Christopher Alexander – Fundamental Property 1: Levels of Scale

I spent a couple of hours trying to find alternative images to those in the book. The concrete one was easy to find, the rest not … so I  gave up trying. The images in the book (especially the living ones) are too subtle to easily replace. So I opted to scan a few samples (this chapter, and the next 14 are filled with many more visual examples). I have picked out a bare minimum to support the core idea.

“The first things I noticed when I began to study objects which have life, was that they all contain different scales. … the centers these objects are made of tend to have a beautiful range of sizes, and that these sizes exist at a series of of well-marked levels, with definite jumps between them.

… If you capture any two things, one with more life and one with less, it is very likely that the one with more life will have better levels of scale in it … consider the following pairs of doors  … both … have parts of different sizes … but the door on the right has a variety of sizes which is more dramatically differentiated, more ‘extended’ along the range of scale than the door on the left. It has three sizes of panels, it has a gradation of scale from the bottom to the top.

… In the right-hand door, we experience the levels more deeply …  First, there actually are more levels … [and] the degree to which the centers help each other … the actual life of each center comes about because it is enlivened by the size and position of the next larger center which lies near it, and by the size and position of the next smaller center which lies near it.

In the left hand door the detail is there – but the detail isn’t doing anything to create life in the largest centers, and is therefore almost meaningless.

It is also extremely important that to have levels of scale within a structure, the jumps between different scales must not be too great … if we look at the concrete wall in the picture below … the wall [is] a center … we also see small individual centers (bolt or boltholes) … [they] are too far apart in scale to be coherent with each other.

… To intensify a given center, we need to make another center perhaps half or a quarter the size of the first. If the smaller one is less than one-tenth of the larger one it is les likely to help in in its intensity.

… In the tilework at Meshed, we see this principle carried from the giant tower-like structures through many intermediate levels, all the way down to the tiles themselves. There are distinct wholes, or centers, visible at every level in between the two.

… the small centers intensify the large ones … the large centers also intensify the small ones …”

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