Christopher Alexander on Archetype

“When everything is going right, when the fundamental process is used well, what comes out is not only natural, not only simple, not only living structure. It has too an archetypal quality – something savage [wild, untamed, original, direct, ‘as it comes forth’ … unweakened by sophisticated thought or culture]

…. It is always the same substance. Technology changes continuously as society changes … the eternal forms are continually refreshed and given new character, new implementation. That is the temporally changing part we know as style. But the core, the unchanging core, is the expression of ancient and eternal truths of unity.

… Every time the fundamental process is used, not matter at what scale, we get a structure in which local symmetries are so densely packed that the highest possible density of local symmetries occurs, but without having an overall symmetry.

… In the best cases, when the symmetries come forth unconsciously from adherence to the feeling of the whole, and from the process of symmetry-production in the small, then something almost awe-filled occasionally comes into being. This is a thing which strikes fear into the heart, yet creates a peacefulness and solidity that we can rest upon. It gives us nourishment because it is so strange and so indefinite and well-found in its uniqueness  – which we did not create.

It is possible to use the word archetype in two different ways. On the one hand there is the weak archetype  … really just the whole class of buildings that have living structure. But there is a narrower class … more awe-filled forms which go to the root, forms which affect us so powerfully, which reach, somehow, the core of what it is to be a person.

… This takes more. This does not come about merely from the fundamental process. I believe this second, strong archetypal core comes when the search for living structure is combined with a conscious desire, and a half-conscious search, for the origin of all things. That topic is taken up in Book 4, The Luminous Ground.

… In the best cases, in the cases which have the most life, the building form will most often be interwoven in some fashion with nature itself. In the best cases it will seem, almost indistinguishably, to be a part of nature, this forming a seamless whole.

… It will … seem extremely ordinary … It will, not at all, then, seem like the work of an architect’s hands.

… Thus the morphogenesis of what is truly living, will have a character that, in our present way of thinking, will hardly look like architecture at all … it is achieved through painstaking attention to the ordinary.

… The naturalness, the ordinariness will then place before us, a target, an aim, which is very different from the things that architects have worshipped today and yesterday.

Something truly relaxed, truly made for human comfort, truly arising from an egoless and unencumbered wish to make things right, and nothing more.”

Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 3: A Vision of a Living World