Christopher Alexander – An Enormous Fact

The following excerpt mentions and relates to two images that are presented in the book and are helpful in relating to the excerpt. After some searching I found these two images which I feel carry a spirit similar the images shown in the book:

“I was lecturing to architecture students … and put on the screen the Bangkok slum house and the post-modern octagonal tower … I asked the students to choose which of the two, for them, seemed to have more life.

For some people the answer was obvious. For others, it was at first not a comfortable question. Some asked ‘What do you mean? … What is your definition of life?” … I made it clear I was not asking them to make a factual judgement, but just to decide which of the two, according to their own feeling, appeared to have more life …

Eighty-nine said that the Bangkok slum house has more life.
Twenty-one chose to say that the question didn’t make sense to them, or that they couldn’t make a choice.
No one said that the octagonal tower has more life.

To repeat, out of those 110 people, not a single one of them wanted to say (or was willing to say) that the postmodern building had more life than the Bangkok house. This shows an extraordinarily high level of agreement.

… Several of the architecture students among the twenty-one who said they could not judge the issue later came to me and told me that they had felt that the slum had more life, but did not feel comfortable saying so.

… I believe that these students were embarrassed by a conflict between the value they were being taught in architecture school, and a truth they perceived and could not deny.

… Indeed, I think there is no doubt that the students – many of them anyway – found the question disturbing, almost as if a secret, a hidden truth, were being dragged from them in spite of themselves.

… Simple though it is, the question has the power to bring perverted values into doubt.

… It would almost appear, then, that the present fashion in architecture is so hollow that its adherents need to prop it up by refusing to see the life in things, or by refusing to apply this criterion to decide what is good, bad, better.

…students sometime become uncomfortable when facing this question, because the moment it is asked, they already sense that most people will answer it the same way …

… in this life if things really exists as I am claiming, that fact along has enormous ramifications, it implies that many things in our society and way of life may have to change. Fear or a natural reluctance to consider these changes makes us intellectually timid, and less open to the fact itself.

… If typical examples of good design by 20th-century standards have less life than a slum in Bangkok … [then] any architect who wishes to defend modern and postmodern architecture will almost have to say, ‘This question doesn’t make sense,’ just to defend his profession and his own self-worth as a professional.

Of course, the question ‘Which one makes you feel that it is more alive?’ is at root simply empirical. But that is exactly why it is so disturbing. Whatever the question means, it seems to probe an area of thought which may have devastating results for the image-based style of architecture current toward the end of the 20th century.

… It is strange that a phenomenon of such power and of such generality – if true – should be missing from our general way of understanding the world. … We seem to have a fundamental observation – so far unexplained – that among pairs of events, bits of space, places, and particles of existence, we can usually judge that one has a greater degree of life and the other less, at least according to our feeling. And we have the observation that our experience of this life in things is roughly consistent from person to person.

… It is hard to see how society could form a proper conception of its own existence without being cognizant of this fact. Yet, for the last hundred years, modern society has existed almost without this knowledge – and has even built institutions, organizations, and procedures on the basis of conceptions which are absolutely at odds with it.

… Hypothesis: What we call ‘life’ is a general condition which exists, to some degree or other, in every part of space: brick, stone, grass, river, painting, building, daffodil, human being, forest, city. And further: The key to this idea is that every part of space … has some degree of life, and that this degree of life is well defined, objectively existing, and measurable.”

Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life