To begin with, nine percent parking is based not on "slender evidence," but no evidence. It is a "suspicion," which becomes a pattern, which becomes a dictum. Here you catch the faint whiff of the crank.

Yet it is a very plausible suspicion, even if the particular number is bogus. Urban landscapes full of cars, like Los Angeles, are depressing. Most of Alexander's patterns are very plausible, even the ones that never would have occurred to me, like "Zen View": "If there is a beautiful view, don't spoil it by building huge windows that gape incessantly at it. Instead, put the windows which look onto the view at places of transition — along paths, in hallways, in entry ways, on stairs, between rooms." The man who writes this has meditated long and profoundly about why some buildings succeed and others fail.

Alexander generally begins with what people want. You might think that most architects would begin there, but in fact very few of them do. Instead they talk a great deal about form, function, structure, "machines for living," and the like. Alexander's solicitude is one of the great sources of both his unpopularity within his profession and his popularity in the world at large. The photographs in A Pattern Language are of warm, inviting, pleasant places that would be fun to live or play or work in. They are not of monuments, large buildings, or what one has been taught to regard as architectural masterpieces.

In Alexander's cosmology, beauty in architecture consists of satisfying people's desires, and those desires are immutable. It follows that architectural standards are objective. There is a human nature, to which buildings will appeal more or less successfully. It follows further that Alexander is in on the secret. This assurance, more than anything, infuriates his fellow architects.

Now I'm all for normative thinking, provided it's kept far away from the police power. Jane Jacobs, with whom Alexander is frequently grouped, takes pains to show how livable cities grow organically from people's natural behavior, while top-down planning leads to disaster after disaster. This concerns Alexander not at all: only ends interest him. Some of his grander patterns must be enforced by law, and he does not shrink from doing so. In "The Magic of the City" he writes: