” … fundamental practical innovations of process are inevitable consequences of thinking correctly about the nature of living structure in buildings, and of facing honestly the task of creating living structure in the world.
‘A client … once asked me to plan a small town for about a thousand people, on the banks of the Sacramento River. As part of this work, I began working out a money-flow process for the first twenty-five years of the project, but one day she phoned me to say that she was worried about mis-using my genius as an architect. She didn’t want me to spend so much time thinking about the money flow, since other people could do that, but she wanted me to think more about he ‘design’. By that she meant the static pattern of buildings, streets, shapes, and so on. It took me quite some time to convince [here] that the flow of money, year after year, and they way this works to create a flow of construction in the town, are essential features of its life … and that is his process were put in someone else’s hands (an accountant for example …), it would become separated from the building forms, and therefore almost certainly wrong and inimical to the life of the place. The notion that beauty is the result merely of ‘design’ deeply pervades our contemporary consciousness … Although she had recognized the beauty of the buildings my colleagues and I had sometimes managed to build, and wanted that beauty for her own project – that inner thing which catches life – she was simply unaware that what made our buildings live was the process we used to create them.’
… it is precisely these innovations which attempt to change the system of processes most deeply, that are hardest for society to accept … really deep changes are ones which change jobs, and which therefore actually alter the capacity of the social system to let people create wholeness in the world, or to allow it to be created …
… that social process must necessarily be architectural process, and that architectural process must necessarily be life-creating…
That requires not merely that we improve the sequences and processes of our society. IT requires, specifically, that we make these processes architectural. That means they must be morphogenetic [creating or generating shape] … What I call morphogenetic is not different from ‘living’ – but it places emphasis on the form creating aspect … It is, therefore, ‘architectural’.
… Our built environment … is formed by the interaction of thousands of day-to-day rules, procedures, habits of thought and action. It is these processes, embedded in society, which create the form of the world…
… the larger task of making these processes genuinely morphogenetic – so that they generate deeper and more coherent living structure – still lies on the horizon.
… It may even be said that we could approach anew point of view in which THE primary function of society would be understood as the function of generating a healed structure in the world through morphogenetic processes – and that this primary function is to allow us, the members of society, to adjust progressively all the small processes in such a way that individually, and together, they will more and more effectively create a living world.”
Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 2: The Process of Creating Life