0:00 I had a funny beginning to the pattern language. I don't think I've actually hardly ever told 0:05 anybody about this. It's kind of a very odd thing that happened to me. You know 0:09 I'd been at Harvard. I tried to figure out from scratch what is architecture all about. 0:14 I was totally disgusted really with what I'd learnt in architecture school. So I went to 0:18 Harvard to try to figure it all out. And I started out with some very sort-of formal questions about 0:26 adaptation in the environment, and what it was all about, and so forth. And always inspired by 0:31 traditional cultures and traditional societies, and what they managed to do, and why did they 0:35 know so much and I knew so little, and all of us knew so little. I spent a few years 0:44 thinking about that. And then I had a very odd thing happen to me. I was living in India ... 0:51 I went to India really just to look at a small village society, 0:59 in microcosm in its environment. And I lived in a village in India for several months. 1:06 And it taught me a lot. But anyway, not long after that, I was, well, in my mid-twenties, 1:17 and I had an offer to build a village. To build a whole new village. In India. 1:25 I had some ... from my childhood I'd known various Indian people and Indian families, 1:30 and some of them were fairly powerful families in India, in Ahmedabad which is the cotton 1:36 capital in India. So even though I was some completely unknown person and I was 1:41 young and everything. Anyway suddenly this amazing offer came in would you come, 1:45 on the basis of the work you did when you were studying the village when you were living there 1:48 would you come build a new village in Gujarat. I mean a dream, really, for a young architect. 2:00 And I thought about this ... for a very long time. First weeks and then a couple of months. 2:10 And then I finally refused. Because I felt I couldn't do a good job. 2:18 Because I knew that the real life in a real village comes from all the people in that 2:23 village. Somehow, magically in a traditional village operating together and producing all 2:29 this incredible stuff, over years, or decades, or centuries even. And I thought "well, 2:35 that is what I know has got to be done" and here I am, and somebody's just made me an offer which 2:40 I would have given my eye-teeth for, but I gotta refuse it, because I don't know how to do it. 2:48 And that shocked me, actually. It was a terrible thing to have to do, really. But I did the right 2:54 thing. I would have made a complete mess of it. I would not have been able to do 2:59 it. But it shocked me a great deal and I started thinking ok well what is really 3:03 going on then. I've gotta get to be the master of this situation, so the next time it happens, 3:09 if I'm lucky enough to have anyone ever ask me again, that I will actually be able to do it. 3:19 And ... that was really the birth of the pattern language. 'cause I sat there and thought during 3:23 those two months, I was in effect having to refuse this amazing offer, and I realized 3:37 that it was actually ... that it was somehow ... see I had known, even from the work I 3:42 did in India, I knew things about the Indian villages which were sort of pattern-like, 3:49 and I had ways of analyzing these things, and I had actually written some of them down, 3:53 in fact it was because of what I had done about that that I was offered this thing. So it wasn't 3:57 a lack of information of a pattern-like nature. Actually, I had a lot of information about that. 4:04 Pretty, and I think pretty good. But I didn't know how to harness the energy of the people 4:13 in the village. In other words, it was one thing for me to think I knew. First of all I knew I was 4:18 gonna be wrong about a whole bunch of it. 'cause I'd had experiences there, which I maybe could 4:23 tell you about, but anyway so I knew that it was a lot more mysterious than it seemed. And so there 4:27 were simply things I didn't understand about their lives. But also, I didn't really know how to get 4:34 that wonderful juice out of them ... The one I lived in was very small, maybe 600 people, 4:40 all mud buildings, and I was being asked to build a place on that order of magnitude, 4:48 maybe a little tiny bit bigger ... so fine you've got several hundred people, 4:54 and how can you actually ... it's one thing to think you know what it takes to make the family 5:02 feel comfortable in relationship to the water buffaloes and put the well in the right place, and 5:08 have the communal spaces working in the way they have to given the nature of the Indian village 5:13 society as it was then. But it's quite another thing to say ok now I've somehow got to make a 5:20 present of that material to those 600 people, so that they will become activated to do it. 5:29 And of course by the way I haven't said but the thing that was at stake was not simply 5:34 reproduce a traditional Indian village, because of course they didn't need me 5:38 for that. I mean, they could have done that without, certainly without, me. 5:42 The point was that there were transitions in Indian village society that were coming, 5:46 and that one could start to feel, and so the question was well what was the village now, 5:50 and how was it emerging, and that was really the hope, of the people who had asked me, was 5:55 that I would come and build such a place. So it involved in effect saying to people of a village, 6:03 this is how your life is going, this is the nature of things, but somehow I've got to show 6:09 this to you, or discuss it with you, so that it becomes part of you, so you will then pull out 6:15 all the stops, and actually 600 people will do this and make this living thing. And that's what 6:21 I didn't know how to do.That was why I refused the job. Because I did not know how to do that part. 6:29 And then I started realizing that somehow, even though these somewhat pattern-like things that 6:38 I had already discovered, were more rule-like needed ... that in traditional societies people 6:44 weren't thinking about this stuff all the time, they were just doing stuff. And so 6:48 therefore it was clear that it was already sort of available in some very simple form, everyday form. 6:55 And that people were just kind of doing stuff like daily. And then I began thinking about 7:01 well how can that be possible? And that was really the birth of the pattern language. 7:09 In the years following that, I went into that very heavily. And it was after about, 7:16 it's after working on what now is published today as A Pattern Language 7:20 which altogether took, I forget, maybe 10 or 15 years ... 10 really. 7:32 But anyway, so were were sort of about mid-stream on that thing, when I was asked to come and do the 7:36 plan here. So that was already ... all of that was clear, as a way of thinking about the world. 7:46 So that the particular things that came into play here at the University of Oregon, 7:51 one was simply well ok fine what specifics about a pattern language would be helpful 7:59 and relevant to the creation of this campus. And secondly: what would the specific ways be 8:04 of getting hundreds or thousands of people involved in this process ... here.