Category: Nature of Order Book 2

  • Christopher Alexander on Feeling as Criterion and Instrument

    Unless something quotable shimmers in the appendices, this brings me to the end of book 2: “If living processes, guided by feeling for the whole, and guided by feeling, were to shape all acts of construction in society, then everything, nearly, that we know about modern society would be changed. Above all … it means…

  • Christopher Alexander – It Must Be Us

    This quote comes at the end of another significant section which I did not draw quotes from (as was the case with sequences). It describes life-creating sequences can be interlinked into process-networks … it struck me as a fascinating balance between something specifically mechanical and yet filled with life. Ready-made quotes did not jumpt out…

  • Christopher Alexander on Gene Snippets

    “… the structure of social processes we created during the 20th century, again and again create a mental catch-22 situation where the means needed to escape from the anti-living process, are prohibited by the very process we are trying to replace. … The key to the idea that will allow a system of workable morphogenetic…

  • Christopher Alexander on a Pursuit of Wholeness

    This reminded me of Pirsig’s thoughts on contrarians: “… you risk a great deal when working within a new paradigm which includes a) human relationships of trust, b) on-going decisions about trade-offs, c) the overall wisdom of how to spend a given modest amount of money to get the best from your money. It is…

  • Christopher Alexander on Frederick Taylor

    “Frederick Taylor … was one of the individuals who had the greatest influence on the 20th century. An American machinist working at the very end of the 19th century, Taylor conceived the idea of time-and-motion studies … which make the repetitive production of objects more efficient. Taylor first inspired Henry Ford’s factory at Dearborn, the…

  • Christopher Alexander on an Architecture Studio Class

    Reading this brought Itsik to my heart and mind. I know, and on a couple of occasions have witnessed him deal with this specific challenge, the studio class. Though as I read this I also thought about the “competition” format that was (probably still is) so prevalent and normative and the source of so much…

  • Christopher Alexander – Kitchen Sequence

    There was a section in book 2 dedicated to the idea of sequences … about how important the order is in which structure preserving transformations steps are taken. There wasn’t a sweet and succinct quote that shimmered for me and in a way it (ironically) is a missing step in the overall order of quotes…

  • Christopher Alexander on Architecture in Democracy

    This is from the opening text of the third section of book 2 … looking forward to diving into it 🙂 “Processes which are living ones, are step-by-step structure-preserving adaptive processes whose main characteristics is their ability to focus on the whole, and to improve and deepen the whole … And the sequence in which…

  • Christopher Alexander – First Hint of the Ground

    hmmm …. “For the time being, you may think of the Ground as the substrate of everything … … Within the structure of nothingness there is an endless system of repeating centers, all rather weak, but all equally weak, overlapping continuously … We may … call it simply emptiness. In any case, emptiness or nothingness…

  • Christopher Alexander – Material and Light

    When I collected this quote, the words “ultimately material and light” shimmered for me. Yet I decided to skip them, I felt that they may not be nourishing for a reader who is not as involved with the text as I am. Yet as I continued collecting the quote the words came back to me.…

  • Christopher Alexander on Simplicity and Symmetry

    “… Complexity (in the bad sense) consists of distinctions which unnecessarily complicate structure. To get simplicity, on the other hand, we need a process which questions every distinction. Any distinction which is not necessary is removed. To remove a distinction we replace it by a symmetry … Gradually we get just that syncopated system of…

  • Christopher Alexander on Simplicity

    “Our modern conception of simplicity has gone wrong. Simplicity as depth has been replaced by a mechanical idea of simplicity as the geometrically banal… The things we call simple in design – cubes, spheres – appear simple conceptually because they can be represented by simple mathematical schemes. But they are not, in any real sense,…

  • Christopher Alexander on Form Language

    ” … we do not start each new design from scratch. Somehow, we learn, over years, the ingredients that make a building good … the form language we use to speak the words that come out as buildings. … at any given period of history, in any particular society, there are a certain number of…

  • Christopher Alexander on Holding the Feeling Constant

    “… our ability as artists depends very largely on our ability to experience, formulate, and carry such a feeling – first to feel it and witness it, then to carry it forward, remember it, keep it alive within us, and insist on it … … you hold the feeling constant … you keep it alive…

  • Christopher Alexander on Deep Feeling and Emotional Substance

    “… The Word “feeling” has been contaminated. It is confused with emotions – with feelings (in the plural) such as wonder, sadness, anger – which confuse rather than help because they make us ask ourselves, which kind of feeling should I follow? The feeling I am talking about is unitary. It is feeling in the…

  • Christopher Alexander on Uniqueness

    “Almost the most distinctive mark of living process lies in one aspect of the geometry of the results. Simply put, Every part of the world that has life, and every part of every part, becomes UNIQUE. It becomes unique because each part is adapted to its context and because, in the large, no two contexts…

  • Christopher Alexander – Illuminated by Existence

    “I am not trying to be clever. I am not trying to follow any special archetype, ancient or modern. I am just trying to make that thing, which, when its centers have been created, will most honestly make me feel a tremor, make me feel that my life is (even if only slightly) illuminated by…

  • Christopher Alexander on The Void

    This is out of reading sequence. In thinking about Annelieke in the very present moment, the Void came back to me from Book One: “In the most profound centers which have perfect wholeness, there is at the heart a void which is like water, infinite in depth, surrounded by and contrasted with the clutter of…

  • Christopher Alexander – Move with Certainty

    “As the living process goes forward, repeating the fundamental process again and again … one feature is built up at a time … How do you determine these steps which must be taken, and their sequence? … The most basic instruction I can give you as a guide for a living process, is that you…

  • Christopher Alexander on First Steps and Ripples in Design

    “… As any designer will tell you, it is the first steps in a design process which count for most. The first few strokes which create the form, carry within them the destiny of the rest. How then, in a living process, do we take the first steps of design so that a beautiful, coherent…