The timeless way
Christopher Alexander가 1979년 저서 The timeless way of building에서 설명하는 개념.
설명1
비록 의식하지는 못했더라도, 옛날부터 항상 존재하던 방법. 이 방법을 통하지 않고서는 훌륭한 건축을 할 수 없다. 이 방법을 이제서야 식별할 수 있게 되었다.
There is one timeless way of building. It is thousands of years old, and the same today as it has always been…. It is not possible to make great buildings, or great towns, beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way…. In an unconscious form, this way has been behind almost all ways of building for thousands of years. But it has become possible to identify it, only now, by going to a level of analysis which is deep enough to show what is invariant in all the different versions of this way.
이 방법을 이해하면 전문가의 도움없이 누구라도 방, 집, 정원을 ‘살아있게’ 만들 수 있다.
Once you understand this way, you will be able to make your room alive; you will be able to design a house together with your family; a garden for your children; places where you can work; beautiful terraces where you can sit and dream…. Without the help of architects or planners, if you are working in the timeless way, a town will grow under your hands, as steady as the flowers in your garden.
건축물을 만드는 방법이 완전히 똑같다는 뜻이 아니라, 하나의 근본적이고 불변하는 특징이 있다는 뜻.
It means that at the core of all successful acts of building and at the core of all successful processes of growth, even though there are a million different versions of these acts and processes, there is one fundamental invariant feature, which is responsible for their success. Although this way has taken on a thousand different forms at different times, in different places, still, there is an unavoidable, invariant core to all of them.
살아있는 건축물, 살아있는 마을을 만드는 ‘정의할 수 있는 순서definable sequence of activities’가 존재한다.
There is a definable sequence of activities which are at the heart of all acts of building, and it is possible to specify, precisely, under what conditions these activities will generate a building which is alive. All this can be made so explicit that anyone can do it…. And, once again, these processes can be made so explicit, and so clear, that any group of people can make use of them.
패턴과 패턴 언어:
As we shall see, in chapters 4 and 5, every building, every town, is made of certain entities which I call patterns: and once we understand buildings in terms of their patterns, we have a way of looking at them, which makes all buildings, all parts of a town similar, all members of the same class of physical structures. Second, we have a way of understanding the generative processes which give rise to these patterns: in short, the source from which the ultimate constituents of building come. As we shall see in chapter 10, 11, and 12, these patterns always come from certain combinatory processes, which they generate, but always similar in their overall structure, and in the way they work. They are essentially like languages.
이 방법은 정밀하고 체계적이지만, 기계적으로 적용할 수는 없다.
But though this method is precise, it cannot be used mechanically…. Although the process is precise, and can be defined in exact scientific terms, finally it becomes valuable, not so much because it shows us things which we don’t know, but instead, because it shows us what we know already, only daren’t admit because it seems so childish, and so primitive.
이 방법이 “timeless”인 이유는, 우리 안에 이미 들어 있는 지식을 꺼내는 것에 불과하기 때문.
And what happens finally, is that we learn to overcome our fears, and reach that portion of our selves which knows exactly how to make a building live, instinctively. But we learn too, that this capacity in us is not accessible, until we first go through the discipline which teaches us to let go of our fears. And that is why the timeless way is, in the end, a timeless one. It is not an external method, which can be imposed on things. It is instead a process which lies deep in us: and only needs to be released.
두려움을 떨쳐내기.
… we have become afraid of what will happen naturally, and convinced that we must work within a “system” and with “methods” since without them our surroundings will come tumbling down in chaos. …
The thoughts and fears which feed these methods are illusions. … To purge ourselves of these illusions, to become free of all the artificial images of order which distort the nature that is in us, we must first learn a discipline which teaches us the true relationship between ourselves and our surroundings.
Then, once this discipline has done its work, and pricked the buddles of illusion which we cling to now, we will be ready to give up the discipline, and act as nature does.
This is the timeless way of building: learning the discipline - and shedding it.
See also
Footnotes
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Chapter 1, The timeless way of building ↩