This page is a table-of-contents that links to posts containing excerpts I’ve edited from Christopher Alexander‘s The Nature of Order.
I’ve been studying and experimenting with building energy efficient houses made of natural materials for a few years. At one point I realized that one fundamental subject was still a mystery to me: how to design, shape, give form to a house? What makes one design better than another? How to design a new house (that can take on any shape)? How to choose from seemingly infinite possibilities? I could not find good answers to these questions. Then in my 2nd or 3rd reading of Charles Eisenstein‘s Sacred Economics I came across a quote from Christopher Alexander and the Nature of Order.
I inquired and came across his more famous works A Pattern Language and A Timeless Way of Building, but did not resonate with them. They felt, oddly (given the spirit of his work), very mechanistic. After some hesitation I finally got my hands on a copy of Book 1. Shortly after I started reading it, I got the other three books – I wanted to be able to read through without interruption. I was taken in, I found answers, surprising answers, answers that resonated deeply with other discoveries that excited me, answers that resonated deep with my own feelings and experiences, answers that apply to so much more then creating a house, answers that potentially turn the world upside down (or maybe finally put it right side up!).
The key take away for me is that creating living structures (houses, software, organizations, societies … that support life) is less about structure and more about process: how structure is created. The (mathematical) odds are not in our favor – there are orders of magntitude more possiblities for creating structures lacking in life than living structures. Good processes help us make choices that increase the odds of creating living structures. Nature surrounds us with examples of good processes of unfolding wholeness: from blooming flowers to maturing embryos – nature never assembles pieces together, it always refines from the inside out … and so should we. We need to move away from design (as in theoretical and pre-emptively forming shapes on paper removed from circumstances) towards gradual, feedback induced, sense-driven making.
My first reading spanned over almost a year. As I write these words (January 2018) I have embarked on a second reading.
The title of each excerpt was of my choosing, sometimes it is directly informed by a chapter or section title, sometimes by the content of the excerpt, and sometimes with my own words/associations.