Club considers how to build a better world

Summer seemed to come all of a sudden this week and, in response, there was a hefty showing of pale linen suits at our monthly meeting. Oddly we were also plagued by what seemed like a mobile source of disco oom-pah music. Having circled the block it settled outside the pub and loudly annoyed us for most of the evening.

Our speaker this month was Luca Jellinek, talking about the architectural theorist Christopher Alexander, who died recently. He seems to have been a divisive and controversial figure, at odds with some of his modernist and brutalist contemporaries. Rather than thinking up new, radical and thoroughly modern ways to use architecture to govern people's lives, he preferred to study organic architectural traditions around the world and establish a grand theory of how best to organise buildings and infrastructure to offer people what they really want by putting people at the centre of all design and allowing them to participate in constructing their physical world. He felt that first and foremost buildings need to make people happy. His own buildings do seem to have been quite traditional in style, but he is best known for his writings, most notably the seminal A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction in 1978 and his 2004 magnum opus The Nature of Order, coming in at 2,300 pages across four volumes.

You can see a video of Luca's talk on our YouTube channel at youtu.be/ln_wmSy4W4w. (I have done my best to filter out the oom-pah music, but you can still hear it, I'm afraid.) You can see more photos from the evening on our Flickr account at flickr.com/photos/sheridanclub/albums/72177720298744366.

It’s vigorous debate like this at the NSC that is shaping the modern world