https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZHb9-Y9r_E
I had a funny beginning to the pattern language. I don't think I've actually hardly ever told anybody about this. It's kind of a very odd thing that happened to me. You know I'd been at Harvard. I tried to figure out from scratch what is architecture all about.
I was totally disgusted really with what I'd learnt in architecture school. So I went to Harvard to try to figure it all out. And I started out with some very sort-of formal questions about adaptation in the environment, and what it was all about, and so forth. And always inspired by traditional cultures and traditional societies, and what they managed to do, and why did they know so much and I knew so little, and all of us knew so little. I spent a few years thinking about that. And then I had a very odd thing happen to me. I was living in India ...
I went to India really just to look at a small village society, in microcosm in its environment. And I lived in a village in India for several months. And it taught me a lot. But anyway, not long after that, I was, well, in my mid-twenties, and I had an offer to build a village. To build a whole new village. In India.
I had some ... from my childhood I'd known various Indian people and Indian families, and some of them were fairly powerful families in India, in Ahmedabad which is the cotton capital in India. So even though I was some completely unknown person and I was young and everything. Anyway suddenly this amazing offer came in would you come, on the basis of the work you did when you were studying the village when you were living there would you come build a new village in Gujarat. I mean a dream, really, for a young architect.
And I thought about this ... for a very long time. First weeks and then a couple of months. And then I finally refused. Because I felt I couldn't do a good job.
Because I knew that the real life in a real village comes from all the people in that village. Somehow, magically in a traditional village operating together and producing all this incredible stuff, over years, or decades, or centuries even. And I thought "well, that is what I know has got to be done" and here I am, and somebody's just made me an offer which I would have given my eye-teeth for, but I gotta refuse it, because I don't know how to do it.
And that shocked me, actually. It was a terrible thing to have to do, really. But I did the right thing. I would have made a complete mess of it. I would not have been able to do it. But it shocked me a great deal and I started thinking ok well what is really going on then. I've gotta get to be the master of this situation, so the next time it happens, if I'm lucky enough to have anyone ever ask me again, that I will actually be able to do it.
And ... that was really the birth of the pattern language. 'cause I sat there and thought during those two months, I was in effect having to refuse this amazing offer, and I realized that it was actually ... that it was somehow ... see I had known, even from the work I did in India, I knew things about the Indian villages which were sort of pattern-like, and I had ways of analyzing these things, and I had actually written some of them down, in fact it was because of what I had done about that that I was offered this thing. So it wasn't a lack of information of a pattern-like nature. Actually, I had a lot of information about that.
Pretty, and I think pretty good. But I didn't know how to harness the energy of the people in the village. In other words, it was one thing for me to think I knew. First of all I knew I was gonna be wrong about a whole bunch of it. 'cause I'd had experiences there, which I maybe could tell you about, but anyway so I knew that it was a lot more mysterious than it seemed. And so there were simply things I didn't understand about their lives. But also, I didn't really know how to get that wonderful juice out of them ... The one I lived in was very small, maybe 600 people, all mud buildings, and I was being asked to build a place on that order of magnitude, maybe a little tiny bit bigger ... so fine you've got several hundred people, and how can you actually ... it's one thing to think you know what it takes to make the family feel comfortable in relationship to the water buffaloes and put the well in the right place, and have the communal spaces working in the way they have to given the nature of the Indian village society as it was then. But it's quite another thing to say ok now I've somehow got to make a present of that material to those 600 people, so that they will become activated to do it.
And of course by the way I haven't said but the thing that was at stake was not simply reproduce a traditional Indian village, because of course they didn't need me for that. I mean, they could have done that without, certainly without, me.
The point was that there were transitions in Indian village society that were coming, and that one could start to feel, and so the question was well what was the village now, and how was it emerging, and that was really the hope, of the people who had asked me, was that I would come and build such a place. So it involved in effect saying to people of a village, this is how your life is going, this is the nature of things, but somehow I've got to show this to you, or discuss it with you, so that it becomes part of you, so you will then pull out all the stops, and actually 600 people will do this and make this living thing. And that's what I didn't know how to do.That was why I refused the job. Because I did not know how to do that part.
And then I started realizing that somehow, even though these somewhat pattern-like things that I had already discovered, were more rule-like needed ... that in traditional societies people weren't thinking about this stuff all the time, they were just doing stuff. And so therefore it was clear that it was already sort of available in some very simple form, everyday form.
And that people were just kind of doing stuff like daily. And then I began thinking about well how can that be possible? And that was really the birth of the pattern language.
In the years following that, I went into that very heavily. And it was after about, it's after working on what now is published today as A Pattern Language which altogether took, I forget, maybe 10 or 15 years ... 10 really.
But anyway, so were were sort of about mid-stream on that thing, when I was asked to come and do the plan here. So that was already ... all of that was clear, as a way of thinking about the world.
So that the particular things that came into play here at the University of Oregon, one was simply well ok fine what specifics about a pattern language would be helpful and relevant to the creation of this campus. And secondly: what would the specific ways be of getting hundreds or thousands of people involved in this process ... here.