Christopher Alexander – Fundamental Property 12: Echoes

” … there is a deep underlying similarity – a family resemblance – among the elements, so deep that everything seems to be related, and yet one doesn’t quite know why, or what causes it. That is what I mean by ‘echoes.’ Echoes, as far as I can tell, depend on the angles, and families of angles, which are prevalent in the design.

… This family resemblance can be illustrated most easily by a negative example: the building by Michelangelo … is, of all the buildings I know, the most hopeless hodgepodge. It is a salad of motifs and elements. Squares, circles, broken circles, triangles, are pasted together in a riot of disharmony …

… in the Himalayan monastery all the parts – stones, caps, doors, and steps – are heavily square with a line and a shallow angle … In Thyangboche, the monastery in the foothills of Everest, we feel in some profound and subtle way that this building is part of the mountains: part of the Himalayas themselves. The angles of the roofs, the way the small roof sits on the larger roof, the ‘peak’ on the largest roof, the band below the roof edge – all reflect or echo one another, and echo the structural feeling of the mountains themselves.

… in the houses from Alberabello all the motifs are cone-like …

… If something has been made without some echoes of this type, the chances are that certain deep requirements have been ignored, and the variety of non-echoing forms will cause various functional failures …”

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