*It’s curious that both Charlie and Alexander would use a linguistic metaphor to describe architecture’s fundamental elements. Alexander’s conception of architecture is no more literary than Charlie’s—his patterns are clearly not signs or metaphors. Perceiving a pattern is less a matter of interpretation than experience; indeed, many of his patterns (like “Watching the World Go By”) are activities as much as material forms. My hunch is that Charlie and Alexander are both thinking of language in only the most rudimentary and old-fashioned sense, as a system that makes it possible to combine a finite number of basic building blocks into an infinite number of more complicated structures. In Alexander’s conception, words are not nearly as ambiguous or arbitrary as modern philosophy has taught us to regard them.