Daytalking About Our Favorite Spaces
An interview with Jo's Epistolary author Joanna Petroni on Christopher Alexander
“On the wire, that’s living…all the rest is waiting.”
—Christopher Alexander from his The Timeless Way of Building, quoting a high-wire acrobat’s approach to life.
Let’s begin with this image.
It’s the same space at different times.
How do you feel about the image on the left? On the right?
What accounts for the gap in your feelings about both spaces?
That’s just a taste of what I got from initial readings of architect and philosopher Christopher Alexander (who died March 17, 2022). And I only learned about his existence from fellow Substack author Joanna Petroni in her recent post.
My loss is also now my gain. And maybe yours. This is Stargazing in action, but I wanted more; I needed to rope in some Daytalking.
So, I reached out to Jo to talk about her own connections to Alexander and we happily veered to into life, the universe, and everything. Which always puts me in my happy place.
We chatted briefly on the phone (she’s in the south of France) and I lightly edited our emailed interview for length and clarity.
Michael Maupin: How did you first learn about Christopher Alexander?
Jo Petroni: It was in my later university years, and not through architecture school! My teachers would not touch the stuff :) Too esoteric for their taste.
I deep-dived into Alexander’s work much later, after my “Aha” moment had happened (you know, when you find out what you actually want to do) and it helped me define a lot of undefined elements in my work. I still go back to him from time to time and that’s how I happened to find out about his passing before the press did. I was looking for his opinion on porches.
MM: You are an architect, too, and we’ve talked about our fathers being architects. How do you suppose their generations affect our work currently? Is there a timing issue about ideas and how they’re received?
JP: Well my dad was your generation, Michael, so you tell me :))
My father was a totally different architect than me. He was a true visual artist. I worry about sustainability and atmosphere and what it all means and go into theory that no one cares for.
He made beautiful buildings. Just like that.
But I didn’t start becoming the architect I am today until after he died. We were too entangled for me to forge my own way until then.
MM: What is your current favorite space? Why?
JP: Always my favorite place is a corner in the afternoon glow. Everywhere I end up living I find a place like this and it becomes my corner. I try to imagine one in all my home projects and then imagine people enjoying it on a sunny April day and that makes me smile.
MM: What is a past space that you miss dearly? Why?
JP: The place in our brains that processes memories is the same one that manages our spacial navigation. It’s all happening (here’s a link to a very dry study) in the hippocampus and that seems to be why all of our memories have a place attached, even though other elements like faces or sounds might be missing. It’s ultimately our memories that make us miss a place.
And my childhood was such a happy one. I miss the cedar in the front lawn and the way the wind blew in the woods and the pink crumbly texture of the brick masonry that made up the house, covered in ivy.
MM: Alexander talks a lot about the feelings we humans get when we’re in a particular space. Is that something we can internally correct, or is it a hard line given its reality?
JP: Every second of our lives we input 11 million bits of multisensory information, 10 million of which are visual, 50 bits of which are conscious.
Who knows what’s going on in there?
Then there’s the filtering of the information. Stuff that is hardwired in us, stuff that's cultural and stuff that’s unique to each of us. When I see a place, and you see a place, we don’t see the same place. And that’s the beauty of life. But we are more similar than we are different, which is comforting.
Alexander was looking at spaces in a very experiential way, feeling rather than knowing. And what he felt was true for him was consequently true for everyone else and he was ultimately condemned for it. Today, no one would dare such a thing anymore. They make studies, analyses, charts and tables. But they lose that “feeling” bit that Alexander had.
The truth must be in the middle somewhere I imagine...
MM: Let’s talk about a space together. What do you think of this?
How does it make you feel?
JP: The month of March! I had my driveway full of petals, too, up until a couple of days ago. Full of this pink abundance that blossoming trees promise.
MM: How do spaces contribute to our sense of belonging or not belonging? What can we do to remedy spaces where we once belonged but no longer feel we do?
JP: Smiling people are the best remedy that I know of.
How do we make people smile? Juhani Pallasmaa has said that his architecture teacher once said that: “The talent of imagining human situations is more important for an architect than the gift of fantasizing spaces.” Architects have forgotten how to smile and it shows in our buildings and towns.
MM: That’s a wonderful take on emotion and the effect of space on them. You mentioned overuse of patterns and how we can run with that to our peril. Can you explain further?
JP: We’re such pattern-making machines! We live for the stuff. For things to make sense. For an underlying logic. We seek it so much that we even fool ourselves sometimes. See patterns where there aren’t any, find logic in chaos, order in mumbo-jumbo.
There are theories today saying that we love symmetrical houses because they have the same structure as a human face and that we’re hardwired to like human faces. Is that a true pattern? Is it just our brains going gaga?
Your bricks, are they trying to tell us something? Or do we want them to?
MM: Lastly, who are the “Christopher Alexanders” alive and well that should be on everyone’s radar now? What inspirational leaders are currently in our midst?
JP: I wouldn’t dare dictate “everyone’s radar,” Michael. But here goes, my people:
On the architecture side, there's the great Juhani Pallasmaa, who wrote the bible of phenomenology, “The Eyes of the Skin,” back in the day. It’s about the way we feel spaces through all of our senses. Peter Zumthor and his “Thinking Architecture.” Kengo Kuma and his Character of Places philosophy. Some Japanese architects spend more than a year on a site before attempting any design ideas, sensing the spirit of a place before adding something new. I try to add that to my work.
I have recently been enjoying Charles Eisenstein. He's the guy who wrote Sacred Economics, about the Gift Economy, which has helped shape the way I do business. He’s on Substack as well.
Another Substack we both love is George Saunders. He’s one cookie who clearly enjoys what he's doing, and that’s always refreshing.
MM: Thanks for the chat, Jo. It’s been fun and informative!
Thanks for sharing! I'm thinking that we should all seek out places where the architecture gives us inner peace and harmony with our surroundings. In Minneapolis, I would put the Minneapolis Institute of Arts high on my list. I love that it is surrounded by park space. I never tire of the view of downtown Minneapolis on the third floor north window. Wonderful.