Category: Nature of Order

  • Christopher Alexander – An Enormous Fact

    Christopher Alexander – An Enormous Fact

    The following excerpt mentions and relates to two images that are presented in the book and are helpful in relating to the excerpt. After some searching I found these two images which I feel carry a spirit similar the images shown in the book: “I was lecturing to architecture students … and put on the…

  • Christopher Alexander – Degrees of Life

    “In the 20th-century scientific conception, what we meant by life was defined chiefly by the life of an individual organism. We consider as an organism any carbon-oxygen-hydrogen-nitrogen system which is capable of reproducing itself, healing itself, and remaining stable for some particular lifetime … There are plenty of uncomfortable boundary problems: For example, is a…

  • Christopher Alexander – What Kind of Thing is Order?

    ” … to make buildings which have life and profound order – it is necessary to be rescued from the mechanistic trap by concentrating on life and order of a building as something in itself. I believe such a formulation can only come from a new view of the world which intentionally sees things in…

  • Christopher Alexander – Mechanistic: A Mental Toy

    “The mechanistic idea of order can be traced to Descartes, around 1640. His idea was: if you want to know how something works, you can find out by pretending that it is a machine. You completely isolate the thing you are interested in … from everything else, and you invent a mechanistic model, a mental…

  • Christopher Alexander – A World Picture

    “I believe that we have in us a residue of a world-picture which is essentially mechanical in nature – what we might call the mechanist-rationalist world picture … Like an infection it has entered us, it affects our actions, it affects our morals, it affects our sense of beauty. … This is a picture of…

  • Christopher Alexander – Human Feelings

    “Of course there is that part of human feeling where we are all different. Each of us has our idiosyncrasies, our unique individual human character. That is the part people most often concentrate on when they are talking about feelings, and comparing feelings. But that idiosyncratic part is really only about ten percent of the…

  • Christopher Alexander on Essential Awe

    “… In this conception, value is not something merely grafted onto space, as a passenger might be who carries no weight and does no work. It is part of the same nearly mechanical picture of space that we have come to believe in, and respect and trust. Yet, at the same time, in a most…

  • Christopher Alexander on an Extended Physics

    “… In physics, the effort has always been to take the geometry of a material system and to derive from it, predictions about the dynamic behavior, forces, and causal interactions … which follow from a particular configuration. In art and building … Again we have geometry, but here we seek especially to derive from it,…

  • Christopher Alexander on A Gift from Art to Science

    “What is, truly, the ultimate nature of matter? … I have expressed my conviction that architecture cannot be good so long as we try to to do it within a mechanical conception of matter … I have argued … that we must have a vision of the world in which life, as the foundation of…

  • Christopher Alexander on a Gift to God

    This felt like a demanding excerpt to put together. “When the field of centers appears in something, its deep feeling appears and it is … spirit made actual, spirit made manifest … It is not an indication of God living behind all things, but it is actually God itself … As we understand this more,…

  • Christopher Alexander on Never Truly Beautiful

    “What kind of beauty could go so deep that a person would be afraid of creating it? … Working with architects, I have experienced it again and again. Many traditional shapes, especially the most profound shapes with deep and serious centers in them, for some reason trouble modern architects profoundly. Even when an architect does…

  • Christopher Alexander on Gauguin’s Cow

    After reading this, I invite you to repeat an experiment I did: do an online search for both pictures and see what you get! “The cow is more basic still. This one is less knowing that Gauguin’s other works. When I saw it at Christie’s, the junior auctioneer told me it was a ‘very nice…

  • Christopher Alexander on Nolde’s Sunset

    “If we look at a sunset, we have all seen one; what more basic, more primitive response is there, than to dip the brush in yellow, scrawl yellow, yellow, yellow, all over the central sun? But who would dare to do it? It would have taken enormous daring to be so absurdly basic. And then…

  • Christopher Alexander on Pleasing Yourself

    “In order to create living structure, we must please ourselves … And you need only please yourself. But you must please yourself truly. And to do that you must first discover your own true self, come close enough to t, and to listen to it, so that it can be pleased. Does this sound absurd?…

  • Christopher Alexander on Making as Healing

    “When the I-stuff is created, it nourishes the maker – not only the viewer, but the maker too. For some reason, the process of making things which are alive enlarges us, deepens our experience. I feel more alive for having done it. It is like food … What is the reason for this ‘food-like’ character…

  • Christopher Alexander on Tears, Sadness and Unity

    This resonates deeply with me. A pursuit of happiness has never appealed or worked out for me. If what Alexander is true, then the oh-so-popular notion of “pursuit of happiness” is bound to hit a wall. My experiences of happiness seem to expire quickly, while my experiences of sadness seem to resonate deeper and longer…

  • Christopher Alexander on Schrödinger’s Yellow

    “Schrödinger, the physicist who discovered the matter-wave equation of quantum mechanics, has a great deal to teach us about color and its real existence. He outlines [in his short book Mind and Matter] the following argument. ‘You and I, both see yellow. But according to the prevailing view of science, there is no way of…

  • Christopher Alexander on Color Properties of Inner Light

    This post is an except from an extensive chapter about color. As I was reading through the chapter and excerpting from it the subject of relationships was on my mind and in my heart. When I speak of relationships between people, especially between myself and people close to me, things tend to get personal(!). However…

  • Christopher Alexander on Inner Light

    This section of the book is filled with examples, including works of art, that demonstrate the qualities Alexander discusses. I looked up a few of these examples online and wanted to include them here, but the color rendering of low resolution images in heavily manipulated color pallettes on the screen is not true to the…

  • Christopher Alexander on Windows to the Ground

    This (kind of?) makes up for my not excerpting sooner about centers … but without the previous, softer, experiental introduction, this may be harder to swallow ..anyways … here it is: “I am going to start with the idea that the I exists physically, that there is some plenum, not part of the physical space…