Weeknotes #7: Nature of Order — Step by Step Adaptation, Always Improving the Whole
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.
19 November, 2020. It is the 7th seminar, in which:
- We read Book Two, The Process of Creating Life, pp. 175–276
- Alexander discusses the distinction of Generated and Fabricated Structure
- We are introduced to the first two facets of Living Processes: I. Step by Step Adaptation, and II. Each Step is Always Helping to Enhance the Whole
- We discuss the formulation of Indian settlements as laid out in plan in the texts, and experienced in person by Muni to exemplify the idea of ‘generated’ and ‘fabricated’ structure
- Nikos highlights the philosophical challenge we are undertaking; Muni offers an opposing point of view; Or elegantly recasts our efforts to build a living world in Alexander’s language of centers and living processes
- This one comes up to the deadline, published right as Week 8 starts.
Generated vs. Fabricated Structure
To begin, Alexander has us consider a distinction between two types of structure. A distinction of geometric quality, between “generated” and “fabricated” structure. While we are characterizing the quality of the structure for life, it ultimately asks of the process that put something into the world — did it even have a chance to be alive? Was it possible, as this structure was coming to be, that it could have adapted to its environment, and the conditions resulting from its own construction? If not, it is fabricated, and it will be riddled with thousands, literally thousands, of mistakes.
In a generated structure, time plays a real and meaningful role in the evolution of its structure. That is, each step along the process means that the structure can actually respond to its new state, and this new state can inform the next step. In our modern methods of fabrication, this is not the case. The only role time plays is a measure of “whether or not we’re hitting the schedule.” After the foundation is laid, the next move is already planned, has been planned long ago on the drawing board. When the walls are framed, where and how the windows will be placed was decided long ago, on the drawing board. As a room is detailed, the size and position of trim was decided long ago, perhaps in a 3D model, likely value-engineered into a thin strip of wood that makes us wish someone had at least tried to make it nice…
Given how we produce our structures, they have no choice but to be fabricated, to be an arrangement of pre-existing elements instead of a generative process-outcome, not a structure whose complexity and coherence is only enhanced with time. This distinction is an important launching point for the discussion of the role of drawings and models in architecture (vs. which decisions must be made on site), and also for what it actually means for a process to be able to generate living structure. The former we spent more time with in seminar last year. The latter, we examine next.
Facets of a Living Process, I. & II.
Living Processes / Fundamental Differentiating Process
Alexander introduces the idea of a “Fundamental Differentiating Process” — the process archetype that can be instantiated into that class of things we would call a Living Process. The last two chapters of our reading for seminar, presented next, begin to detail some of the facets of living processes in general, or the necessary core of process pieces for the Fundamental Differentiating process, in the specific.
Because the fundamental differentiating process is concerned with the production of life, which must respect its larger context at every step, Alexander introduces a hierarchy of the Individual Process (e.g., an act of design, the growth of a leaf, the development of one room), and the Accretive Process (the sum of the leaves on a tree, the effect of a town of similarly fashioned buildings, the strength of a city in all its vibrant diversity.) Every living process, every decision made through the Fundamental Differentiating Process, acts on both of these levels of hierarchy, simultaneously. And it is the opposition and interplay of the specific and the general, acting together, through which living processes bind structure into life, bring forth the fifteen properties from the field of centers.
Often, these processes are governed by extreme common sense. What we find is not radical on its own, it is only radical when we imagine we could implement such a process in our modern scheme of production. Alexander says:
“Whatever you are doing, whatever process you are following, the concept of a living process usually has the capacity to make it a little better, by making deeper, more profoundly and carefully structured living centers, replete with the fifteen properties — just helping you do a little better what you already do naturally.” — The Process of Creating Life, p.219
So let us look at the first two facets of living processes, chapters Eight and Nine, respectively.
I. Step by Step Adaptation (ch.8)
The first facet of a living process is step-by-step adaptation. If we are looking to make some place or some thing or some activity alive, it must be able to unfold according to its context. And that means that it does so step-by-step.
While this was once the ordinary way of working—the only way, before scale, mass production, and economic expedience—it now feels as if we’re introducing an uncomfortable precarity into the process of building. What feels precarious, however, is precious and purposeful. A fixed image is a recipe for failure. Alexander states quite strongly, that for a built work to come to life, even when we are within the process of construction, we cannot have a fixed or final picture of the output of the process.
This doesn’t mean, however, that we don’t know what we are going to do: it is a rejection of the hubris of architectural image as source of truth. The ultimate source of truth, each step of the way, is the wholeness of the larger field of centers, the feeling that it generates in us, and our ability to make the whole configuration better, more alive, with each step of the process.
We work from pictures in our minds’ eyes. We create programs of words that describe a shared and accepted vision of the character of what we’re trying to achieve. We work with the structure on the ground and mock up our next decisions, experiment with alternative. We set up cost and contract structures that allow efficient and fixed use of money at each step of the process.
Once we recognize life as the ultimate ideal of our work, and believe, as Alexander has shown that living structure can only be generated by a certain type of process, then we see that we must create systems of production that allow the right kind of processes to work. Allowing our current systems of production to continue to dictate dead processes, processes of fabrication, is an implicit agreement to continue the large scale assault on the life of the built structure on the earth.
In Seminar, Yodan presents some mockups of the bench. At one level of scale, how the bench itself was formed, was through step-by-step adaptation. At a different level of scale, this one bench itself is just one more step in the gradual adaption of the life of the garden in Sorrento.
II. Each Step is Always Helping to Enhance the Whole (ch.9)
In the introduction to seminar, Yodan described the year-over-year process of developing this garden at the Sant’Anna institute, in choosing, for each year, that project that would be. Given that there are about 3 months of working time, complex permitting regulations, longer scale visions, limited resources… how do we decide what to do?
The staff of Building Beauty have to answer this quesiton each year: What can we do within the time and means that we have, that will make the most impact on the garden? It’s not the biggest thing that can make a change —different constraints on time, money, and capacity could allow the program to do something else. So, where we are now, with the resources we have and in line with the vision for the overarching whole, we must look for the area that can most contribute to the life of the whole within those constraints.
This is the next facet of living process: How do we choose which step is the right one to take next? Of all the things we may be able to do, only a few of them will truly line up with our larger vision, truly enhance the whole once this specific step is itself complete.
So, pragmatically, and with an eye for the larger vision that guides the whole, we pick the next step to work, and do it with confidence. It’s important here, to recognize that there is an overarching vision about the character or quality of what we create, but that there is not a concrete image that forces us into choices rooted in anything but the context of work, the constraints on the system, and the quality of outcome we’re trying to achieve.
Alexander discusses the concept of latent centers, developed intro strength from their position in the whole. We look at the development of Rome (again, the Nolli plan is brought up in the text), and how over 100s of years, specific areas have been brought to life by gradual steps where each one, in its own right, makes the whole more alive, more beautiful, stronger.
On Changing the World
Our discussion of the technical aspects of the process in seminar is brief. Nikos (an impressive provocateur) lays out a challenge about what we can actually do to bring more life into the world. I quite enjoyed Muni’s response, and Or’s essential reframing. So here, I paraphase from each to give a sense of what we encountered in seminar.
Nikos’ Challenge, Paraphrased
Our system for centuries has been powered by mass production, by a unit that can be replicated on the industrial scale, which is entirely the opposite of the step-by-step adaptive process. And modern society has become overwhelmingly wealthy and powerful because of this approach. This is a part of the DNA of our society, and immense power comes from how this works.
This is not an academic fight, but a philosophical fight against the military industrial complex… Christopher taught us this beautiful method, but not the tools to implement it in the face of a crushing opposition. How can we possibly fight Hudson Yards by building a little beautiful bench somewhere in Sant’Anna?
One might mistake Nikos’ provocations for hyperbole, but the core of his argument flies true. What we value as a culture and an economic system is predicated on growth, scale, speed, money…
Muni’s Perspective, Paraphrased
And so, it’s heartening and refreshing to hear from an architect in India who says—not so. This may be all you see over there, but it’s not the reflection of the condition or values of the majority of the world…
These overwhelming forces only address about ⅓ of the world’s population. Two thirds of the world population is still outside the scope of the military-industrial complex. We suffer because of it, but we are outside of the system, our minds are free of that militarization. We are the poor and the dispossessed who live in the 3rd world, 4th world, 5th world…
We live a life which is completely outside the scope of imagination of this powerful minority which thinks it is ruling the world. It is a complete mistake. We the majority population are ruling the world, and the effects can be seen month by month, year by year, and what the media and the publications pick out from our reality are only those aspects of the distortion that is caused to our reality because of the minority reality that causes it. If you look at the newspapers and the TVs and the magazines, this is not our reality… I speak from experience. It is not.
I have had some of the members [of the architectural elite] come over and spend a little while in my world. And they think that all this poverty and all this dirt is appalling. But when they look at the eyes of the people they see life and brightness in peoples’ eyes. It’s not just in their eyes, it’s in their movements, their body language, the clothes they wear, and the environments they create. But we have not found an adequate measure or system of describing this in the terms which are acceptable to this powerful minority. We are still marginalized… but let me tell you that it is wonderful, it’s really quite wonderful. And it’s certainly not impossible, it is the future.
Or’s Essential Reframing, Paraphrased
Among further discussion, Or picks up a few threads, and reframes for us our own conversation in (of course) the very framework we’ve been learning to see and make sense of life in the world.
There is the book we are discussing, the Process of Creating Life, and the process of structure preserving transformation itself…
And there is one step at a time, every step you create something… and you create another center, and you go sequentially…
Within the conversation that we are having… a major center, was the publication of the Nature of Order… the book that Yodan mentioned was a center… the creation of Building Beauty was a center… the creation of this course was a center…
Each of us having joined this conversation is the creation of yet another center…
So, what would be the living process path of introducing this knowledge and making it available in the world…?
It’s an angle on a true bootstrapping of life. If we view the world we are a part of as a living system, we take into account those centers we’ve established, we work with the vision of a living world we’d like to move towards, find the latent centers, and begin to work with them… the only choice is to take one step at a time, slowly, surely, always enhancing the larger whole.
How could we do it any other way?
On the Life of the Text
Re-reading the Nature of Order (this is the third pass for Book Two), I am struck that each page turned introduces more complexity and detail now, than in previous readings. I recognize more connection and more relatedness in any given section of the reading with the grand current of thought that sweeps through the entirety of the Nature of Order.
It feels obvious now that the same processes Alexander is describing to create living structure in the world were used to fashion the structure of the Nature of Order as a text. I believe it is very much a living structure. Understanding the idea of building text with a living process is straightforward (in fact the processes are laid out step-by-step, in our current readings for seminar.) And yet, experiencing a living text that only becomes deeper, more complex, and more unified over time is rare and remarkable. A book composed of whole parts that overlock and interlap with all of the other wholes at each level of scale…
I recall a footnote from Battle where Alexander notes another book which mirrors the structure of the world. He says,
“The vision of these endless wholes and beings is most magnificently expressed in the The Avatamsaka Sutra (The Flower Ornament Sutra) … It is an immense book, more than 1600 pages long. Even if you only have stamina to read a few pages, I most strongly recommend it. It is a visionary platform to stand on, and will help you to understand this book. The endless hierarchy of levels, and wholes within wholes within wholes is captured in chapter 5, especially the property of levels of scale. …”
The Nature of Order is an immense work, four volumes more than 2000 pages long. Even if you only have the stamina to read a few pages, I most strongly recommend it. I believe it is another visionary platform on which to stand…
Closing
A strong seminar this week. We discussed themes from the text, the processes that led to the reality of certain settlement structures, the felt reality of those places vs. what is seen in plans, their unfolding over time… We zoomed out, discussed the ideals of an Alexandrian program in a growth-and-economy oriented society, and how we might use the very principles and worldview to we’re learning to interpret our own efforts, to propagate the system.
At the end, the seminar gets fast-paced, quickly. With too much to cover in the final moments, I collect some references from the chat for later investigation…
- Tom mentions Patrick Geddes — I find this paper as a starting point
- Tom also mentions tactical urbanism in San Francisco. I find a planning analysis to look into, and remember that an old co-worker had introduced me to the SFMTraA
- In the discussion of Indian settlement plans, Yodan mentions “How the Other Half Builds” from McGill, which was the source of plans Alexander presents in the reading. These publications as well as a small archive of other relevant and interesting reports, are all available online from the Minimum Cost Housing Group
- Gareth sends a Dave Snowden talk to the chat about complexity, systems, and directional change; some of Snowden’s themes around navigating chaotic environments show remarkable parallels to the facets of living processes we discussed today and will discuss in further seminars
And that’s Week 7 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.
