Bodies“:

On what forms and patterns would connect people’s bodies to their buildings: “We know those fairly accurately. There exist spatial patterns that define a sense of “partial envelopment,” and those help create welcoming spaces. Details and articulations of the structure and surfaces follow from universal scaling, organized complexity, color, etc. We have explained this in great detail in published texts, many of them online. Note that what we propose is found in traditional and vernacular architectures the world over, and throughout history. The connective qualities are not a secret, but those design tools and constraints were deliberately contra- dicted in order to promote the industrial-modernist style.

Because I must take a train up to Boston for an ICAA meeting, I must quote and run!