The document discusses Christopher Alexander's work exploring the phenomenon of life and the nature of order in the universe. It describes how Alexander began a scientific inquiry into how living structures emerge in nature. He realized that in natural systems, there is nothing other than emergence. Every thing is constantly emerging. Emergence indicates a general recognition of patterns that exist universally in any natural phenomenon and structures life. Therefore, any principle that creates these qualities in nature must be critically examined in these cases. Alexander believed it is possible to think about all these cases in a fundamentally uniform way. The key is evolution by gradual differentiation - any natural system follows a mathematical wholeness and is subject to gradients that allow transformations, moving the overall pattern in a special direction of
4. Freedom
“If everyone is trying to do something different in a town or community, different in kind,
not different in detail of execution, then of course there will be chaos; just, indeed, what
we have experienced in modern urbanism.”
“Infected by positivism, by postmodernism, and by deconstructivism, and exhilarated by a
phony pluralism of ‘‘anything goes,’’ architects tried to get by, by saying everyone should
do ‘‘their’’ thing. . . each person is entitled to his view, her opinion, and so on. All true
enough as comments on the freedom of human beings. “
9. WHOLENESS
And its building blocks: The Centers
"the wholeness we see," is a real,
well-defined structure, not merely
a cognitive impression. That the
thing we recognize as the "gestalt’
of a figure, is - in each case - a
describable mathematical
structure.
However, there was no then-
existing mathematical structure I
knew of, which was able to capture
this "something" or which could
embody it. “
85. Spirit
when a thing is well made, it is an actual
realization of spirit, a physical appearance
and creation, realization, of spirit in this
world. The process by which a center is
made is the process by which spirit becomes
manifest, becomes actual.
God
So, when that quiet, happy, sad paste
occurs, everything is at peace – then spirit is
made real, the underlying spirit of the world,
its potential, becomes concrete and real.
Then, at the moment, we are face to face
with God. This quality, when it appears in
things, people, in a moment, in an event, is
God.
86. A necessary state of mind
you make each building in a way which is a
gift to God.
The essence of this state of mind is that
the building must not shout. Emotionally, it
must be completely quiet.
That means I must give up my wish to
draw attention to myself. I must honestly
want the thing which I am making to
become part of the greater world,
inseparable from it... Thus, to make a thing
which is one, I struggle- myself, the maker-
to become one with the world.
87. This is why, from a practical point of view, there is a
connection between building and religion. The
connection is not historical. It is empirical, because
the religious disciplines are just those which have
taught people how, practically speaking, to lose
themselves. Not only how to become not-separate
but – far harder- how to become willing to become
not-separate.
not-separateness
Not-separateness, like everything else we have
discussed, is a physical attribute of order. It is
something which is visible with in any building that
has life. But when we concentrate on the problem of
creating it, it arises only from a certain state of mind.
I could say that a building which has life in some way
mirrors the structure of our mind, our body, or our
self.
88. COHERENCE :as an objective concept
and
The unavoidable relationship between
structure, fact and beauty
Estimate the degree of complexity
well-developed system of local symmetries and
sub-symmetries.
89. “This might be powerful enough, in principle, to help us act as nature does — to create
adaptation and beauty in complex systems, not only efficiency— and to restore to the
landscape of Earth what we have been busy, for two centuries, unintentionally taking away. “