Christopher Alexander – Fundamental Property 3: Boundaries

My attempt to find suitable images to use in these excerpts is a demanding practice. This time I separated the task of looking for images from writing the excerpt itself. At first I felt that these images were easier to find than those for the previous posts. But then when I came to assemble the excerpt and looked at the examples in the book, I again saw differences. Though the examples I have chosen to include in the excerpt are valid, they are usually not as good as the ones in the book. Noticing these differences is a profound learning experience for me.

” … living centers are often – nearly always – formed and strengthened by boundaries …The Norwegian storehouse is replete with boundaries at every scale …
The purpose of a boundary which surrounds a center is two-fold. First, it focuses attention on the center and thus helps to produce the center. It does this by forming the field of force which creates and intensifies the center which is bounded. Second, it unites the center which is being bounded with the world beyond the boundary. For this to happen, the boundary must at the same time be distinct from the center being bounded, must keep this center distinct and separate from the world beyond it, and yet also have the capacity of uniting that center with the world beyond the boundary. In both ways, the center that is bounded becomes more intense.
… the boundary needs to be of the same order of magnitude as the center which is being bounded. If the boundary is very much smaller than the thing being bounded, it can’t do much to hold in or form the center … An effective boundary for the river Seine consists of roads, walls, paths quays, trees, something almost as massive as the river itself. It general it it necessary to think of boundaries as very large.
When taken seriously this rule has a very big effect on the way things are organized … the lips as the boundary of the mouth are similar in size to the mouth; an arcade … the same order of size as the building … marsh as boundary of a lake … capital and base as boundary of the column …
The door as a center is intensified by placing a beautiful frame of centers around that door. The smaller centers in the boundary are also intensified, reciprocally, by the larger center which they surround
… to establish the interlock and connection, coupled with separation … the boundary itself is also formed of centers … in the [Persian] manuscript … the boundary is formed out of large centers, sometimes almost as large as the field, but made in such a way that they unite the thing bounded with the world beyond … Essentially they form centers, or systems of alternating centers, which look both ways …
… Taken by itself, the boundary rule seems simple. But the rule does not merely refer to the outer boundary of the thing. If we apply the rule repeatedly, it says that every part, at every level, has a boundary which is a thing in its own right. This includes the boundaries themselves. They too have boundaries, each of which is a thing in its own right. What seems like one rule, then, is a pervasive structural feature of enormous depth, which is in effect applied dozens or hundreds of times, at different scales throughout the thing.
… it is possible for a thing to follow this rule and still lack an outer boundary around the whole, because that outer boundary (present or not) is merely one of ninety-nine other boundaries which do exist within the whole, at different scales … The limited idea of a main boundary by itself completely fails to convey the shimmering sense that is created when a thing has boundaries within boundaries, which are boundaries of boundaries, and that all together permeate its structure.
The castle of Gwalior: the whole building front is made of boundaries, and boundaries of boundaries.”