Weeknotes #5: Nature of Order—Book 1 Recap
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.
November 5, 2020. It is the 5th seminar, in which:
- We complete reading The Phenomenon of Life
- Yodan challenges the group: do we really believe this view of the world is, or can be, true?
- We consider the role of Alexander’s architecture (and cosmology) as it relates to established architecture
- We prepare to move in to Book II, The Process of Creating Life
5 Weeks Into seminar
In this last seminar, and the final reading of Book I, we see the full aim and ambition of the Nature of Order (even if we don’t see how it will play out yet — Book IV is a real trip.) I will try to recharacterize the broad arc of what we’ve seen in these books — a better and more useful look at weeks 1, 2, 3, and 4, cumulatively.
Alexander starts by asking what is wrong with the modern world, straight away pointing to the malaise, the disease, that our environment causes in us when it is not and cannot be nourishing to us. And with a conviction and desire to get us firmly rooted into a place from which we can build a world that is whole and alive…
Remember: the Nature of Order came about because of a dissatisfaction with Patterns. It became clear to Alexander that the results generated from patterns could create small and local improvements — better entrances, livelier living rooms, more beautiful gardens, and so on — but on the whole, when others took a pattern approach, they did not necessarily create buildings with the character of life that Alexander was striving for. It was not clear that these results actually healed the larger environments they were a part of.
And so he needed to find a deeper, even more complete way to describe and transmit what he had discovered in the process of creating and evaluating the impact of his own build work: and thus, the Nature of Order…
Recounting the Arc of Book I
In Book I, we first grapple with life in space, its ability to generate feeling in us. How this works is by way of an underlying substrate in the world (the universe) — call it wholeness, or the mathematical object W — which carries in it a latent order that can be expressed, or not, into the world as living structure.
Centers
The entities underlying living structure are “centers.” These are field-like regions of space from the size of (for our current architectural purposes) a framing nail to a city block or a neighborhood. (We could say that the largest center is likely the known universe and everything extant within it. But then again, perhaps the largest center is that known universe along with the overarching void that contains it, taken together…)
Anyway: a center. A “center,” this entity, this field-local locus, is simply one instance of a coherent organization of space, and one that can be perceived as such. Windows, tables, chairs, doors, walls, paintings, potted plants, yes, these are all centers.
What is tricky, at first, is that centers don’t need to be things. Centers are also the space in a courtyard, the open volume of a room, a sunbeam shimmering down from a dusty window, the patches of light glimmering through the leaves, the interlock of two hands shaking, the shape of space created by the outside of a teacup. Everything, insofar as we can rest our attention on it, differentiate it from its surroundings in some way, is a center.
The way that centers interact with the underlying wholeness is this: when they are deeply overlapped, interlocked, intertwingled and yet coherent in their own right; when all centers in some area of space work to create more strength and coherence for the centers around them, then they begin to mirror the nature of the underlying wholeness. They work in a harmony that can generate profound feeling in the observer. They are living structure. They make this region of space more alive.
Properties
Assume with me, that this is true. Then we can move on to the fifteen fundamental properties. Alexander spent 20 years working to find the common geometric properties of living structure. At first, he simply noticed some common characteristics in those places, objects, and activities that could generate a real and profound feeling in the observer. So he and colleagues worked to sharpen their ability to discriminate which things and place had more or less life, and to systematically identify those properties present in the field of centers for those things.
They settled on fifteen. Fifteen “properties” that better characterized as relationships between centers in a given activity or region of space. Fifteen ways that describe how centers can work together to produce living structure. Alexander notes that this isn’t a final number, but it is like the correct order of magnitude: it will be much closer to fifteen than 5 or 100.
The Criterion: Life
With this theory of centers and life in structure laid down, Alexander next moves to the crucial point: we humans, in this conceptualization of the world — like all other natural phenomena — are also centers, also embedded and enmeshed and interlocked into the structure of the word, with the ability to bring forth more life in that structure, or not, by our actions of building and creation. And this is the ultimate criterion Alexander will lay forth for value in works of art and architecture: does it create profound feeling in the observer? Does it make them feel more whole, more humane, more in touch with the reality of their whole true selves? Are they in a structure and a state where they can respond appropriately and freely to the world around them? Being able to honestly and truly say “yes” to these questions is what good means for space in Alexander’s view of the world.
Of course, any scientific-minded people will ask — how do you think you’re going to measure that? And Alexander’s argument is as simple as they come: have people make this judgment. Let truth come from the reality of users, experiencers, observers. It’s not so naive a response as to allow for a tyranny of the majority or a crush of idiosyncratic preference — there is a well developed class of questions that must be asked, and a real sensitivity to be developed, if one would like to reliably make difficult judgments on their own.
Human-as-Instrument
Alexander calls it the Mirror of the Self test. The first version of the test takes paired images of objects, places, activities, and asks the observer to really, truly, judge which of these more resembles his or her own true self. It is an attempt to cut past the idiosyncracy of personality quirks and ego, and often must be reframed a number of times before observers can relinquish the staid and serious sense of self-important adulthood that prevents them from answering the question as it is truly asked.
Some may take years of practice to delve beneath the surface, into understanding their ‘truer’ sense of self. (In this way, the act of attempting to earnestly answer this question is instructive, and a place for growth, in its own right.) Some approach the test with a relaxed and open curiosity, an intellection drive to really answer the question as it is, and will have a much easier time working with this method — ultimately the test is a decision-making tool. And perhaps others may never let themselves go deeper. What Alexander found is that we can see fairly consistent, reliable, not-due-to-chance results of 70 or even 80% agreement among observers for specific choices in performing the mirror of the self test.
Life Is a Primitive
How could that be? How could people really know when one building, one chair, one stairway really is a better picture of their true self? How could they reliably come to identify the places, the choice, that generates a profound feeling, can spark life in the sense of one’s own humanity?
First, we go back to Alexander’s opening look at the book. At the beautiful and lively imagery of people and places throughout the volume. I believe, quite strongly, that it should go without saying that some places can indeed be more profound in their feeling, more alive. Alexander takes this feeling and life as the undefined primitive of the universe. Imagine those places you have felt a reverent wonder and a deep and abiding connection to yourself, the environment, and the people around you. Would you deny that this feeling can exist?
In Alexander’s theory of wholeness, life, and centers, we have to remember that “we” are not outside the system. There is no bifurcation of nature and society. All there is, entirely, is centers on top of centers, within, outside, connected, and interlocking other centers. The degree to which those centers are related to each other by way of the fifteen properties is a proxy for us to understand how well they reflect the nature of the underlying substrate of wholeness. And because we ourselves are centers, integral to the system/structure we use and observe, unfold of that same wholeness, of course we can reliably judge when the structure is more alive, when it gets closer to our true selves.
The Cartesian Conundrum—Extending Empiricism
Alexander says that the character of modern science, its “objective nature” arises chiefly from the fact that its results can be shared (p.352). Take a machine-like view of some aspect of the world, create a circumstance in which we can reliably create the same results when we experiment upon them, and by nature of this shared view we have an “objective” picture. Note that the observer is explicitly excluded from the frame.
Now, consider Alexander’s proposition: it’s a view of space in which the observer a part of and integral to that space. It is impossible to treat this concept seriously and also insist that the observer is removed form the picture, which is the standard Cartesian approach to a scientific inquiry.
And of course, we see an immediate challenge with the Cartesin approach: if the method used to create our view of the world cannot allow us to entertain a reasonable hypothesis, do we extend the method, or discard the hypothesis? This is the root of Alexander’s scientific approach, and what he is asking us to work with.What we require is an extension to the area of scientific observation where the observer (and the observer’s judgment) can be a part of the picture in an objective way.
Is a hypothesis about these elusive personal judgments really reasonable, are they really, potentially, empirical? Alexander states that they are: they are experienced as inner feeling, but their origins are in real and concrete phenomena: they can be measured and they can be shared. Because observers are instruments, because we ourselves are core, we cannot rely on the creation of an external experimental setup. We need a tool like the mirror of the self that allows for an internal experimental setup.
Objectivity comes because these results are and can be shared. This is an extension to the Cartesian method of science — certainly not always appropriate — that is useful in the context of deciding which actions can create a more-living structure in the world. Observation’s of the observers inner state can tell us real things about the external world, and are one potential for a “post-Cartesian form of criterion for objectivity (p.364).”
Conclusion
Alexander urges us to throw out any artificial notions of form or function except for the idea of establishing the life in a field of centers. Don’t give in to the hubris of a modern planner and believe that you, in all your righteous intelligence, can enumerate all of those goals that will make a building functionally successful. Worry instead about bringing out the life in a field of centers: form, function, ornament, will take care of themselves: “In nature there is essentially nothing that can be identified as a pure ornament without function. Conversely, in nature there is essentially no system that can be identified as functional which is not also beautiful in an ornamental sense. In nature there is simply no division between ornament and function (p.404).”
The most noble task we have is to make the world around us, wherever and however we are capable, more whole and more alive. To help bring forth living structure in the world. To unfold it to get there with the users, experiencers, and inhabitants of that place, so it can become healthy and alive according to the truth of their own deep feeling.
We have a theory with which to evaluate the potential life in a field centers, properties we can use to train our sensitivity, a test we can use for making decisions and honing our judgment. Ultimately, what we do when we make these judgments is not to attempt to validate the theory of centers or “prove” Alexander right. Rather we are employing one tool that gets us closer to good decision making in the elusive and catastrophically important task of creating a more whole and healthy world around us. In building beauty.
How, then, do we really design or create living structure? How do we make things and places which can truly make people become more whole, more human, more free? We find out in the next volume, Book 2: The Process of Creating Life.
Closing, Book 1 Seminar
Yodan closes out the first book’s message at the end of seminar. I paraphrase and lightly extend:
If you want to make a better and more beautiful world… you must be able to observe the feeling that each decision arouses in you in the process of building and creating. It’s not how you feel in a personal or idiosyncratic sense, the important thing is what’s out there in the world and its capacity to generate that profound feeling in you. The only way you can approach what’s out there is by learning to understand your own sense of internal heath, wellbeing, and wholeness.
And that’s week 5 in the books. See you next week.
Thanks to Building Beauty for creating the Nature of Order reading seminar, and keeping it a free and publicly accessible part of the program.
Whether or not you’re a builder, if you feel a spark in the above, I can only recommend you find your way to a personal copy of the Nature of Order. It’s a remarkable work.
