Rethinking Lifestyle

Isolated buildings are symptoms of a disconnected sick society. This pattern is reprinted with permission from Christopher Alexander and the Center for Environmental Structure. It has been abridged for this article.

Even in medium and high density areas where buildings are very close to each other and where there are strong reasons to connect them in a single fabric, people still insist on building isolated structures, with little bits of useless space around them. Isolated, free-standing buildings are so common, that we have learned to take them for granted, without realizing that all the psycho-social disintegration of society is embodied in the fact of their existence.

It is easiest to understand this at the emotional level. The house, in dreams, most often means the self or person of the dreamer. A town of disconnected buildings, in a dream, would be a picture of society, made up of disconnected, isolated, selves. And the real towns which have this form, like dreams, embody just this meaning: they perpetuate the arrogant assumption that people stand alone and exist independently of one another.

When buildings are isolated and free standing, the people who live in them, have no need to interact with one another at all. By contrast, in a town where buildings lean against each other physically, the sheer fact of their adjacency forces people to solve the myriad of little problems which occur between neighbours, to adapt to other people’s foibles, and to learn how to adapt to the realities outside them.

Not only is it true that connected buildings have these healthy consequences and that isolated buildings have unhealthy ones. It seems very likely that isolated buildings have become so popular, so automatic, so taken for granted in our time, because people seek refuge from the need to confront their neighbours, refuge from the need to work out common problems. In this sense, the isolated buildings are not only symptoms of withdrawal, but they also perpetuate and nurture the sickness.

If this is so, it is literally not too much to say that in those parts of town where densities are relatively high, isolated buildings, and the laws which create and enforce them, are undermining the fabric of society as forcible and as persistently as any other social evil of our time.

In ancient Rome even churches were never erected as free-standing structures, rather they had at least one wall attached to another building. Almost the same is true, in fact, for the whole of Italy. As is becoming clear, our modern attitude runs precisely contrary to this well-integrated and obviously thought-out procedure. We do not seem to think it possible that a new church can be located anywhere except in the middle of its building lot, so that there is space all around it. But this placement offers only disadvantages and not a single advantage. It is the least favourable for building, since its effect is not concentrate anywhere but is scattered all about it. Such an exposed building will always appear like a cake on a serving-platter. To start with, any life-like organic integration with the site is ruled out…

THEREFORE: Connect your building up, wherever possible, to the existing buildings round about. Do not keep set backs between buildings; instead, try to form new buildings as continuations of the older buildings.