Programming the Future Community: Automation, Algorithm, and Mind in the Early Work of Christopher Alexander

This paper offers a critical revision of histories of architecture and digital automation through a close analysis of the early work of the urbanist Christopher Alexander. In the 1964 text Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Alexander upheld the potential of an algorithmic design process to address the failures of urban planning in the early postwar era. Computational models provided the basis for a critique of the cognitive and perceptual limitations of a human designer, which were to be supplemented by the ostensibly superior problem-solving capacities of early digital technology. Within a few years, however, Alexander had grown disillusioned with computer-aided design, arguing that a quantitative design process failed to address the psychological and social dimensions of urban experience. However, his encounter with the linguistic theory of Noam Chomsky soon inspired a new direction for his research: a productive misinterpretation of the Chomskyian theory of deep structures allowed him to argue that the qualitative dimensions of architecture already possessed an algorithmic regularity. If the city could not be programmed, in other words, human-environment interactions in the city already possessed a programmacity whose elucidation could address crucial lacunae in existing systems model of society, government, and behavior. I address Alexander’s liaisons with mental health organizations in the late 1960s and early 1970s to demonstrate how architecture supplemented projects of social normalization in the human sciences during an era in which algorithmic models of mind and behavior remained openly speculative.