Category: Nature of Order
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Greg Bryant on Generative Sequences
I feel that generative sequences are one of the most overlooked and valuable discoveries in Christopher Alexander’s work. When you learn to see them for what they are you can find examples of them everywhere and then you can increasingly notice when/where they are missing. I have adopted an attitude in which I assume that…
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Spaces for the Soul (a Ruth Landy documentary about Christopher Alexander)
Dear Ruth, thank you for this precious work, it is vital that this story be told, and for it to be told it is vital that it be available. While I understand your motivation for having it taken down, please don’t. Please let it live and ripple.
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Christoper Alexander – What is Wholeness?
“How can we tackle the task of making good sense of this intuition of unity and wholeness? First, wholeness is a structure, and can be understood as such … Second, the thing we call wholeness – the feeling, or the intuition, of what the wholeness is – always extends beyond the thing in question ……
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Christopher Alexander – A Freedom Inducing World
… an environment which goes as far as possible in allowing people’s tendencies, their inner forces, to run loose, so that they can take care, by themselves, of their own development … it depends in part on … configurations … which remove energy-wasting conflict from the environment … release human effort for more challenging tasks,…
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Christopher Alexander – The Stress Reservoir
Broadly speaking, the reaction to each unsolved problem, or annoyance, or conflict that is encountered creates in the individual some level of stress … There is, in effect, a stress reservoir in the body …
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Christopher Alexander – A Universal Personal
… from the point of view of the world picture in this book, ‘personal’ is a profound objective quality which inheres in something, It is not idiosyncratic but universal. It refers to something true and fundamental in a thing itself.
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Christopher Alexander – The Character of Living Structure
In nature the principle of unfolding wholeness … creates living structure nearly all the time. Human designers, who are not constrained by this unfolding, can violate the wholeness if they wish to, and can therefore create non-living structure as often as they choose.
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Christopher Alexander – The Fifteen Properties in Nature
I chose to do a brief summary of this section, giving preference to the wholeness of the theme of the properties in nature (over giving more attention to each property). It was a journey, first reading through it, not knowing how/what to extract. By the time I read through, certain excerpts popped out of the…
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Christopher Alexander – The Family of Living Systems
the fifteen properties define the enormous family of systems, among all possible systems, which have life in them
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Christopher Alexander – Fundamental Property 15: Not-Separateness
The correct connection to the world will only be made if you are conscious, willing, that the thing you make be indistinguishable from its surroundings, that, truly, you cannot tell where one ends and the next begins, and you do not even want to be able to do so
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Christopher Alexander – Fundamental Property 14: Simplicity and Inner Calm
It has to do with a certain slowness, majesty, quietness, which I think of as inner calm … The quality comes about when everything unnecessary is removed
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Christopher Alexander – Fundamental Property 13: The Void
This emptiness is needed, in some form, by every center … It is the quiet that draws the center’s energy of itself, gives it the basis of its strength