Rethinking Lifestyle

This article builds on one titled “Designing Steinbach” published in a November post where we introduced Christopher Alexander’s “Pattern language” on building design.

A garden is the place for lying in the grass, swinging, croquet, growing flowers, throwing a ball for the dog. But there is another way of being outdoors: and its needs are not met by the garden at all.

For some moods, some times of day, some kinds of friendship, people need a place to eat, to sit, to drink, to talk together, to be still, and yet outdoors. They need an outdoor room – a partly enclosed space, outdoors, but enough like a room so that people behave there as they do in rooms, but with the added beauties of the sun, and wind, and smells, and rustling leaves, and crickets. This need occurs everywhere. It is hardly too much to say that every building needs an outdoor room attached to it, between it and the garden; and more, that many of the special places in a garden – sunny places, terraces, gazebos – need to be made as outdoor rooms as well.

The inspiration for this pattern comes from Bernhard Rudofsky’s ‘The Conditioned Outdoor Room’ in Behind the Picture Window (New York: Oxford Press, 1955). “In a superbly layed out house-garden, one ought to be able to work and sleep, cook and eat, play and loaf. Domestic gardens as we have known them through the centuries were valued mostly for their habitableness and privacy, two qualities that are conspicuously absent in contemporary gardens.

These gardens were an essential part of a house; they were, mind you, contained within the house. One can best describe them as rooms without ceilings. They were true outdoor living rooms, and invariably regarded as such by their inhabitants. The wall-and-floor materials of Roman gardens, for example, were no less lavish than those used in the interior part of the house. The combined use of stone mosaic, marble slabs, stucco reliefs, mural decorations from the simplest geometric patterns to the most elaborate murals established a mood particularly favourable to spiritual composure. As for the ceiling, there was always the sky in its hundred moods.”

An outdoor space becomes a special outdoor room when it is well enclosed with walls of the building, walls of foliage, columns, trellis, and sky; and when the outdoor room, together with an indoor space, forms a virtually continuous living area.

THEREFORE: Build a place outdoors which has so much enclosure round it, that it takes on the feeling of a room, even though it is open to the sky. To do this, define it at the corners with columns, perhaps roof it partially with a trellis or a sliding canvas roof, and create “walls” around it, with fences, sitting walls, screens, hedges, or the exterior walls of the building itself.

This pattern is reprinted with permission from Christopher Alexander and the Center for Environmental Structure. It has been abridged for this article. You can read his latest thoughts on design in “The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A struggle between two world systems”, published by Oxford University Press in 2012.