Alexander’s ‘Nature of Order,’ Books One & Two Summary
Notes on the Nature of Order Seminar series — part of the Building Beauty Post-Graduate Diploma in Architecture. A weekly running reflection for myself, for friends, and for those curious about Christopher Alexander’s work and its importance in shaping a healthy, living world.
17 December, 2020. It is the 11th seminar, in which:
- We read the final pages of The Process of Creating Life, pp. 565–632
- Here, I attempt to recap what we’ve encountered in these first thousand pages of The Nature of Order
- Yodan leads a group discussion, asking how we’ve engaged with the material, where we have doubts, and what impact we’ve seen in our own practice
- We take a break — resuming in January with Book Three: A Vision of a Living World
What if design were a truly empirical science? That is, what if there was some theory beneath the acts of design and architecture that could predict how and why certain structures work (or don’t)? What if that theory could explain how to generate good — living, beautiful — buildings and objectively test the validity of that work?
Perhaps our built works could retake their rightful place: in and of nature, alongside the trees, the people, the sea, the hills, and stars…
It would mean that how we conceive of design must fundamentally change. It would mean that what we come to think of as ‘life’ would be recast in a new and far-reaching form. And it would mean that the boundaries of science would expand, once again recognizing that we-ourselves — our experiences of the world — are valid, valuable, and fundamental sources of design insight.
It is this kind of theory that Christopher Alexander lays forth in the Nature of Order.
Nature of Order Recap
Backing out after a thousand pages of theory, I try to provide a conceptual view of what we’ve encountered so far as Alexander builds his picture of the universe and architecture in Books One and Two of The Nature of Order.
Week 1: Life, Wholeness, and Centers
Week 1: Book One, The Phenomenon of Life, pp. 1–142
We don’t get anywhere in talking about a new architecture without a core criterion that we can use to objectively judge and evaluate it. For Alexander, this is life, wholeness, beauty—all terms that can be used interchangeably as he loads them with meaning over these first two books. What was an idea of “good fit” in Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964), and “the quality without a name” in The Timeless Way of Building (1979) and A Pattern Language (1977) is now this wholeness and life.
Alexander introduces the idea of a ‘center,’ a fieldlike part of space or structure that is somehow distinct from the other centers around it, as the fundamental element in the construction of the universe. Centers as fields are overlapping, interlocked, co-dependent, defined in terms of their relationships to other centers. This perspective is liberating, as we can conceptualize everything we encounter in space and time as the product of relationships between centers.
And Alexander claims that life can exist in the structure of the world, extending the idea of life beyond our biological definition. He says that we can sense and connect to this life, feel a deep connection to the wholeness as it has unfolded into the world. How this life emergences is a direct product of how centers relate to one other, how they support one another.
Fifteen Properties
Week 2: Book One, The Phenomenon of Life, pp. 143–194 & Week 3: Book One, The Phenomenon of Life, pp. 195–298
To be more specific about it, after 20 years of study, Alexander found 15 properties that are positive indicators of life in structure. The number isn’t fixed but the order of magnitude is about right, he says—maybe there are 10–20 properties one could derive, but not 5 or 50.
These properties each express a geometrical relationship between centers. When centers are working such that they express a number of these properties, we can likely say that the object/structure/space has “more life”—expresses more of the underlying structure of wholeness—than something else that does not exhibit these properties.
Some are simple to conceptualize, like Alternating Repetition, where two repeating systems of centers embellish and enhance one another; others take work to access, like Simplicity and Inner Calm, which is not an opposite to complexity but an internal coherence that speaks to the absence of all unnecessary centers.
The Mirror of the Self
Week 4: Book One, The Phenomenon of Life, pp. 299–350
How do we know that these properties indicate the objective presence of life? Alexander proposes that we ourselves are the instrument who can do that.
He introduces a pairwise comparison called the Mirror of the Self test, where in the presence of any two similar centers, we can ask, “Which of these two things is a better picture of my true self?” It seems easy on the surface, but it requires us to understand what is meant by ‘self’ and to be able to move beyond idiosyncratic “personal” preference and be more in touch with the deep and universal experience of self.
There are a number of other formulations of the question, and all share the same core idea: that because we ourselves are centers pulsing with the whole rich experience of life, we can learn to sense when other structures share more of this quality of life, to see the degree to which structures induce this deep feeling of personal self within us. Compare your experience entering an ancient and time-adapted temple versus your experience entering a modern glassy gleaming corporate skyscraper. Alexander claims that it is the geometry of the structure that creates these feelings within us, and the more present and interwoven the 15 properties, the more likely we find the deep feeling of wholeness.
Beyond Descartes: Towards a New Empiricism
Week 5: Book One, The Phenomenon of Life, pp. 351–476
Is this test scientific? Can we really use it for a new ‘objective’ view of our core criterion for architecture?
Alexander zooms out, at the end of Book One, to speak to Descartes’ perspective in modern scientific inquiry. By reducing portions of the world into disconnected and detached machines, we create hypotheses about how these little machines work and act, test our predictions to find objective and scientific truth. And it works marvelously, or it has, in advancing our society to its current industrial state. But we ought not conflate this method with the idea of empirical objectivity itself.
Descartes’ method does not allow us to ask questions about what happens when the observer is also considered a part of the machine. This how the Mirror of the Self operates: on interconnected centers, one of which is the observer, measuring by feeling, the degree to which the other is alive.
Alexander claims that, if find repeated and reliable results from this kind of judgment, then we ought to consider it empirically and scientifically valid. Yes, we need to train ourselves to be able to answer this question reliably, but it’s no different from other specialized branches of science—radiologists must learn to read X-rays, microbiologists must learn to use microscopes, engineers must learn the mathematical models of structural forces—except that the instrument for measurement we learn to work with happens to be our own felt experience.
Now we have a theory of life-as-core-criterion-for-architecture, a structural basis that it is expressed in (centers), properties that directly correlate to the presence of life, and an empirical system to measure and judge the degree to which that life exists. That’s Book One.
Unfolding Wholeness, Structure Preserving Transformation
Week 6: Book Two, The Process of Creating Life, pp. 1–173
We move now to process. It starts with understanding that structure, living structure, is an act of “unfolding” the wholeness into strong and stronger centers that work together and support each other. This is a view of life based on differentiation: not the mechanical assembly of parts to create a whole like an erector set, but the gradual differentiation of a whole into more order, clarity, and life, like an embryo develops from an egg.
We must drop our static picture of the world—because process is paramount in determining the shape of living form. Alexander says that you may take these 15 properties as indicators of life, but they do not just exist in structure for no reason. These properties emerge as the result of transformations of structure, of specific steps in a process.
As living structure unfolds, at each step there is the possibility of strengthening existing centers, bringing latent centers to life, binding centers together with new centers: every act that will bring more life to this configuration is procedural expression of the 15 properties. A “structure preserving transformation” that acts on what exists and extends it, enhancing and also preserving the pre-existing order.
Generated and Fabricated Structure, The Living Process
Week 7: Book Two, The Process of Creating Life, pp. 175–266 & Week 8: Book Two, The Process of Creating Life, pp. 267–340 & Week 9: Book Two, The Process of Creating Life, pp. 341–494
We can set up a distinction between two kinds of structure based on the processes that form them. First, we have structure that lives, that is generated by a living / structure-preserving process that respects a full range of contextual forces. Second, we have structure that cannot be alive, that is fabricated by a procedure of assembly, such that each step in the process does not adaptively build on the results of the prior step, because each step is mechanically pre-defined.
Generated structure is living, the result of a living process. Fabricated structure is dead, the result of non-living process. We find the 15 properties in generated structure, because each step of the process is working on the existing centers and embellishing or strengthening their relationships through structure-preserving transformation (ex: we frame the wall, and then based on the entire configuration—the light in that context and the nature of space on each side of the wall—we determine the best location for the window.) Time does not really matter for fabricated structure, because the steps are not structure-preserving (ex: we frame the wall and then frame the windows because that’s where they are in the design drawing.)
There are a whole class of processes that we might consider ‘living process’, those that help us create the living generated structure we want to see in the world. Alexander defines a “fundamental differentiating process” as the master process archetype for generating architectural structure. He defines the idea of living process and then lays out 10 component facets of the fundamental differentiating process—some connected to making and life in general, some specific to the act of making our human-built environment.
Examining this process, we see that the sequence of decisions is crucial to creating life; that we must always be working toward a shared vision that is best expressed in words-and-minds (patterns), not drawings that overspecify so many decisions that ought not be made until we’re working on the real thing; that at some point a pattern-based vision must be expressed as a “brutal” geometric order for a building, imposing a physical, structural rhythm onto a previously unconstrained vision; that each step of the process must be making the whole configuration stronger, respect and work with the outcomes of each prior step; that the whole process must always be guided by the feeling of life in the whole—by the core criterion of life Alexander has been developing since the beginning of Book One.
Reorienting Societal Processes, Role of the Architect
Week 10: Book Two, The Process of Creating Life, pp. 495–564 & Week 11: Book Two, The Process of Creating Life, pp. 565–633
If only it were so simple. In his own work and projects, Alexander has found that we can create living structure through step-by-step and repeat application of the fundamental differentiating process. But how those projects came to be—through heroic and dogged effort, a near literal “battle” against the existing modes of production—prove that there are large obstacles to building a living world around us even with a guiding theory and process in-hand.
We can understand society as a complex of processes, large and small, all interacting with each other, ultimately shaping our interactions and even the structure of our buildings. Many aspects of societal process are not the realm of ‘architecture’ and yet they deeply affect the final structure of our built environment because they interact with design and construction to enable, or not, the creation of living structure. Especially those processes that deal with money, are not currently enabling living structure. How buildings are financed for lump-sum and rapid development; how construction trades are compartmentalized into piecemeal units of work, ever pushing liability down to the bottom while real decision-making and responsibility for the quality of the whole remain out of reach on the ground.
Alexander introduces a final, encompassing idea: morphogenetic process. This class of process is a living process, some version of the fundamental differentiating process, that directly contributes to the form of built structure in our world. Finding, using, and working with morphogenetic processes means working with all of the ideas in the Nature of Order so far. In one deceptively simple phrase it characterizes everything: a center-based view of structure; the goal of creating life in our buildings; a generative, structure-preserving process that respects time and context; a step-by-step adaptive procedure guided by repeat application of the fundamental differentiating process.
The “problem” so to speak, is that modern society’s processes of building are not morphogenetic. They are reductionist and piecemeal processes, driven by economics and expedience, with no fundamental orientation towards the ultimate goal, our criterion of life. One cannot easily construct a new project with morphogenetic process: society is an interconnected complex of mostly non-morphogenetic process, and any project will need to connect and work with and within a frame of the pre-existing systems that design, finance, and build. To generate living structure, one must approach the process with an entirely different value-system and mindset. The bank doesn’t understand why a project would want less money over longer time. Insurers are not prepared to cover an architect who is also licensed as a builder, taking full responsibility for the outcome of a project. Architects who work under the AIA contract system, keep a strict divide between design and construction, never taking direct responsibility for the gradual unfolding of the structure. Tradeswork is a subordinate component to the general contractor, laborers restricted to re-creating drawings on time and in-budget. Inhabitants and users of modern projects have little or no connection to the process of a building’s creation, cannot feel the state of a project and use this as a means of guiding the work forward.
The real challenge, then, is not only knowing how to work with morphogenetic process, but slowly shifting the entirety of societal processes related to building towards life. To inject morphogenetic process up and down system of building-production such that projects oriented toward life can even have a chance to work. It is not an easy task, but if we value life, it is what we must strive for. Alexander paints a compelling vision of the character a future world might have if it were constructed morphogenetically. With the same timeless, unhurried, and beautiful character we see in traditional works and buildings, through modern technology and at modern scale.
It’s not a conservative plea for a return to traditionalism. It’s a progressive view that says we have not really understood what ‘industrialized’ can be—we are still stuck in a mode of Taylorist assembly-line thinking. Pre-fabrication of components and compartmentalization of labor are modularity and efficiencies at the wrong level of the stack. Rather—and the software community has understood this well—users, designers, builders all must work together, with efficiencies designed to enable modular iterations of morphogenetic process across the whole of the building.
In a humanist plea towards the possibility of life in our built world, Alexander recasts the role of architect. It mirrors his own patterns of work and his many-leveled view of the world. Architects must become the guardian of living structure—well-built and beautiful towns, neighborhoods, buildings, and cities—across the world. Given the volume of built work we produce each year, it is inconceivable that architects can individually design and work with each, and yet they are, in Alexander’s view, those most-attuned and best-suited for ensuring that all buildings are alive, are helping to enhance the wholeness across the entire earth.
A close-up look: architect as craftsman, responsible, for the final beauty and wholeness of each specific structure. It is only through the experience of making, and personal connection with the process of construction, that we can truly become practiced and responsible for building beauty into the world. Architects must learn how to guide construction processes and understand how that process generates living form. And do so always recognizing that the conditions of every building are unique, and so, under a structure-preserving process, will the building be. A far-out view: architect as gardener of living structure, nourishing the world by developing, sharing, and implementing the morphogenetic sequences from which our buildings grow. Providing the tools and orchestration necessary for people and communities to unfold life. Understanding that there is so much people could and would do for themselves, if a system was in place to help them gradually unfold their own buildings.
It’s an expansive role. It overlaps with so many other existing and ‘separate’ disciplines. It entails working towards the reorientation of an entire class of societal process, injecting new values into a system that is optimized for the sterile forms endemic to financially expedient development.
And yet… what else is there to do? If we believe that structure can be ‘alive’ and whole in the Alexandrian sense, if we take living structure as a necessity for humans to feel alive, at ease, and free in their environments, and if we understand the idea of morphogenetic processes and the obstacles to its implementation… the way forward is very clear.
There are the centers of our built environment, and all the centers of our practices, processes, people, projects, patterns of thought. (And sunbeams, parks, courtyards, paintings, books, sunflowers, ponds, streets, gardens, birds, and trees. And so on.) It’s all centers, all way up and down, interconnected, intertwined, interrelated, contained-and-containing. We find the centers that are most alive, and strengthen the smaller centers around them. We develop the latent centers that can give a larger whole the guiding feeling of life. We find those centers most in need of repair and gradually enhance them, step by step, each step bringing just a bit more life and wholeness. Slowly, with effort, inevitably, we bring more life and more beauty in the world; we help the world rediscover what it has forgotten it’s missing.
Semester 1: Reflection
In the final, 11th, seminar, Yodan asks us three questions.
1. What are the main lessons that you take from these two books?
On this third read of the Nature of Order, I begin to feel the power and freedom of ‘thinking in centers.’ Any “thing” we can put our attention on—built structure, spaces, actions, places, objects—is a field-like center connected to all of the other centers around, within, and about it. The ultimate logical extent of systems-thinking, this interdependent fieldlike fabric of structure moves up and down the levels of scale to encompass everything that conceivably exists from the smallest fundamental field/particles of physics through the realms we inhabit and interact with each day up to the entirety of the universe and whatever void may encompass it.
The idea of any thing-as-isolated-entity is a construction useful in navigating and conceptualizing the world, in scientific exploration. But it severely restricts us in understanding and evaluating emergent, systemic phenomena and our subjective experience of reality. What becomes important, in a center-based view, are the ways different centers work together to create and support life and higher-order structure.
What is a tree? From one point of view, we may look at the organism as a distinct entity, characterizing it by its roots, its trunk, its shoots, its leaves, how they function and how they grow. It’s interesting, productive, and sensible, but there’s pernicious severing of context that lets us imagine we understand this tree in the abstract while at the same blinding us to the contextual relationships that actually constitute what the thing is/does. From a center point of view, it means we might describe a tree as a system that grows toward the sun for light, its shape dictated by the space available for it to grow into; as a system that draws water from the ground and releases it into environment, cooling the air around it; as a system that exchanges nutrients with the other plants and trees around it, nourishment and life passing through woven network of roots and fungal mycelia; as a system that supports and enables life for creatures large and small, one that has shaped and is shaped by its interaction with bacteria, bees, birds, bats, , fungus, virus, human, and plant; and so on—what a tree really ‘is’ is a functional and structural expression of the interaction of all of these relationships, as unfolded by a generative process over time.
This multiple parallel vision is how we must understand our buildings, and in fact anything we may be working on: as centers—across all levels of scale, defined only by their relationship to/with other centers. It forces us to take stock of all the potential relationships at play in a given center, focuses us on enhancing and strengthening the center from the perspective of those relationships.
From a center-like mindset, Alexander and team derived the timeless patterns presented in A Pattern Language. He rails against the modern built world because the structure of this world affects us so deeply, and the current systems of building production cannot respect the rich and complex reality of buildings as they living systems they are meant to be. Seeing in centers, there is no such thing as a truly blank page, no landscape should be cleared-and-grubbed to artificial sterility: there is an existing fabric to be understood and brought more to life with each and every center we act on.
We are ourselves centers in this structure, one more inextricably emergent entity in the larger fabric of wholeness. We can bring ourselves to life by creating and strengthening life in the centers we relate to—rooms, loved ones, buildings, teams, streets, music, neighbors, friends, community, artwork, courtyards, cafes—every time we talk, write, draw, or build; make, play, think, or act.
2. What are the concepts or ideas in the books that you are less convinced about, and why?
I am almost entirely sympathetic to the arguments Alexander lays out: the living view of space and structure, the living process needed to create life, the inability of our current systems of production to produce life.
I am willing to believe and argue for this view, and yet, we need evidence. Alexander proposes a reconfiguration of Cartesian empiricism to incorporate “subjective” human experience, one that will set us up to find or measure the degree of objective life in the space and structure around us. We can work, right now, under this framework to test the theory laid out in the Nature of Order: do people indeed feel “more alive” when they live in the houses Alexander has built, versus those produced by modern-industrial methods of production? Do students feel more “free and at ease” when they spend their days studying at the campus Alexander built, compared to others at schools nearby? Do the residents of the homeless shelter Alexander’s built in San Jose feel more dignity when they stay here, versus other places? To what degree might these felt difference affect other parts of our lives and well-being? Alexander has defined the theory, made its claims, and provided us with tools to investigate them under this new paradigm. There is still so much work to be done in systematically understanding and investigating all the implications coming from the Nature of Order so far.
One other thread that came up in seminar was not a doubt about the material itself, but a doubt that we might actually be able to achieve the vision of a living world that all of Alexander’s work points toward. The task is immense. The predominant system of production and value is deeply entrenched in our built world, in our daily lives, in all the processes of society, and is working tirelessly to extend and entrench itself. Can we really imagine a society that values life and is organized such that building and construction can happen freely from the bottom up? Where human feeling shapes our world instead of the market? It is truly hard to imagine in context of the current Western-world culture.
Even so: all we need to do is look at the world around us and find out where the latent centers lie, to give them life through acts of making and attention, ever strengthening and solidifying the wholeness where we find it.
3. In what way has this book changed your practice?
This reflection and writing effort is the most visible change in my own practice. In the last 20 years have read a volume of books, with highly varying degrees of worth; many I have re-integrated into my practice and larger understanding of the world. What I had not undertaken before was a creative and systematic exposition of what I have found through that reading. I find in the Nature of Order two distinct encouragements to do so.
The first is the sheer brilliance, comprehensiveness, and audacity of what is written and expressed through Alexander’s work. Connecting to this material, seeing the vision that’s proposed as-compared to the reality we’re currently constructing for ourselves… I feel compelled to share. In hunting the treasures to be found in reading, no other glitters so brightly and yet begs only to be given back into the world.
The second encouragement is the new way to see. In line with the lesson above, seeing that the world is a vibrant and ever-evolving system of co-dependent centers fundamentally alters what it means to engage in a creative act. Creative making is not an isolated activity but and enrichment of the living fabric of the world, operating the living process on the centers at hand. It means understanding the structure and reality that already exists, identifying the centers to work, and breathing life into them with care, attention, and a sensitivity to the vision of what they may be.
For the prior 10 weeks, I have left seminar not to “write an essay,” but to ask how best to bring life into one more small center that interacts with what we’ve encountered. Now, the last 10 centers, though small, have created the platform for this one. The form that is created, this center, is an unfolding born of the intersecting fields of so many other centers (Alexander, his books, Alexander’s students and collaborators in Building Beauty, the seminar discussion group, Alexander’s and others’ built works, my experiences of architecture and art and public space, my writing, photographs, drawings) is itself enhanced by—and one hopes, enhancing—each of them.
Less visible, and just as visceral, I have found that the idea of a living process translates as well to the creation of software as it does to the built environment. Nowhere is it easy to achieve, but moving beyond the dogma of method (for us, it has been Agile, or Design Thinking, or Human-Centered, Research-Driven, and so on…), I recognize that the process itself must be constructed in such a way as to enable the thing we are making to unfold naturally; then we select appropriate methods for our context. It is a new frame to engage with teams and position design research or product strategy in the larger context of what the organization is attempting to build. (And recognizing the existence and implications of projects without contextual purpose, one is able to see more clearly what might be the real work, regardless of what a client is initially asking for.)
Bonus Reflection: Working with Others
It’s easy to credit the Nature of Order in-and-of itself for all the above, yet the crucible for my own thought is the reading seminar put on by the Building Beauty program. Over 3 years of attendance I’ve come to find mentors, collaborators, provocateurs, and allies. We read the same material, we experience it differently, we grow our understanding through discussion, interpretation, and practice: it grows more rich and rewarding over time.
I see a spark to chase when I forma thread worth following; I find productive in how my perspective resonates (or not) with the group. Every member of the seminar who contributes has colored and re-shaped my perspective in all that’s interpreted above. And it is especially in Yodan, Nikos, Or, Susan, Narendra, and Muni I have found strong sources of inspiration, encouragement, questions, or provocation, as the case may be. Thank you, all of you.
Closing
Yodan turns the floor to Muni and Narendra to close the session with thoughts on Alexander’s work and the Nature of Order. Their own text, The Discovery of Architecture, was lauded by Alexander as “a treasure of the highest value.” I note just a short portion of their remarks, here.
Muni:
It’s quite clear that Alexander’s systemization is very distinctive. He has the feeling question as a driving force. These are generally seen as opposite things, science and feeling: they’re not opposites but very different kinds of ways of looking at the world around us…
In Alexander’s case the words become wonderful tools, the whole process of creating a physical reality becomes very real in his works. I think that’s a wonderful thing.
Narendra:
For me, too, it’s been a learning experience, to read through Alexander again…
The ground reality is that when you are engaging in anything you are doing, you think of making, you start making within your own mind, within your own consciousness. When you work with a society, it is your understanding of that society that works through you. Self is as important as that society is.
Centers grow, centers come into being, centers replace other centers, centers decay, and centers die: this is all things and it is happening to all things.
That’s Semester One in the books.
Thanks to Building Beauty for creating the Nature of Order reading seminar, making it a free and publicly accessible part of the program.
