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We’ll start with Alexander’s idea of pattern, then look at two canonical patterns, modernism and postmodernism, each in its particular way configuring our meanings in the spaces of modernity. A “pattern language,” says Alexander, “gives each person who uses it the power to create an infinite variety of new and unique buildings, just as his ordinary language gives him the power to create an infinite variety of sentences.”³⁸⁹ Constructing the environment is based on a program, a word commonly used in architecture, which we would rephrase as the attempt to realize interest^§AS2 scenarios in building. Hence: houses, schools, parks; these are different kinds of building serving different kinds of interest.

Alexander and his co-workers offer 253 patterns, each finely parsed: neighborhoods with “28. Eccentric Nucleus,” “29. Density Rings,” and “30. Activity Nodes”; path networks including “49. Looped Local Roads,” “55. Raised Walks,” and “56. Bike Paths”; buildings including “76. Houses for a Small Family,” “85. Schools,” and “87. Shops”; rooms including “139. Kitchens,” “143. Bedrooms,” and “145. Bathrooms”; then spaces that “fine tune” rooms, “192. Windows Overlooking Life,” “198. Closets,” and “200. Open Shelves,” and, now nearing the end of the taxonomy, “249. Ornament,” “251. Chairs,” and finally, 1165 pages after this exhaustive journey began, “253, Things from Your Life” – an awkwardly classified, omnibus other, the realm of “décor” or “interior design” which may in a house be subclassified as the placement of objects and pictures in “collections, family remembrances, and old adventures.”³⁹⁰

No pattern, says Alexander, “is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world only to the extent that it is supported by other patterns … [W]hen you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it.”³⁹¹ With this, Alexander promises “a timeless way of building,” though as we read his books, it is hard to escape the sense that his patterns refer more to a suburban modernity with its cars and parks, than a petrochemical plant, or a railway yard, or an office-ridden city, or the sacred sense of place held by the Guugu Yimithirr in their country.^§AS1.3.2c

Nevertheless, the idea of a pattern language fits nicely with our notion of multimodality, transposing as it does meanings between text and space. This is our project too, writing this text, although the scope of our transposition is wider, from text to all other modes, and to trace patterns in the meanings of meanings.

Alexander’s “pattern language” served as inspiration for Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki. He received a copy of Alexander’s Timeless Way of Building. Moved by this idea, in 1995 he created a program in both the architectural and a software sense. The wiki is a patterned textual space where people share the writing of text, their own texts, different texts. As medium, the wiki is not unlike the general patterning of houses, where notwithstanding the generalizable pattern, people in particular houses could live their lives in different ways. Waiting for a shuttle bus in Hawai’i, he lighted upon the name. The bus was called the WikiWiki, in the indigenous language of Hawai’i, the word for “quick.”³⁹²

Our next architect: Le Corbusier’s modernist building projects ranged from the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, to the United Nations building in New York at the end of the 1940s, to the design and the principal public buildings of Chandigarh, capital city of the Indian states of Haryana and Punjab, constructed in the 1950s.³⁹³ “Architecture or Revolution!” he promised, advocating an emphatic pattern language for modernity. “The incredible industrial activity of today … puts before our eyes every hour, either directly or through newspapers and magazines, objects of arresting novelty whose whys and wherefores interest, delight and disconcert us … If we set ourselves against the past, we see that new formulas have been found that only need to be exploited and that, if we can break with routine, will bring real liberation from the constraints hitherto endured.”³⁹⁴

Hence, some maxims for modernism. “Form follows function” (after Adolf Loos).^§MS2.1.1b “Less is more” (after Ludwig Mies van der Rohe). So, said Le Corbusier, “The house is a machine for living in.”³⁹⁵ In his book, Toward an Architecture, he celebrated the utilitarian aesthetics of factories, grain elevators, airplanes, and automobiles. His houses were straight-lined and white. He said the claustrophobic city of slums of old Paris should be torn down, and replaced with towers in parks – a formula that was to be repeated in the socialist east^§AS2.3d and the capitalist west. The program was not the solution because poverty was still poverty, and the towers became the new slums.

“Less is a bore,” was the retort from Denise Scott-Brown and Robert Venturi. In 1968 they took the students in their Yale University architecture studio to Las Vegas, where more was never enough. Together, they parsed “the Strip,” the focal axis in a cityscape of excess. “Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect. Not in the obvious way, which is to tear down Paris and begin again, as Le Corbusier suggested in the 1920s, but another, more tolerant way; that is, to question the way we look at things.”³⁹⁶

Tolerant, in the case of the Las Vegas Strip, meant reconciling oneself to the screaming commercialism of signs, the huge parking lots behind the signs, and beyond the cars, barely visible from the street, the “decorated sheds” that were the casinos or the shops. This is representative of the now-ubiquitous strip mall architecture. This was also to be eviscerated, as it transpires, by another kind of modernism, the modernism of the shopping mall.^§AS2.3c

“The emerging Strip is a complex order. It is not the easy, rigid order of the urban renewal project or the fashionable ‘total design’ of the megastructure,” say Scott-Brown and Venturi. So, they celebrated the “honky tonk improvisations” and things that might be regarded as “commercial vulgarities – Las Vegas’s values are not questioned here.”³⁹⁷ Signs and ornament – these were to become two defining motifs of postmodernism, in social theory³⁹⁸ as well as architecture.³⁹⁹

“I like boring things”⁴⁰⁰ – Scott-Brown and Venturi quote Andy Wahol, and so do we.^§MS0a But we know they didn’t like what they found to be boring about modernism.

And another boring thing for Denise Scott-Brown. Venturi was named winner of the 1991 Pritzker Prize, the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in architecture, but not Scott-Brown. “Room at the Top?” she asked in a celebrated article, “Sexism and the Star System in Architecture.”⁴⁰¹ To no avail, people petitioned Pritzker. “20,000 people wrote from all over the world,” she said in an interview, “and every one of them called me Denise.”⁴⁰²

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³⁸⁹ Christopher Alexander, 1979, The Timeless Way of Building, New York: Oxford University Press, p. xi.

³⁹⁰ Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein, 1977, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, New York: Oxford University Press.

³⁹¹ Ibid., p. xiii.

³⁹² http://c2.com/doc/etymology.html

³⁹³ Jean-Louis Cohen and Tim Benton, 2014, Le Corbusier Le Grand, New York: Phaidon.

³⁹⁴ Le Corbusier, 1928 [2007], Toward an Architecture, translated by J. Goodman, Los Angeles: Getty Publications, pp. 297, 304.

³⁹⁵ Ibid., p. 87.

³⁹⁶ Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, 1977, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 3.

³⁹⁷ Ibid., pp. 87, 52, 72, 6.

³⁹⁸ Hal Foster, ed. 1983, Postmodern Culture, London: Pluto Press; Jean-François Lyotard, 1979, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

³⁹⁹ Fredric Jameson, 1991, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press; Heinrich Klotz, 1984 [1988], The History of Postmodern Architecture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

⁴⁰⁰ Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, 1977, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 87.

⁴⁰¹ Denise Scott-Brown, 1989 [2015], “Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture,” MAS Context 27:25–39.

⁴⁰² www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/denise-scott-brown-recognised-with-2017-jane-drew-prize/10017080.article

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 147–150. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Denise Scott-Brown and Robert Venturi’s “Learning from Las Vegas” §AS1.4.5b