His review of The Nature of Order, was first
published in Resurgence, 2004.
THE UNIVERSE IS abundantly filled with living structure at
every level of scale. Energy, matter, and information cascade from vast sheets
of galaxies through to our own solar system, to the earth, to the oak
glistening in the glade, to its microbial symbionts, on to their proteins, and
ultimately to the Planck scale at which spacetime becomes discrete.
When we are most alive, we
experience the universe in its wholeness. We experience our connection to a
thirteen-billion year old unfolding story that links every living cell, every
particle, every star. Why then are we surrounded with buildings, landscapes,
and artefacts that engender fragmentation?
Christopher Alexander, an
architect, builder and mathematician, has spent forty years attempting to
discern the living structure inherent in the universe and harvest this
structure for use in practical processes that repair damaged places and create
harmonious new ones. In his extraordinary four-volume summation of a fruitful
life’s work, The Nature of Order,
Alexander proposes both a new science and a new approach to buildings and
places unified by a profound notion of wholeness as the governing field.
Wholeness is understood as a
richly nonlinear field of interactions among salient entities – or centres – with surprising, yet
empirically verifiable properties. Centres support larger centres, and in turn
are recursively formed from smaller centres. As we know from experience, subtle
changes may greatly affect the field of wholeness. The field has a number of
postulated mathematical properties, but currently resists even approximate
calculation.
Fortunately,
we can access the field of wholeness through personal observation. We need
merely ask, “To what degree each of two things we are trying to judge is, or is
not, a picture of the self – and by this I mean your and my wholesome self,
perhaps even our eternal self”. This mirror of the self test asks us to awaken
to our deepest feelings in the presence of a farmhouse, a chair, a painting, and
to see whether we are made more or less alive. Remarkably, extensive
experiments have demonstrated that subjects cross-culturally will reach
extremely high levels of agreement after honest engagement with the task of
evaluating wholeness.
Based on
intensive examination of thousand of examples, Alexander posits fifteen
fundamental properties that generate life and wholeness from a system of
centres. These properties include levels of scale, strong centres, boundaries,
alternating repetition, positive space, good shape, local symmetries, deep
interlock and ambiguity, contrast, gradients, roughness, echoes, the void,
simplicity, inner calm and not-separateness. This list, while provisional,
hints at something of profound importance; a comprehensive taxonomy of
transformations that generate orderly, larger and larger wholes with living
structure.
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