I wonder what Christopher Alexander thinks of https://solutions.synearth.net/a-community-dwelling-machine

I think he would not approve. http://en.bp.ntu.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/06-Alexander-A-city-is-not-a-tree.pdf

that kind of design is almost the polar opposite of CA's ideas, yes 🙂

Are both of you saying he wouldn't approve of any attempt to design a city?

@Kartik Agaram Depends what you mean by "design". You can follow the link to see some of Alexander's objections to "engineering" style urban design based on symmetry and hierarchy and monument building. Alexander also wrote a book called "A New Theory of Urban Design".

The venerable cities of the past, such as Venice or Amsterdam, convey a feeling of wholeness, an organic unity that surfaces in every detail, large and small, in restaurants, shops, public gardens, even in balconies and ornaments. But this sense of wholeness is lacking in modern urban design, with architects absorbed in problems of individual structures, and city planners preoccupied with local ordinances, it is almost impossible to achieve.

In this groundbreaking volume, architect and planner Christopher Alexander presents a new theory of urban design which attempts to recapture the process by which cities develop organically. To discover the kinds of laws needed to create a growing whole in a city, Alexander proposes here a preliminary set of seven rules which embody the process at a practical level and which are consistent with the day-to-day demands of urban development.

He then puts these rules to the test, setting out with a number of his graduate students to simulate the urban redesign of a high-density part of San Francisco, initiating a project that encompassed some ninety different design problems, including warehouses, hotels, fishing piers, a music hall, and a public square. This extensive experiment is documented project by project, with detailed discussion of how each project satisfied the seven rules, accompanied by floorplans, elevations, street grids, axonometric diagrams and photographs of the scaled-down model which clearly illustrate the discussion.

A New Theory of Urban Design provides an entirely new theoretical framework for the discussion of urban problems, one that goes far to remedy the defects which cities have today.

I've read A City is not a Tree multiple times, and I just read it again. But I'm still not seeing a connection. What part of OP are you objecting to, exactly? What hierarchy are you referring to? Symmetry can be useful, it can cut costs. There's lots of symmetry in Venice. It's hard to house tens of thousands without creating a large structure of some kind. Given that constraint, a very gradual incline seems to minimize rather than maximize monumentality. One fallacy in A City is not a Tree is judging cities from just a superficial 64k-ft aerial photograph. I've always assumed that to be a synecdoche to save space, not to be taken too literally. Governance in any city has always had to wrestle with overlap. Like taxis, and parking, as City mentions, and also mixed-use lanes that may have been created since. I have some ideas about holes in OP. But I think you're perhaps not quite engaging with it yet.

The most obvious hierarchy in Old Man River City is that all of the private homes are on the outside of the ring, and all of the facilities for community living (tennis courts, playgrounds, outdoor theatres) are on the inside of the ring. A City Is Not A Tree is unambiguously opposed to this kind of structure and separation. Quote: "Only in the artificial-tree conception of the city are their natural, proper and necessary overlaps destroyed." This sentence is particularly relevant: "Another favourite concept of the CIAM theorists and others is the separation of recreation from everything else." Note: CIAM = Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne. From the Wikipedia article: "CIAM proposed that the social problems faced by cities could be resolved by strict functional segregation". As for symmetry, Alexander says the following when criticizing the OP style of urban design: "In simplicity of structure the tree is comparable to the compulsive desire for neatness and order that insists the candlesticks on a mantelpiece be perfectly straight and perfectly symmetrical about the centre." As for "judging cities from an aerial photograph", I understand the first section of City Is Not A Tree as saying that if you design an urban area so that it looks beautiful and symmetrical from an aerial view, then you are prioritizing the aerial view over the needs of the human inhabitants who live in the city. In general, I understand Alexander as proposing "human centred design" as an alternative to CIAM theory and modernist architecture, of which Old Man River is a pretty blatant example. "Monument" is my own word, it's not from Alexander. It's interesting that you don't see Old Man River as a monument. To me, it looks like Bucky Fuller wants to recreate the great pyramid of Cheops: a huge, unitary megastructure: timeless, eternal, unchanging. If built, it would be a monument to him and his ideas. Demolishing it would be politically difficult due to the vast cost of the building and its monumental nature. "Natural", "organic" cities (terms that Alexander uses) consist of many different buildings, and you can rezone areas and replace buildings as the city evolves and needs change. Old Man River is an artificial city of 125,000 that is designed to make this kind of evolution impossible. The residential, commercial and recreational zones are immutable. So I'm pretty confident that Alexander wouldn't approve of OP. Your question was "what would Alexander think?". So I'm not objecting to OP, I am trying to view OP from Alexander's perspective.

Thank you! That was exactly the sort of detail I was looking for. In particular, your defense of the word 'monument' is compelling.