Christopher Alexander – Fundamental Property 2: Strong Centers

For this excerpt, I was able to find compatible images, so the images you see are not the ones shown in the book.

“… I began to  notice that, next to the property of levels of scale, possibly the most important feature of a thing which is alive is that we find that the various wholes which exist at different levels appear not merely as centers or ‘wholes” or ‘blobs,’ but actually as strong centers.

… As we look at the mosque of Kariouan … we see many mutually reinforcing centers. The great courtyard, the large dome, the smaller dome, the individual battlements, the steps, the entrance, the individual arches, even the segments on the roof … the sequence of three domes, each one higher than the other, leading up to the main dome as a pinnacle. The entire structure builds up to the main dome …

… The imperial inner city of Beijing … is a layered system of nested domains which lead, one by one, to the inner city, and then to the inner sanctum of the inner city … the deep center arises at the heart of the inner city, because of the field effect generated by the nesting.

… In contemporary buildings, it is often hard to create this hierarchy of centers, perhaps above all because – in practical terms – we don’t know what to put at the center … What function could there be at the center that is important enough to make the building have a series of levels …? … What were once powerful centers – the fire, the marriage bed, the table – no longer have this power, because individually and as families are not centered in ourselves. The emotional confusion of the present-day family reveals itself in the lack of power in these centers of the house.

But when a house is organized with clearer centers … it becomes immediately more potent, even in its ability to harness unknown and undeveloped tendencies of centering in the life people live there together.

… The tip of each roof in the trulli at Alberobello is a strong center which is formed, not merely by the little knob, but by the way the whole roof of focused towards the tip, the way the tip if painted white, and the way this then culminates as a core of a center that is formed.”

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