Editor's note: Hey friends! Today's story is the first of a four-part series written by Amanda Patchin. It explores various "patterns" that Boise has that make it a vibrant & beautiful city, and considers how those patterns might be expanded and improved. Enjoy!

Architect and theorist Christopher Alexander set out to design spaces where people feel at home, at ease, and truly alive. He built individual homes, larger buildings and complexes and wrote at length about the characteristics that gave inviting spaces their unique and various beauties. He was the author of numerous books, all which have been influential in architecture and design circles. His most famous work is A Pattern Language in which he and his numerous co-authors work to develop a way of thinking through design that allows and expects the full participation of those who will use the space.

Christopher Alexander’s work was defined by the pursuit of what he termed “the quality with no name.” He believed that the kinds of places people most enjoyed living and working in shared a quality that could not be identified with a single descriptor or associated with any one characteristic. Somehow great cathedrals, tiny hamlets, cozy cabins, thriving neighborhoods, beautiful schools, and healthy cities all managed to share this quality, though it is nearly impossible to identify the one thing that causes them to do so. In The Timeless Way of Building he speculates that it has to do with some kind of “wholeness,” although he acknowledges that what is “whole” and how it is “whole” is impossible to define. He also calls it being “alive,” though again he acknowledges that how it is alive is very hard to say.

Patterns

In A Pattern Language, Alexander attempts to develop a way of identifying not only the features that create this quality but also the methods by which a community or an individual can reliably elicit “wholeness” and beauty from their building projects. He posits a couple of principles that would be beneficial for any community at any stage of its development to consider.

One: that a building, a street, a place of work, a home, should be at least partly designed by the people who will actually use it.

Two: that the kinds of characteristics humans have repeatedly and historically enjoyed should be directly imitated, and then also adapted to the very specific place they are being implemented.

Three: that all communities and all buildings are to be built in recognition of the fact that they are never “done” and that they will have to be repaired and eventually replaced, and this repair is an integral part of cultivating “wholeness” and beauty.

Four: that any change or addition ought to be understood as a natural “growth” from the “DNA” of what already exists or is planned, because nothing can have the nameless quality if it is planned out at once and not allowed to gradually expand and adapt.

A Pattern Language includes 253 named and described characteristics that Alexander and his co-authors believe to contribute to the quality without a name. Each one is connected to others in the book and each one is named and described to help the designer understand exactly how to make that aspect of a building or a community inviting and beautiful.

Reading through these patterns, it is easy to see ways that your own home, neighborhood and city either have or fail to have these patterns. One way of thinking through this might be to criticize how your city fails, or how your neighborhood is deficient or how you just have to move to a better house – and I have certainly done some of that in reading and thinking about Alexander’s work. However, I have been periodically delighted to recognize the patterns that are functioning healthily in Boise, in South Boise Village (my neighborhood), and in my own little house.

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There is much to lament in modern urban design, in mass-produced everything, and in soul-deadening car culture, but there is also a great deal of beauty to enjoy, and seeing and naming in new ways can help us appreciate and attend to these living and beautiful elements of our city with new love.

Some of the patterns would help Boise improve the lives of its citizens and I would love for our city planners to consider the significance of the pattern “Web of Public Transportation” or of “Four Story Limit” or of “Scattered Work.”

But one that is working in Boise and that I quite enjoy is the pattern “Promenade”.

Promenade

Alexander describes a “Promenade” as a “center for public life” where people go to see and be seen. He describes numerous cultures including that of Greece, South America, Italy, and Spain, that have expressions of this pattern as a part of their cultural life. They seem to be nearly universal across the world, although the precise dimensions and customs of use do vary considerably.

According to Alexander, a good and living promenade must have several characteristics. A promenade must have a certain density of pedestrians using it during any given window of time: estimated to be about one person for every 150 to 300 square feet of space. A promenade must have shops or cafes or other nodes of activity strung out at intervals of no more than 150 feet. It must be long enough to allow for approximately a ten-minute stroll, and it must have trees or other forms of shade as well as benches for sitting.

In Boise, the newly pedestrian-friendly Eighth Street is a wonderful promenade. Running North and South from Myrtle Street to Bannock Street, there is little to no car traffic, some benches, some trees, and almost enough little nodes of activity to make it a pleasant ten-minute stroll from end to end. The best part of it, of course, is the two-block section between Main Street and Bannock Street. There is a bookshop, a game store, clothing stores, Freak Alley Gallery, salons, restaurants, and pubs which provide a pleasant variety of destinations.

Eighth Street is usually pretty full of people on weekend days and during most evenings. No cars are allowed and so all the restaurants have expanded their patios, giving people places to sit and people watch. Conversation, music, and silliness all have both physical and metaphorical space to flourish.

But Eighth Street isn’t quite perfect. As with anything, it could be “repaired” in a variety of ways to make it even more vibrant and living. The Grove Plaza – while a fantastic and bustling place on Saturday mornings during the market and on Wednesday summer evenings during Alive after Five – often feels a bit like a wasteland, even on weekend nights.

If the ground-floors of the buildings surrounding it had some small shops – perhaps drawn from the same pool of artisans that make the Farmer’s Market so much fun – facing the fountain, there would be enough activity to sustain that “living” feeling throughout the week and possibly even throughout our colder months.

Likewise, the Eighth Street Marketplace might need a bit of “repair” as well. The Warehouse Food Hall has drawn a lot of traffic indoors – which is helpful in said colder months – but if that border were a bit more porous with cafe counters opening through the main wall and with less of the sidewalk space fenced off, people could walk and mingle more freely. As it is, there is very little space to walk on the East side of the street between the cars backed into the spaces there and the trees on the edge of the sidewalk and the railing of Warehouse’s outdoor seating area.

Ideally, I would love to see some investor develop further South along Eighth Street, all the way to the Library and the Greenbelt, to make the pattern “Promenade” truly sing! Imagine if the warehouse space on the North side of Broad Street and Eighth Street were an industrial salvage and furniture store? If the old Foothills school were a sprawling bookshop like Powell’s in Portland? If there was another cafe or a pub across from Goldstein’s Bagels to accommodate evening diners near the Greenbelt?

Imagine if other neighborhood's had their own little Promenade, like 13th Street in the North End? How would it transform your daily life? Make your neighborhood come alive? Would it change the way you move about, interact, & think about your home, your neighborhood, your city?

Thanks for reading!

With love from Boise,

Marissa

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Today's story was written by Amanda Patchin. Amanda has a monthly-ish newsletter where she shares her booklist, selections from her fiction, and updates on what books she has for sale in the Zed Bookshop.

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