Christopher Alexander
In the first volume of his latest work, Alexander goes about setting the foundation for a new kind of thinking about the world, based on his idea of wholeness as a construct basic to everything in nature and with deep ties into the human being.
A quick quote from the end of the book (the last sentence of the conclusion in fact) to give an idea of where this is heading and what Alexander is trying to get at:
This is not merely a poetic way of talking. It is a new physical conception of how the world is made and how it must be understood. 444
He’s laying the foundations to a new system of his own conception to bring an order to the world, or moreso to bring human cognizance to an order already deeply ingrained in the earth, in each and every natural system. Alexander is a practicing architect, but here he’s talking far beyond architecture. His wholeness affects everything at a deep level. He notices how the principles he delineates as wholeness occur profoundly in every natural system, but only in those human designs and machines which are generally accepted as good. Coincidence?
He mentions in the prologue how his formal training as a mathematician has made it hard for him to come about these, albeit well-supported, somewhat vague and unscientific notions of wholeness in structure.
Even now, on some days I look at the theory I have formulated in these four books and can hardly believe that it is true. It provides a view of the universe which is so surprising, and so much at odds with the normal common-sense ways of thinking about physical reality we have currently, that it seems almost like fantasy, like some kind of science fiction. But then, on other days I go through the arguments again and realize that no matter how strange these things are, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they must be true. 3
It’s a nice argument presented beautifully in a large format book printed two columns per page, full of photos and illustrations. I’m persuaded. Alexander stresses that this system doesn’t have to replace the cartesian view of things, that the world can be discovered by thinking of its actions as those of an unknown machine and then using scientific experiment to deduce the inner workings of that machine, upon which we’ve operated nearly worldwide since the 17th century.
Really fun to think about, too.
To achieve this aim – to make buildings which have life and profound order – it is necessary to be rescued from the mechanistic trap by concentration on the 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 their wholeness, not as parts or fragments – and which recognizes “life,” even in an apparently inanimate thing like a building, as something real. 22, A new vision of architecture
57: blossoming almond tree, van gogh.
62: Aldous Huxley – The Perennial Philosophy; Soestu Yanagi – Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty.
The possibility that the degree of life of different things and places and events is objective – not solely individual – implies that this “felt” life has some part in the shceme of things that is truly enormous. If so, the existence of this felt life = existing as it must to some degree in every single thing there is – would be a discovery, an awakening, at an extraordinary level, perhaps comparable to the 16th-century discovery of the fact that the earth moves round the sun, or the 19th-century discovery of the electromagnetic nature of light. 77, An Enormous Fact
80, 107: Karl Lashley, experiments on the brain and memory. (We don’t store things in our brain at one location, like a computer would, say 0×88902932 in the register, but somehow globally, everything we know is everywhere the nerves and electrical impulses of the brain. In Search of the Engram)
Wholeness: the overall feeling evoked in the deep down emotional centers of us humans is wholeness. Ask yourself: is this meaningful? Profound? If I could be anything in the world, would I maybe chose to be this thing? (Image of self test). Something with great wholeness sets us at ease, increases our happiness, and doesn’t contribute to our stress reservoir.
Centers: Everything is a center. Recursive points in a structure. Aggregations of centers amplify each others significance, and a structure with good centers exhibits wholeness.
...these parts and entities [centers] are rarely pre-existing. They are more often themselves created by the wholeness. This apparent paradox (seeming paradoxical only because of the simple-minded way in which it is expressed) is a fundamental issue in the nature of wholeness: the wholeness is made of parts, the parts are created by the wholeness. To understand wholeness we must have a conception in which “parts” and wholes work in this holistic way. 84
When we understand what wholeness is really like as a structure, we see that in most cases it is the wholeness which creates its parts. Rather is would be more true to say that most of the parts are created by the wholeness. They settle out from the wholeness, and are created by all of it. 86
98: Wholeness might influence physics at the electron level. two slit experiment. It’s something that deeply ingrained in the system of the world.
All centers that appear in space – whether they originate in biology, in physical forces, in pure geometry, in color – are all alike simply in that they all animate space. It is this animated space that has its functional effect upon the world, that determines the way things work, that governs the presence of harmony and life. 106, Wholeness as the underlying substrate of all life in space
Theoretically, many scientists know that the individual is not a skin-encapsulated ego but an organism-environment field. The organism itself is the point at which the field is focused, so that each individual is a unique expression of the behavior of the whole field, which is ultimately the universe itself. “Alan Watts”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts, 141
142: I still haven’t read Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.
Local Symmetry: don’t be overly formal, please dear god not geometrical, but symmetry should be present in everything at a small level.
We see this clearly in the Alhambra, shown on this page and the next – a marvel of living wholeness. It has no overall symmetry at all, but an amazing number of minor symmetries, which hold within limited pieces of the design, leaving the whole to be organic, flexible, adapted to the site. 187, Local Symmetries
What is essential is that the local symmetries in these patterns play a decisive and quite unexpected role. Though hidden from view, they essentially control the way the pattern is seen and the way it works. 192
The quality comes about when everything unnecessary is removed. All centers that are not actively supporting other centers are stripped out, cut out, excised. What is left, when boiled away, is the structure in a state of inner calm. It is essential that the great beauty and intricacy of ornament go only just far enough to bring this calm into being, and not so far that it destroys it. 226, Simplicity and Inner Calm
I’d quote Saint-Éxupery, but we don’t need that, everyone already knows Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
This is, finally, perhaps the most important property of all. In my experiments with shapes and buildings, I have discovered that the other fourteen ways in which centers come to life will make a center which is compact, beautiful, determined, subtle – but which without this fifteenth property, can still often somehow be strangely separate, cut off from what lies around it, lonely, awkward in its loneliness, too brittle, too sharp, perhaps too well delineated – above all, too egocentric, because it shouts, “Look at me, look at me, look how beautiful I am.” 231, Not-separateness
And there’s nothing that I personally like less than that sort of demand for attention. Nothing and nobody should ever stand with no purpose but that of stealing attention away from other things. Sit back and do something worth attention, and just trust that it will come. Probably the thing I like least about the world, forcing someone to pay attention to you.
The sad truth is that the works of the last fifty years have consciously abandoned understanding, or use, of these properties. 237, The nature of meaning and the fifteen properties
This will, later, give new insights [...] – and how, finally, the unfolding of wholeness might one day be understood as a single law which underlies the entirety of everything we know as nature. 245
Einstein should’ve been an architect.
288: Bell’s theorem.
When we think it through, there appears to be a puzzling anomaly in this conclusion. Among natural phenomenon, the fifteen properties seem to appear, pervasively, in almost everything. Yet among human artifacts, the fifteen properties appear only in the good ones. How can the very same properties be marks of good structure in human artifacts, and yet be present in all of nature? What is it about nature which always makes its structures “good”? 293
The existence of a personal feeling in a thing or system is not a subjective quality of limited validity, but an objective quality whose existence is as fundamental to any given situation as the more mechanical facts to which we are accustomed. 301
We become happy in the presence of deep wholeness. When I am in a building which has life, I have a happiness in me, a comforting and profound wholesomeness. Unlike those structures pursued by science, which are remote from us and have only mechanical reality, the field of centers is somehow part of us, connected with the very essence of being human. 308
This sort of subtle self improvement is great, how can I best structure my environment as to be happiest and most successful? Continuing:
The proper understanding of the connection between objective life in a thing and my own deep-seated happiness is fundamental and goes to the very nature of order itself. Once understood, this connection is capable of healing a rift between us and our understanding of the universe which has existed since the 17th century. In this new understanding even though we continue to recognize wholeness as a structure which exists “out there,” we l;earn that is is also a real unity which exists “in here,” in each person’s heart. 308
I believe that, in all contemporary cultures, people have been robbed of their heritage, not so much because ancient culture has been destroyed, but more because today’s prevailing culture robs people of the feeling that is inherent in them, their true feeling, their true liking. 350
I like Alexanders anti-establishment bent, probably because I for the most part hate the established commons today. I can’t help but think that as good as things are (I’m sure not starving, live in a beautiful house, nobody is trying to kill me) I feel that things are really fucked up (anywhere but the western countries, and even below the surface of our culture today), and they probably are. It’s something you can just ignore and live through, and maybe I’m just sensationalizing (maybe global warming is fabricated by wacko scientists bent on taking over the world?), but we’re doing terrible things to the world, incubating wars all over, poisoning the water we drink and the cows that we butcher and drug and eat, tearing down the rainforest to grow soybeans, etc. The abandonment of ancient culture does seem to equate with these perceived disasters in the making, although those of us with the power to make the changes and stop them are sitting dandy in our blacktop cities and traveling all overt he world to see the beautiful areas of the world deemed special enough to be protected from our ravages. But ah, ranting done. (And look at how I just dismissed my thoughts, as if it really doesn’t matter, things will turn out alright. At least in the no more then 80 years I have left in my life…)
It’s not only the human situations which cause the expanding and contracting of my humanity. It is everything in my surroundings, my experience, the physical world I pass through, the activities and actions I encounter. Even architectural details are like this. They support me, or they deny me, in varying degrees. An ordinary iron railing may be very positive. It is no big thing, but as I look at it, as I am aware of being with it, very, very slightly I feel more of a person, a little bit more valuable. 356, The expanding and contracting of out humanity
Using Wertheimer’s definition of freedom1, we may define the best environment for human life. It would be one which gives people the maximum chance to be free, one which actually allows them to be free. A living environment is one which encourages, allows, each person to react appropriately to what happens, hence to be free, hence to encourage the most fruitful development in each person. THis in an environment which goers 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 is an environment in which a person is free to grow, if she wishes to grow, and to do so where, and how, she chooses.
1 from A story of three days, a short story written by Max Wertheimer.
384: Photographer “André Kertész”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/André_Kertész
397: The Eishin Campus, a school designed by Alexander and his crew outside of Tokyo. (_For the first time in my life, I felt that I was free._, said a student being interviewed about what was so special about the complex.)
Chapter 11.11, titled “Throw out all functional explanations in your mind except the life of centers”. we can best assess function by assessing the degree of life in various centers. Forget all ideas about design that exist, these are better.
And if you too feel something like this, then with Diderot, you may frankly say this idea is simpler, and more direct, than saying that there is a dead mechanical world, in which a few living creatures have appeared… far simpler to say that it is all alive in its cooperation, and that space itself, the space we formerly thought of as a dull, mathematical, cold, inorganic medium which houses a few living things, is itself – rather – touched, sparked, and burning. 430
I like this conception. This is the new way to look at the world, it’s all alive, even the plastic and sheet metal and stone. We humans have no conception at all what the fuck is actually going on in the world, just some ideas which have demonstrated their effectiveness at capturing the underlying forces of the world.
I’ve thought for a time now that we don’t actually have any fucking idea how the world works. I don’t see the scientific method as the way to figure that kind of thing out, it only works delude ourselves with shallow explanations that 100 years later will be overturned by other shallow, but slightly less so, scientific ideas. That’s how science has gone since its invention. Give me a scientific principle that’s held for more than 200 years and will likely hold 200 more.
I think it’s extremely dangerous, because we think that we have the world figured out, based on the fact that we create these impressive machines and do amazing things with them. But as the issues of global warming and pollution show, we really don’t know what we’re doing at all. Is progress burning our planet into a global ocean and poisoning our food and drink to the point of obesity and cancer epidemics? Really?
We have suffered, in the last hundred years especially, because the old roots of architecture – its sound pre-intellectual traditions – have largely disappeared, and because the lawless, arbitrary efforts to define a new architecture – a modern architecture – have been, so far, almost entirely without a coherent basis. 442
Replace architecture with anything – politics, industry, environment – and I think the above holds just as well as with architecture.
This whole idea is: indeed the basis from which we ought to proceed, and therefore the basis from which we must proceed. 442 Just thought that was a good way to put it.
I can’t wait to get through the next few books in the series, but each book costs $75, and I don’t think that they’re on the shelves of my library at college. I’ll have to do some thinking about how to get my hands on them.
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