Category: Nature of Order Book 3

  • Christopher Alexander on Our Birthright

    deep sigh … there’s a book ending to contemplate … architecture!!! “I should like to make one last comment on the buildings I have shown, the processes, the forms. Throughout, in all this material, we touch on a birthright. Yet this birthright that I speak of, it is in the mind, in people’s minds. And…

  • Christopher Alexander on Archetype

    “When everything is going right, when the fundamental process is used well, what comes out is not only natural, not only simple, not only living structure. It has too an archetypal quality – something savage [wild, untamed, original, direct, ‘as it comes forth’ … unweakened by sophisticated thought or culture] …. It is always the…

  • Christopher Alexander on Color

    This is merely an opening for a subject that is covered in more depth in book 4 “I believe that color, like music, holds the key to life as it appears in art; it is, perhaps, the most fundamental way in which things in geometry – that means real physical things in the world –…

  • Christopher Alexander on Ornament … in the Eyes of God

    “If the field od centers comes to life when it is endlessly differentiated and extended, then that same field of centers – which is after all a pure structure of geometry in space – will find its most living state when all creation, everything in the word, really is ornament. … I know that I…

  • Christopher Alexander on Unfolding Ornament

    ‘ornament’ is simply this smaller stuff … Thus it is not something extra or extraneous; it is a continuation of the same process we have followed in creating the field up to this point. It is necessary in order to complete the field

  • Christopher Alexander on Green Materials

    “We need new types of materials and techniques which have the following two functionally necessary attributes fo the construction process: We need to be able to shape materials rapidly and carefully so that the process of shaping … easily creates living centers … … We also need the the process of shaping and forming centers…

  • Christopher Alexander on Wabi to Sabi – Rusty Beauty

    I am starting to feel a build up of “missing” excerpts … from the first phase of my reading Alexander (before I started excerpting) and from some things which didn’t feel “excerptable” … in this case roughness. “… to get the perfect adaptation which is required by the unfolding of a field of centers, you…

  • Christopher Alexander on Working on Wholeness

    “… the operations of making and construction are distinguished by the way they handle the wholes and centers which are being formed … The essence of a succesful construction process … is that the team working on a given part of a building have the satisfaction of working on a psychological whole and making it…

  • Christopher Alexander on Making

    “Just as one can hardly make a vibrant painting unless the paint and paintbrush are in one’s own hands, so I cannot imagine how to make a concrete component in a building unless the substance of the concrete, the mold, the forming, the conception, the sizing and shaping – and the sheer love of doing…

  • Christopher Alexander on Traditional Elements

    a beautiful illustration of the nature and manifestation of static quality “In a natural unfolding of the building – the wholeness of that configuration itself – generates centers at various key points … Consider an imaginary process in which a generalized building is conceived, in outlines, as a hazy volume … even without knowledge of…

  • Christopher Alexander on Microstructure

    so … in mixing cob, even though it looks like we are stomping mud, we are creating life at a molecular level! “The walls, are they living centers? Is the roof a  living center? Is the roof edge a living center? Are the columns living centers? Are the windows living centers? Is every door a…

  • Christopher Alexander on the Purpose of a Room

    “In principle, a room is the sanctification and illumination of a life. It is your life made manifest. The room itself, like a cradle or a gathering together of a life is, in its essence, the place of a thousand joys and sorrows, the receptacle of your life and your children’s lives, the embodiment, in…

  • Christopher Alexander on a Coherent Plan

    ” … it is more important to get the rooms right, one by one, than it is to have a coherent ‘plan’. Don’t worry about trying to arrange the overall plan – that is not unfolding but manipulation. Instead, start with the most important room. Put it in the most important place, towards the garden,…

  • Christopher Alexander on Vital Centers of a Room

    “Now we come to the internal organization of the room. This is the most subtle aspect of room design. It is extremely hard because, in many cases, the centers which to be created, and which define the room, are almost invisible. … The vital centers which govern the life of the room are nearly invisible…

  • Christopher Alexander on the Most Important Room

    “At an early stage in a building design process, the rooms are first established in position: usually to start with, by name, size and rough position. At this stage, conceptually, we may say that the rooms are (usually) rough rectangular volumes of space which have yet to be made ‘good’. In theory, one might argue…

  • Christopher Alexander on Mass Situations

    There is a section of the text about sequences that I did not quote from because there was no single quote that shimmered for me and I felt that it needed to be kept whole. This quote builds upon that missing subject and yet seems to have an independence. It holds, I believe, a key…

  • Christopher Alexander on Sameness and Uniqueness

    This quote comes after a story of how three different houses individually unfolded in a shared place in nature where three families wanted to create a shared experience: “The uniqueness of the houses, the sensation that they are like nature, different leaves off the same tree, comes in large part from the way these houses…

  • Christopher Alexander on Doing Work Together

    One beneficial side effect, I believe, to a process as described in this quote, would be that group decision-making would probably take more time (then is typically allocated for it) … as it should. This kind of process unveils the illusion of quick-feel-good-superficial-consensus. It takes time, engagement, care, patience, attention to detail … if a…

  • Christopher Alexander on Static & Dynamic

    dynamic and static indeed … and also … how to juggle these two qualities “Think about the time dependent process by which an unplanned human settlement grows naturally. Someone starts with the idea of building or living on a certain site. A few people build their houses there. In the natural order of things, perhaps…

  • Christopher Alexander on Cars in Neighborhoods

    … though the subject of a neighborhood is of lesser interest to me …this is a wonderful example of direct reasoning and priorities … and this is just one example … is it any wonder that our sense of community has been eroded … and the funny thing is that I too always appreciated the…