This is the first part of an extensive four part essay by Christopher Alexander, exploring the deep fundamentals of architecture, especially what gives a building a transcendent feeling of being “alive.”
In this first book he explores this quality of life, and how it can be found in everything from forests to minerals. For example, gold has a quality of vitality and liveliness that is unlike other metals.
Along the way he lays out several principles.
- The quality of life is mainly experienced through feeling, on an almost visceral level. We recognize it but can’t explain it.
- The quality of life is universal, there seems to be near unanimous agreement about whether certain structures have this quality of life.
- The quality of life exists on a continuum, all things have some degree of life, others have more life.
- A building will have more life if it was created using an unfolding sequence, the way a flower unfolds and grows from a seed one step at a time, growing more complex with each stage.
- Every building has multiple “centers” or concentrations of the building’s essence. At each step of the unfolding process these centers are strengthened, which creates the essence or feeling of being alive.
- There are 15 geometric patterns, any of which can be applied to a center to strengthen it and add life.
“What is going on is that life — an emergent thing in the space itself — appears as the space wakes up. When something works, or is ‘functional,’ its space is awakened to a very high degree. It becomes alive. The space itself becomes alive” (p 427).
The Nature of Order, Book One, The Phenomenon of Life
By Christopher Alexander
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Other Books in the Series
The Nature of Order, Book Two, The Process of Creating Life
