Tag: Christopher Alexander

  • LLM Coding: Generative Sequences

    What are generative sequences, and how do they support unfolding wholeness & living structures? What is a Generative Sequence? What makes a good Generative Sequence? The Generative Power of Words Generative Sequences as a form of Writing Generative Sequences as Knowledge Containers

  • LLM Coding: Unfolding Wholeness & Living Structures

    I’ve been working extensively with LLM-assisted coding. I’ve been applying (almost exclusively) a writing style I’ve developed and practiced for a few years, inspired by “Generative Sequences.” To explain why I used this writing style and why (I think) it has served me well, I need to provide some context and terminology related to generative…

  • Ancient Greek Metaphysical Damage

    Introduction I recently completed yet another reading of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. There is a section near the end of the book where Pirsig, in his attempt to point the root of our current metaphysical crises, reaches the philosopher of ancient Greece. I’ve always experienced both a draw to…

  • 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…

  • The Unfolding of 17th Century Amsterdam

    … reminder – you are looking at 100 years in a few minutes! via Yodan Rofe of Building Beauty

  • Sequence: The Difference Between a Novice and a Master

    The experienced carpenter keeps going … every action he performs, is calculated in such a way that some later action can put it right to the extent that it is imperfect now. What is critical here, is the sequence of events. The carpenter neves takes a step which he cannot correct later; so he can…

  • Bryan Ungard – Deliberately Developmental Organisations

    This came to me via Richard Bartlett and: Listening to it while reading Christopher Alexander’s A Timeless Way of Building feels almost eerie … as if Bryan is looking over my shoulder and re-whispering the book in my ear recontextualized from the architecture of buildings to the architecture of organizations. I felt a deep sense…

  • The Order of the Language

    Design is often thought of as a process of synthesis, a process of putting together things, a process of combination. According to this view, a whole is created by putting together parts. The parts come first: the the form of the whole comes second. But it is impossible to form anything which has the character…

  • Attention to Reality

    And it is in the end only when our feelings are perfectly in touch with the reality of forces, that we begin to see the patterns which are capable of generating life. That is what is hard – because so often people choose to put their own opinions forward, in place of reality. … Yet…

  • … not quite adding!?

    … not quite adding!?

    Ryan Singer posted this on twitter: “Adding” and “integration” are different operations: Adding: Bolt working wholes together w/ no problem solving. Integration: Solve lots of problems to connect parts together into a working whole. Complex problem? Orthogonalize into integration problems that can then be added. source I had to read it a couple of times…

  • EXTRA Ordinary (Deepest Insights)

    EXTRA Ordinary (Deepest Insights)

    We have a habit of thinking that the deepest insights, the most mystical, and spiritual insights, are somehow less ordinary than most things – that they are extraordinary. This is only the shallow refuge of the person who does not yet know what he is doing. In fact, the opposite is true: the most mystical,…

  • Palpable Organic Tension

    When I witnessed patterns that I felt “could be improved” I used to go right at the pattern and try “to make it better”. That approach didn’t seem to work very well for me. I now try to look beyond the surface pattern that caught my attention. I have come to prefer a different approach.…

  • Wholehearted

    Wholehearted

    A man is alive when he is wholehearted, true to himself, true to his own inner forces, and able to act freely according to the nature of the situations he is in … … it is a state of being in which all forces which arise in a man can find expression; he lives in…

  • Space is Not Mute

    Space is Not Mute

    … Here right now was the space of my building, as plain and fresh as it would ever be. And what it helped me to understand is that space is not mute, that it does speak to us, and hat we respond to it more directly, more viscerally, than all the cerebral, left brained talk…

  • Living Structure in Japanese Katana

    Living Structure in Japanese Katana

  • 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.

  • 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 ……

  • Christopher Alexander – Blue Dragonfly at Tofuku-ji

    we need to understand space as a material which is capable of awakening

  • Christopher Alexander – Ornament and Function

    Function is simply the dynamic aspect of wholeness. A structure, viewed in a static sense, has to do with the system of centers that appear in it. As something lives, acts in the world, interacts with the world, different centers appear and disappear … The flux of these moving, transitory centers … is the process…

  • Christopher Alexander – A Freedom Inducing World

    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,…