A Diagram's Work

The Vancouver House by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), a diagrammatic form rendered at full scale and in real life (my photo).

I participated in a review of student work this past Wednesday at the University of Oregon, one of several summer studio reviews I've sat in on this year. A faculty member and I reviewed a pair of projects—an admittedly small sample—that between them captured two versions of the same issue. One student's presentation had no site analysis or parti diagrams of any kind. The other's did, but they read as an afterthought, drawings that explained the finished design rather than ones that had helped generate it. I've noticed the same in previous reviews; even when an instructor explicitly requires process diagrams, what is pinned up still looks reverse-engineered. The problem lies in the diagrams' provenance—a reality that holds true whether they are the work of students or some of today's most celebrated firms.

Stan Allen, the architect, theorist, and former dean of Princeton's architecture program, drew a useful distinction in a 1998 essay: a diagram's job isn't to depict a building. It's to work out relationships—between program and form, between one space and another—before the building exists to depict. As Allen puts it, diagrams are "architecture's best means to engage the complexity of the real." Much of what gets called a diagram does the opposite: it reverse-engineers a graphic summary after a decision has been made, rather than helping to discover it. A generative diagram precedes the decision. It doesn't explain the building afterward; it's part of the process by which the architect finds the building's basic idea in the first place.

There's a simple test for telling the difference. Point to a particular move in the finished design and ask the student to trace it back to the diagram. Not necessarily to an identical mark, but to something in the diagram that participated in the sequence of decisions that produced it. If they can do that, the diagram probably played a generative role. If they instead begin explaining the diagram in terms of the finished building, the odds are good that the diagram came later. A generative diagram doesn't have to predict the finished design, only to have been capable of changing its direction.

Early design diagram for the VA Roseburg Protective Care Unit. The courtyard organization survived; the entry gesture did not.

The old sketch above passes this test, with qualifications. I drew it during my earliest analyses for the design of the VA Roseburg Protective Care Unit, as I attempted to match site, program, and intent. (I covered this project's design process in my "A Case Study" series of posts.) It's clearly rough: hatched masses standing in for building volumes, a loose unhatched void at the center indicating a courtyard, and an arrow driving in from outside the frame toward one corner.

The courtyard organization held. It became the wrapped, mirrored heart of the finished design, anchored by a huge mimosa tree that I likened to the proverbial Tree of Life. The arrow, on the other hand, didn't hold. It was a stand-in for a real, unresolved question: how to control entry into the secure courtyard. What ultimately emerged wasn't a refinement of the arrow's gesture. It became an entry pavilion, akin to the Propylaea at the Acropolis.

Site plan for the VA Roseburg Protective Care Unit.

That's the important distinction. The diagram didn't predict the building. It put a problem into play while the design was still unsettled enough for the problem to matter. One part of the sketch survived almost intact; another led somewhere I hadn't anticipated. Both were useful because they helped determine what came next.

This tension between diagrammatic exploration and graphic presentation persists in contemporary practice. Bjarke Ingels has described how his firm, BIG, uses diagrams to track the reasoning behind design decisions, a practice he developed in part while working under Rem Koolhaas at OMA. MVRDV's Farmax, published around the same period as Allen's essay, made particularly explicit use of diagrams as instruments of form-finding.  

BIG's series of conceptual diagrams for their Vancouver House project (source: htttps://big.dk/projects/vancouver-house-missing-pictures-7130)  

Yet, there remains a persistent ambiguity in architectural representation: a diagram can document a process, or it can be made to look as though a process existed. Critics have sometimes read BIG's diagrams less as records of discovery than as clever post-rationalization of forms arrived at by other means. The distinction matters because a diagram can be perfectly convincing as a graphic artifact while having had no meaningful role in producing the design.

AI makes that distinction more consequential. Current tools can generate massing alternatives, test code and zoning conditions, manipulate models, and produce images that would once have required considerable effort. Those capabilities may become useful parts of conceptual design. The more immediate problem is simpler: AI can also produce polished, diagram-shaped images on demand. It becomes all too easy to manufacture the appearance of a rigorous design process after the fact.

The issue isn't whether an AI-generated diagram is legitimate because a person didn't draw it by hand. A computer-generated diagram can be every bit as generative as a pencil sketch if it helps identify a consequential relationship, tests an idea, or changes the direction of the design. What matters is what the diagram does in the sequence of thought. A diagram that merely gives graphic form to a conclusion reached some other way is still an afterthought, regardless of who, or what, made it.

Generative diagram by MVRDV for The Modernist, a mixed-use project in Rotterdam (image source: https://www.mvrdv.com/projects/308/the-modernist)  

This is also why a diagram's graphic appearance can be misleading. Arrows, bubbles, hatching, color coding, and other conventions can make a drawing look diagrammatic without telling us anything about its role in the design process. Resembling a diagram isn't the same as having done a diagram's work.

The student who left diagrams out of the presentation wasn't hiding anything, and the one whose diagrams read as afterthoughts wasn't trying to pass off invented process as real. Both, I suspect, simply hadn't yet learned the purpose of diagramming during the early phase of project conceptualization. That's a lesson AI tools may make easier to skip, in a studio or in a firm, because they can cleanly simulate the appearance of analysis without requiring the heavy cognitive lift of the analysis itself.

The afterthought diagram is the more instructive case because it looks like it's doing a job it isn't. Whatever insight it might have delivered—what relationship was worth testing, which constraint should organize the plan—was available only while the design was still unsettled enough to need testing. It can still look flawless on a presentation board, but what it ultimately lacks is a place in the sequence where it still had the power to change the outcome.

Encounters with Architecture - Insights from a Hundred Places

 

I know Howard Davis, and I don't know him, which is a strange thing to admit about someone I first encountered (the word feels apt given what this review is about) as one of a handful of Alexander acolytes on the University of Oregon faculty in the early 1980s. I knew him the way a student knows any respected professor he never quite got to know personally. What I didn't know, until purchasing Encounters with Architecture: Insights from a Hundred Places, was much of anything about the life that produced it: where Howard grew up, what he studied before architecture, how he came to spend a career moving between Berkeley, Austin, Eugene, and fifty countries beyond. So, this review comes from an odd vantage. I have real stakes in getting it right, but I'm still learning, chapter by chapter, more about who Howard is than I knew before.

I began by reading the book straight through, chronologically, the way Howard organized it. I've since abandoned that discipline in favor of jumping around, reading episodically, chasing whichever chapter title catches my eye. This is partly because I wanted to post this review sooner rather than later. The book rewards this kind of reading almost as well as the linear kind. I am not finished. I don't think that disqualifies me from recommending it, and I'll explain why.

Howard organized Encounters with Architecture as a hundred short essays, two or three pages apiece, each built around a specific place that lodged itself in his memory over a career spanning early training in physics, years at Christopher Alexander's Center for Environmental Structure, decades of teaching at Berkeley, Texas, and Oregon, and fieldwork on six continents. The book runs chronologically in seven parts of uneven length, from a childhood memory of four shops on St. Johns Place in Brooklyn to encounters as recent as 2024. Early on, reading straight through, I started to suspect the book isn't really a hundred essays about architecture. It reads more like a memoir organized around a hundred places, each entry depending on the ones that came before it, even when Howard never says so outright.

I enjoy Howard's writing style, which is not academic, despite a career spent producing the journal articles and conference papers that might have trained the habit into him. I don't find a trace of that vocabulary here. The prose is plain and direct but still evocative, and it avoids the jargon so much architectural writing reaches for when it wants to sound serious. I suspect the book's own structure has something to do with this, since two or three pages per encounter leaves little room for throat-clearing, and Howard has to arrive at what mattered about a place quickly. Whatever the reason, the result is a book I can pick up for ten minutes or an hour, in whatever order suits me that day, and come away from either with something worth keeping.

Take the chapter on the Inner Shrine at Ise, in Japan, which is the best one I've read so far. Howard describes the whole approach on a day of drizzle: the long train ride down from Kyoto, the stands of cypress and cedar, the bridges, the stairs, the succession of gateways that keep the innermost shrine perpetually out of reach. He counts it among the two or three most powerful encounters in the book, and the chapter earns that claim through sheer particularity: a specific day, a specific stretch of weather, a route walked in a specific order, rather than anything Howard tells the reader to think about it. That particularity is, I suspect, the book's real method when the method is working; Howard doesn't explain a place so much as walk you through arriving at it. 

A chapter on a neighborhood in Cairo, by contrast, is the weakest one I've come across so far. The neighborhood itself barely appears in any specificity. Howard writes instead about a more general feeling for the city, which he extends outward to "all great cities" rather than keeping it tied to the specific streets he set out to describe. It's the one entry I've read so far where the book turns abstract.

One small thing worth noting, more as an aside than an argument: Howard gives each chapter a subtitle that distills its lesson into a phrase, "The sacred over the profane," "Sheltering daily life," and so on. It reminded me of the pattern-naming he must have done firsthand during his years working alongside Alexander.

I warmly recommend this book, partly because of Howard's like-mindedness with concerns I've long circled: place, memory, what a life's worth of attention leaves behind. And partly because of where I am in my own life right now: retired, with the leisure to read a book like this the way it deserves to be read, and enough architecture behind me of my own to recognize someone who views architecture as I do. I'm not sure this is a book for everyone. If pressed to pass it on to only one actual person I know, it wouldn't be an architect. It'd be a young twenty-something friend of mine, a philosophy graduate, who asks better questions about buildings than most people who get paid to design them. That says less about who's likely to buy the book than about the kind of mind it rewards, which is one with a disposition toward noticing.

Architecture is Awesome: #43 Market Halls and the Bustle of Commerce

Reading Terminal Market (all photos by me unless noted otherwise).

This is another in my series of posts inspired by 1000 Awesome Things, the Webby Award-winning blog written by Neil Pasricha. The series is my meditation on the awesome reasons why I was and continue to be attracted to the art of architecture. 

Step through the threshold of a great market hall and the city changes register. Outside, traffic and sidewalks. Inside, a hundred small, competing voices: fishmongers and flower sellers, the clatter of crates, the smell of bread and brine mixing in the air. It should feel like chaos. Most of the time, it doesn't. Something is holding it together, and that something is architecture — a spatial discipline that turns bustle into legibility. 

Market halls earn a place in this series because they are one of the few building types where architecture, commerce, and community refuse to separate from one another. The building doesn't just shelter the market. It disciplines it, gathering a chaotic diversity of independent vendors into a single legible place. That discipline is precisely what allows the market to function as something more than a shopping trip: an authentic community hub, rooted in a specific city, offering an alternative to the placeless sameness of standard retail. 

Reading Terminal Market (photo by ajay_suresh, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Philadelphia's Reading Terminal Market is a useful place to start, though its architecture works a little differently than a postcard image might suggest. The soaring arched train shed above — now the Pennsylvania Convention Center's Grand Hall and Ballroom — belonged to the Reading Railroad's locomotives and tracks, not to the market. Since 1893, the market has occupied the ground floor and basement instead, the practical undercroft beneath the elevated train deck. Its columns and low ceiling weren't designed with retail in mind at all; they were sized to carry the load of a railroad overhead. But that engineering, not any deliberate design intent, is what produces the spatial legibility the market needed. The discipline arrived by accident. 

And yet that undercroft still does the same disciplining work. Its grid of columns and low, even ceiling height impose a legible order on 78,000 square feet and more than 80 independent merchants: Amish dairy stands, a century-old ice cream counter, butchers next to booksellers, none of them told what to sell or how to dress their stall. Walk the market's wide central corridors, and you can't see every vendor at once, but you can always see the shape of the whole. That's the market hall's architecture at work. It doesn't standardize the vendors; it standardizes the container. Each stall stays idiosyncratic, with hand-lettered signs, mismatched displays, a hundred small acts of local enterprise, while the columns and aisles impose just enough order that the whole reads as one place rather than a hundred unrelated ones. Take away that discipline, and you have a flea market. Add it back, and you have an institution. 

Granville Island Public Market.

Vancouver's Granville Island Public Market makes the same argument from a different angle. Where Reading Terminal encloses, Granville Island opens. It's a low-slung, industrial-vernacular market hall built from the bones of a 1917 industrial site, its corrugated siding and exposed structure left frankly utilitarian. The architecture here isn't a grand civic gesture. It's deferential to its setting: a working waterfront wedged between the bridge and False Creek.

That deference is the point. Granville Island's power comes less from its structure than from where the structure sits: deep in the urban and geographic fabric of Vancouver, reachable from downtown by a five-minute ferry hop across the creek, framed by the bridge, the boat repair yards, and the artists' studios that share the island. The market doesn't just serve the city; it is legible as Vancouver in a way a generic pavilion, dropped anywhere, could never be. Urban embeddedness is its own kind of architectural discipline. Siting, scale, and context do the work here that the grid of columns does at Reading Terminal. 

Lonsdale Quay Market.

North Vancouver's Lonsdale Quay Market and Montreal's Jean Talon Market each add their own variation on the same theme. Lonsdale Quay pairs a working SeaBus terminal with a market hall, so commuting and shopping share the same waterfront threshold. It's architecture again holding two functions, and two publics, in one frame. Worth noting: Lonsdale Quay doesn't dress itself up as something older than it is. Built in the mid-1980s on a former waterfront industrial brownfield alongside the SeaBus terminal, its architecture is frankly of its own era rather than a costume borrowed from history. Authenticity here isn't a matter of age. It's a matter of the building being honest about what it is and when it was made. 

Jean Talon Market

Jean Talon, sheltered under roofs but open at the sides to the street, shows that the discipline doesn't require full enclosure. A strong roofline and a well-defined edge are enough, even without walls. Closer to home, Eugene's own Saturday Market pushes that idea further still. There's no building at all, just temporary tents and a plaza, and yet it's as central to the city's sense of itself as any market hall is to Philadelphia or Vancouver. Placeness doesn't always require a building. 

What these marketplaces have in common is what that architectural discipline, in whatever form it takes, makes possible: independent makers instead of chain retail, experiential encounters instead of transactions, a place that reflects the specific culture and economy of its region rather than a franchise formula that could be dropped into any city in North America. These are festival marketplaces in the original sense. Commerce, entertainment, and local identity fuse into a single building type, revitalizing the urban districts around them and giving regional producers a stage they couldn't build alone. 

I'd stop short of calling the market hall a rare building type, though. If anything, its very success is its risk. The "festival marketplace" formula — reclaimed industrial shed, curated local vendors, artisanal signage — has proliferated widely enough that it now has its own imitators: market halls built from scratch to look authentic rather than grown from an actual place and its actual history. The architecture can be copied. The roof, the columns, the exposed brick are all reproducible. Harder to fake is the accumulated specificity: decades of a particular city's vendors, habits, and produce settling into a particular building until the two are inseparable. A market hall built yesterday to resemble Reading Terminal is not Reading Terminal, no matter how faithfully it borrows the silhouette. 

The good ones, the real ones, still earn the label. A market hall that holds a hundred small, competing acts of local enterprise together under one disciplined roof, in a place specific enough that it couldn't be anywhere else, is architecture doing something no other building type quite manages: making commerce feel like community. That's AWESOME.

Next Architecture is Awesome: #44 The Architecture of Waiting

Visiting the Willamette Valley Oregon Temple

Willamette Valley Oregon Temple (all photos by me unless noted otherwise).

My wife and I toured the new LDS Willamette Valley Oregon Temple in Springfield during its public open house. The Church holds these open houses for several weeks before dedicating each new temple, giving non‑members a rare opportunity to see inside a building otherwise closed to the public. Our guides asked us not to take photos inside; a gallery of interior shots is available on the temple’s website. 

The building’s materiality stood out first. It achieves an unusually high level of finish, with a richness of material and detailing more typical of ceremonial or high‑end private architecture than the institutional work we are accustomed to seeing around here. The stone detailing is crisp, the drywall and paint finishes are flawless, the millwork is fine, the carpets are plush, and the lighting is carefully controlled. 

Much of this work was imported. Exterior stone came from Spain, interior stone from Italy and Brazil, lighting from European manufacturers, and millwork and decorative painting largely from Utah. Only a small number of Oregon trades appear in the project credits. The building expresses “Oregon” mainly through river‑toned art glass and specially commissioned paintings; other motifs, like the mountain laurel and rectangular geometric patterns, are decorative rather than regional. 

Google Earth aerial view of the site prior to completion.

The landscaping follows a similar logic. It is formal and highly controlled, extending the building’s axial symmetry into the grounds. The approach feels more ornamental than ecological and makes limited reference to Willamette Valley native plant communities or climate. 

Inside, the rooms are bright and uniformly finished. Light‑colored stone, pale carpets, and reflective surfaces create an even quality with little contrast and few shadows. The building is new, but I still found its immaculate condition striking. That perfection shaped our behavior. We instinctively moved through the rooms in attentive silence. 

All the principal spaces sit on a single level: two instruction rooms, two sealing rooms, and the baptistry. This simple arrangement creates a clear and straightforward progression through the building. 

Corner and frieze detail above the main entry.

These choices align with the temple typology of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‑day Saints. Members do not use temples for weekly worship; that takes place in more modest local meetinghouses. The Church reserves temples for specific ordinances, such as endowment sand sealings, and therefore invests heavily in materials and craftsmanship. The intent is to create spaces that feel sacred and enduring. 

The temple omits the cross, which is consistent across LDS buildings. This reflects an emphasis on the living, resurrected Christ rather than the crucifixion. Recent designs have also moved away from placing a statue of the angel Moroni on the spire. This medium-sized temple follows that restrained approach. 

Stylistically, the building draws from the familiar LDS temple vocabulary of stripped neo‑classicism, Deco influences, and globally sourced elements. It features symmetrical massing, a central spire, rectilinear stone surfaces, and restrained geometric patterning. Unlike most Christian church architecture, which is oriented toward congregational gathering and liturgical space, this type is organized around ritual sequence and controlled progression. The result feels specific in function but only loosely tied to place beyond its decorative references. 

Public documentation does not name the building’s architect. Like most recent temples, the Church’s in-house architecture and engineering division designed it. The project credits list many contractors, fabricators, and suppliers, but no external architectural firm. This reinforces the sense of a standardized typology rather than a locally authored design. 

The decision to build the temple in Springfield is practical. Local members previously traveled significant distances to the temples in Portland and Medford. In recent years, the Church has constructed smaller, more numerous temples to reduce travel times. In this sense, the Springfield temple functions as regional infrastructure as much as it does a religious landmark. 

I still do not fully understand the symbolic program of LDS temples, but the open house made the building legible as a highly codified type. What I took from our visit was the contrast between an impeccably finished, universalized, and globally sourced ritual space and its placement in a specific, local landscape.

 

Concrete and Light: The Salk Institute for Biological Studies

Salk Institute courtyard, a "roofless cathedral" (all photos by me).

Jonas Salk founded the institute that bears his name in the early 1960s, after the success of his polio vaccine. He wanted a place where scientists could work with a sense of openness and purpose, and he asked architect Louis Kahn to design it. With input from Mexican architect Luis Barragán, Kahn produced what has become one of the most studied research campuses in the world. Even people unfamiliar with Kahn’s work have likely seen photographs of its courtyard: two symmetrical laboratory wings framing a travertine plaza, a thin runnel of water leading the eye toward the Pacific. The site itself—set high above the ocean in La Jolla—is spectacular, and Salk’s choice of it was as consequential as the architecture that followed.

I visited the Salk Institute last Friday while I was in San Diego. I’ve seen enough photographs and drawings over the years that I knew what to expect. Stepping into the courtyard felt like returning to a place I’d visited before. Nothing came as a surprise. The best way to describe the experience is one of recognition.

That familiarity didn’t diminish the visit. If anything, it underscored what I’ve always found compelling about the Salk: its sense of inevitability. The design feels so resolved that alternative outcomes are hard to imagine. I don’t mean that only Kahn could have achieved this. Another architect with a similar sensitivity to site (Arthur Erickson comes to mind) might have produced an equally strong result. But the built Salk has a clarity that reads as predestined. The alignment of program, setting, and light seems almost too exact to have happened any other way.

As I crossed the courtyard’s eastern threshold, I noticed how closely the place aligned with everything I had long understood about it. La Jolla’s bright sky did most of the work. The travertine glowed. The concrete carried its usual gravity. What struck me most was the calm that settled in once I stopped moving. For me, that calm is what “rightness” feels like: clarity, order, and confirmation that a building is precisely as it should be. Kahn’s work has always appealed to me for that reason. His pursuit of order in a world governed by entropy has long aligned with my own architectural temperament.

Our tour guide, Bob, pointed out a few details that reinforced this impression. The upper-level studies, for example, have taller ceilings and windows than the floors below. It’s a subtle correction for the way perspective compresses a façade when viewed from the courtyard. The variation in the spacing of the concrete panel joints is another subtle adjustment, giving the façade a proportional order that feels structural without explicitly expressing it. These aren’t dramatic moves. They’re the kinds of decisions that reward careful looking.

Some readers will look at the photos and see only exposed concrete and assume “brutalism” in the pejorative sense. But the Salk’s concrete isn’t cold. In that climate, under that sun, it reads as radiant and monumental. The texture and mass of the concrete play against the warmth of the teak infill panels in a way that feels deliberate and balanced. It’s a reminder that materials behave differently depending on where and how they’re used. In the Pacific Northwest, exposed concrete tends to stain, spall, and collect algae unless meticulously maintained. In La Jolla, it stays clean and sharp-edged. Context matters.

Not everything about the visit was ideal. The entry sequence through the 1992 East Building addition felt a bit flat, especially knowing that Kahn had originally intended visitors to approach through a dense eucalyptus grove—a transition from the “unmeasured world” of nature to the “measured world” of science. The grove was removed decades ago after disease spread through the trees, but I do wonder how different the emotional register of the approach might have been. I was also disappointed, though not surprised, that we weren’t allowed inside the laboratories. And I couldn’t help thinking about the unbuilt Meeting House and residences, which, if constructed, would have realized Kahn’s complete vision for the campus. These were footnotes, not failures.

The building felt inhabited, peripherally. Researchers and staff moved along the edges of the courtyard, but they were essentially background figures. The Salk is a workplace, yet it reads more like a monument that happens to contain work. It also resembles a secular monastery: a place set apart for concentrated study, shaped by a belief in the pursuit of truth. That may be the building’s deeper meaning, and perhaps its most enduring one.

Leaving the courtyard, I found myself thinking less about my visit and more about the building’s long arc. The Salk has entered that small category of works that no longer belong to their moment. It has passed into the realm of reference—a building architects return to not for novelty, but for orientation. Its reputation isn’t the result of myth or nostalgia; it’s the result of sustained performance over time. Concrete, light, and proportion held in lasting balance. Few buildings earn that. The Salk has.

Can AI Recognize Living Structure?

Sitting area in the Parents' Realm of the Sala House - Christopher Alexander, Architect (photo by Ekyono; file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license).
 

For years I’ve wondered what role AI might play in architectural design—not in the routine domains of optimization, code compliance, or energy modeling, but in the harder question of how buildings acquire coherence, depth, and human resonance. Much of the current discourse avoids that question. It gravitates toward what is measurable and leaves the deeper structure of design unexamined.
 
That deeper question repeatedly leads me back to Christopher Alexander’s work and, more recently, to Nikos Salingaros’s explorations of whether large language models can detect “living geometry” in buildings.
 
Alexander identified fifteen fundamental properties that tend to co‑occur in environments we experience as alive. These appear in nature, in traditional buildings, and in the artifacts people cherish. They are not stylistic devices but a system of interdependent relationships:
 

• Levels of scale

• Strong centers

• Thick boundaries

• Alternating repetition

• Positive space

• Good shape

• Local symmetries

• Deep interlock and ambiguity

• Contrast

• Gradients

• Roughness

• Echoes

• The void

• Simplicity and inner calm

• Not‑separateness

When these properties reinforce one another, the result feels coherent and grounded. Salingaros links them to human neurophysiology, arguing that our perceptual systems evolved to favor nested scales and relational order.
 
With this in mind, I tested an online tool called the 15 Fundamental Properties of Wholeness Analyzer by Danny Raede. It is an admirable initiative: open‑source, accessible, and one of the few attempts to operationalize Alexander’s ideas. But it arrives without documentation on training data, methodology, or weighting. Experimenting with it suggests a modest image classifier that can detect visual signatures such as symmetry, repetition, and contrast, but struggles with the relational, multiscalar depth Alexander’s framework demands. A model can recognize what local symmetry looks like; it cannot easily evaluate how that symmetry strengthens centers across scales or contributes to overall wholeness. These limits reflect the state of current vision models more than the ambition of the tool.
 

Portion of an analysis of the Sala House image, by Danny Raede's 15 Fundamental Properties of Wholeness Analyzer.

A deeper constraint applies to any image‑only system: a single photograph is never a building. It freezes one viewpoint, one moment, one lighting condition. Many of Alexander’s properties are inherently experiential. Thick boundaries reveal themselves in section. Gradients unfold in movement. Not‑separateness depends on context beyond the frame. Positive space requires reading the shape of the outdoor room. Judging wholeness from one static image is necessarily partial.

After using Raede’s tool, I wanted a more relational reading. I turned to a large language model (Microsoft Copilot) and prompted it to analyze the same images through the lens of the fifteen properties: “Consider relationships across scales, massing, thresholds, centers, voids, interlock, context, and overall coherence.”

The difference was immediate. The model produced something closer to the kind of relational analysis an architect might offer. It could do this because it was not limited to pixel‑level cues. It could integrate the image, the conceptual structure of the fifteen properties, and the contextual hints in the prompt. This does not overcome the limits of a single photograph, but it allows the model to make sense of the available information in a more integrated way than a vision‑only classifier can. 

Design for a renovation and expansion of the McMinnville Public Library (1982). The original Carnegie library is on the left; the proposed addition is on the right, which opens toward McMinnville City Park.

To illustrate, here is its analysis of my 1982 project for an addition to the Carnegie Library in McMinnville (completed during my time as a student in the University of Oregon’s architecture program), based on my design drawings and the photograph of the physical model I built, seen above:
 
"The project exhibits a remarkably coherent alignment with Alexander’s fifteen properties. Its organization unfolds through clear levels of scale—from the civic park and axial approach to the outdoor room, lobby, reading rooms, and smaller alcoves—each nested within the next. The original Carnegie library and the new addition form strong centers, stabilized by the cloister‑like outdoor room and the layered thresholds that create thick boundaries between inside and out. Exterior spaces are shaped as positive space rather than residual voids, and the interlock between old and new is handled with care: axes align, proportions echo, and the addition adapts to its context with an intentional roughness that reflects the site’s particularities. Gradients of enclosure and light develop through the sequence of plaza → cloister → lobby → reading rooms, while the repetition of structural bays, window groupings, and spatial rhythms creates subtle echoes across scales. The underlying parti—House of Reading and House of Books—gives the building a simplicity and inner calm, and the reciprocal relationship between the volumes expresses a genuine not‑separateness. The coherence of the whole arises not from stylistic gestures but from a relational structure that resonates strongly with Alexander’s fifteen properties."

A vision‑only classifier cannot produce this kind of relational reading.

These experiments raise a larger question: could any future tool reliably detect living structure? Even with far more capable models, the answer is probably no. Wholeness is emergent. It arises from iterative negotiation among site, program, structure, light, materials, craft, and human inhabitation. These relationships unfold across scales and through time. Many require embodied, situated judgment. AI may one day illuminate hidden patterns or diagnose coherence more reliably, but the deeper life of a building is unlikely to spring from software alone. Design remains a recursive field grounded in construction’s realities.

Even so, the potential is real. If future systems combine multiscale visual reasoning, spatial‑relationship understanding, datasets annotated for the fifteen properties, and insights from environmental psychology and cognitive science, AI could become a useful diagnostic partner. It might help architects see strengths, weaknesses, and missed opportunities. Whether Alexander’s properties remain the definitive rubric is debatable. They endure because they describe persistent, cross‑cultural patterns rooted in human perception. But they demand a relational intelligence that challenges even skilled humans to articulate fully. Any meaningful AI engagement with them will require moving beyond feature detection toward something closer to architectural judgment.

My own exploration echoes themes in Salingaros’s work on living geometry’s measurable effects on cognition and wellbeing. The takeaway is modest but clear: relational coherence in buildings is not an aesthetic preference; it has consequences for how people perceive and inhabit space. For now, AI’s most immediate value lies in conversation, as a tool that helps us see our work more sharply, test assumptions, and notice relationships we might otherwise overlook. In my experiments, it has already done that. If future systems can extend this capacity without losing sight of the relational nature of design, they may become useful partners in the ongoing effort to create environments that are coherent, grounded, and humane.

Dwelling Before Design

It is not uncommon for ideas encountered early in life to lie dormant for years before revealing how deeply they have shaped one’s thinking.

My introduction to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger came during my undergraduate years at the University of Oregon, when I enrolled in a course on existentialism. The decision was not entirely philosophical. My then‑girlfriend (now my wife) was also taking the class, and spending a few additional hours each week contemplating the nature of existence seemed like a reasonable trade-off.

That course introduced us to thinkers such as Jean‑Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Heidegger. At the same time, I was studying architecture under professors such as Bill Kleinsasser, whose emphasis on the experiential qualities of buildings resonated closely with what I was encountering in existential philosophy. The overlap between phenomenology, existentialism, and Bill’s approach to architecture left an early impression that would shape my thinking about architecture. It also planted an early awareness of the importance of continuity and the character of existing places.

Phenomenology, as I came to understand it, is less a theory than a discipline of attention. It asks us to consider how places are lived; for example, how light, material, proportion, and sequence shape our experience of being in the world. It is concerned with the felt qualities of environments: the way a room settles us, the way a path reveals or withholds, the way a building participates in the life around it. This emphasis on lived experience provided a conceptual bridge between the philosophy I was studying and the architectural education I was receiving.

Heidegger’s essay Building, Dwelling, Thinking expresses this connection memorably. He suggests that the relationship between building and dwelling is commonly misunderstood. We tend to assume that people construct buildings and then inhabit them. Heidegger proposes the reverse: human beings are dwellers first. Building arises from the human need to dwell in the world.

We do not dwell because we build. We build because we dwell.

For architects, that inversion carries profound implications. If the purpose of building is to support dwelling, then architecture cannot be understood merely as the production of objects. Buildings must instead be seen as places that sustain and enrich human life. In this sense, dwelling is the fit between people, place, and time.

Those early lessons did not announce themselves loudly in my day-to-day work, but over the years, I found that they quietly informed how I assessed projects, made design decisions, and responded to the character of places. The projects that seemed most successful were not necessarily the most visually striking. Nor were they the most technically ambitious. Rather, they were the ones that felt deeply rooted in their surroundings, places where the relationship between building, landscape, and human activity seemed natural and unforced.

Some architects have shown an especially strong instinct for this deeper purpose. What unites their work is not a recognizable style but a sensitivity to how buildings mediate our experience of place. Frank Lloyd Wright’s best projects grow out of their landscapes. Charles W. Moore—whom I had the good fortune to work alongside in the mid‑1980s—brought an extraordinary attentiveness to memory, ritual, and delight. He created places that were both deeply personal and deeply inhabitable. Even in its playfulness, his work was grounded in a phenomenological understanding of how people live in and move through space. Each, in a different way, begins with dwelling.

This emphasis on place is echoed in the writings of Christian Norberg-Schulz, who drew upon Heidegger’s phenomenology to articulate architecture as the creation of meaningful environments. He reminds us that architecture is not simply the assembly of materials, but the cultivation of places in which human life can unfold with coherence and significance.

My own professional path unfolded on a far more modest scale. Most architects spend their careers designing buildings that never appear in architectural surveys or glossy monographs. Yet the same fundamental question remains: does a building support the life that will occur within it? Does it contribute something meaningful to the place where it stands?

These questions gradually led me to appreciate the value of continuity in the built environment. Early in my career, I shared the profession’s typical enthusiasm for new construction. Over time, however, I found that communities responded most strongly to projects that preserved familiar patterns of use and memory, even when the changes were modest. These might take the form of better natural light in a longstanding community hall, improved accessibility in an aging civic building, or refreshed materials in a church sanctuary—interventions that allow the accumulated character of the place to persist and deepen rather than starting anew.

Here again, Heidegger’s thinking resonates. In Building, Dwelling, Thinking, building is not primarily an act of domination or transformation. It is an act of “sparing and preserving,” allowing places to retain their essential qualities even as they evolve.

Looking back, I can see that the philosophical threads introduced during my university years accompanied me throughout my career. The ideas encountered in that existentialism class, the experiential emphasis of professors like Bill Kleinsasser, and the place‑oriented perspectives of thinkers like Heidegger and Norberg-Schulz helped shape how I came to understand architecture—not simply as construction, but as the creation of places where human life can unfold meaningfully.

In the end, that may be the most enduring insight these thinkers offer. Buildings matter not because they stand, but because they help us dwell.