Weeknotes #9: Nature of Order — Structure, Feeling, Form
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.
3 December, 2020. It is the 9th seminar, in which:
- We read The Process of Creating Life, pp.341–494, five chapters covering Patterns, Feeling, Formal Geometry, Form Language, and Simplicity
- Tigran presents on Form Language and style
- Yodan challenges the class: on what feeling is and how we use it
- Or brings forth a striking exposition on how he uses feeling in his work, the energy is palpable; James riffs
- I muse on feeling, visualization, metaphor, and the role the Nature of Order plays in catalyzing a larger paradigm shift
More on Living Processes
There are 5 more characteristics of living processes we encounter in the reading. Through these 5 chapters, we also find that some of the facets of living processes we discuss here, are specifically suited to the functional act of building, while some are yet more generalizable to a broader class of artistic and living pursuits.
Patterns: Generic Rules for Making Centers (ch.13)
When we look at the ‘functional’ aspects of the living process, we take into account the same idea of function as discussed in Week 5 — not some planner or architect’s top-down enumeration or list of the necessary functions for living… but the function of creating centers that can come alive.
A few key centers, envisioned in advance, can shape the character of a village, a building, a small park, a room, or a garden… We talked last week in ‘every part unique’ about respecting what exists in the formal geometric sense, and when we inject entities into a building project we must also respect the existing culture and society.
Patterns (as developed extensively in A Pattern Language) are essentially rules for making centers. They embody knowledge, cultural subtlety, human need, empirical information about the structure of living environments. Traditional societies were able to develop their patterns — both explicit and implicit — over a long period of time with experimentation and feedback.
We, now, can build artificial pattern languages, as a means to discuss, to build a shared vision of a newly unfolding whole. In fact, to preserve the structure of life and human activity in built works going forward, we must be able to create patterns that embody the culture centers we hope to enrich and enliven — the development of patterns itself being one more step in the living process, one more instance of a structure preserving transformation. A way to preserve what is here, and push forward into a new future.
“The proper unfolding of wholeness is both an unfolding of space form the culture which exists, and an unfolding of a new (future) culture from the culture of the present (Process of Creating Life, p.348).”
With patterns, we encode these centers of functions geometrically. We create the spaces and structures necessary to afford the activity of the center we hope to establish. Patterns, then, are the things that we are choosing to unfold in a project. What centers are essential? What do they need to do for us? We may pull specific pieces from the marvelous and pre-existing patterns, as they are networked in A Pattern Language. And we may create new, project-specific patterns. Together, these patterns all form a vision the project through a project pattern language.
“So a pattern language, if it has been well-constructed, sublimates the inner desires and necessities which have connection to our feelings and dreams, transform them into geometry, exposes them in a deep enough way to make art of them, casts them in such a way that they have a power to become living flesh in buildings (pp.366–367).”
Deep Feeling (ch.14)
All living processes hinge on the production of deep feeling. “The living process can therefore be steered, kept on course towards the authentic whole, when the builder consistently uses the emerging feeling of the whole as the origin of his insight, as the guiding light at the end of the tunnel by which he steers (p.371).”
What Alexander is talking about here is the kind of feeling — the feeling of self-as-unity, deeply personal feeling — that can be generated within us as we encounter the reality of living structure or envision living structure that will unfold:
“Our ability as artists depends very largely on our ability to experience, formulate, and carry such a feeling — first to feel it and witness it, then to carry it forward, remember it, keep it alive within us, and insist on it (p.382).”
Before each step, work with the emotional substance of the thing… feeling is the net we must use to catch a vision of the whole. “Intellect is too crude.”
Emergence of Formal Geometry (ch.15)x
At some point, the whole must be instantiated into the world. It must hae a real and physical guiding structure that will allow it to do its work.
We begin the unfolding with feeling, with patterns that capture appropriate centers of function. And then. “In order to achieve living structure, at a certain stage, it is necessary to seize hold of the building design and force it into an almost brutal, simple, massive geometric mold (p.402).” The real order of a building, in a living process, comes from its structure — ”(Columns, walls, beams, vaults, and so forth…)” in an a-periodic tartan-like grid which will form its “geometrical substratum.”
Based on the need for internal geometric coherence of building-as-physical-structure-in-the-world, the architect or builder must impose. Some of its order must come form the structural needs of building-to-be, “brutally” parceled out into overlapping and interlocking physical geometrics.
“Taking this step is an undeniably brutal act, frightening for an artist who has sensibility for the beauty and softness of the land and what others have built before her. Yet it is from this moment of brutality that real order must come (p.407).”
The development of this grid creates “middle range order”—centers at the scale of rooms, bays, or portions of a building. While the step has been described as “brutal,” it is yet one more act in an unfolding, living process, and should be able to create new life and new possibility for life with the [potential] strength of centers now structurally introduced at this intermediate level. The structural centers themselves, and the new centers they form, should feel positive.
Form Language and Style (ch.16)
Now we dig in even further to the building-functional aspects of living process. How should the character of our buildings come to be? This idea of a form language is nebulous in the abstract and quite concrete when we find families of buildings (especially evident in traditional or vernacular architecture — forms with intense similarity and infinite variation) that do share a form language.
“It is a fundamental issue that belongs square in the middle of the analysis of living structure as a product of society (p.432).”
Form languages guide what we are ultimately able to shape and produce. We must have, be able to create, to work with and form, healthy form language that can support the necessities of living structure. Without this, every other facet of the living process that we have encountered will be unable to bear its fruit.
In the Chapter, Alexander describes some of the historical form languages available to us, and our current struggle to create the kind of scheata necessary for unfolding, living form. What we strive for, what Alexander admits we do not yet have a suitable answer for, is “A useful and coherent geometry — a form language — which lays geometrical stepping stones toward the creation of a living world that can, now and in the future, be attained by us for the production o f coherent, vivid, geometric form (p.436).”
In the chapter we learn of potential inspiration for what such a form language could be, and Tigran presents works of living and whole structure from contemporary architects in the seminar. Like Geoffrey Baawa, Ragnar Östberg, John Harbraken. In the chapter we also see lovely and farcical counterexamples, schemes for buildings driven by ugly images and bad ideas, potential forms that will have no future.
What might be the brushes we use, the most common strokes, the shapeys we parlay with, the materials we turn to? What does it take to find such forms and inject them into building culture so the modern world can learn to work with and extend them as the seeds of a living form language?
We are left with beautiful brushstrokes, sketches that Alexander presents in the chapter, showing the type of things such a form language must enable. Unfoldings driven by the 15 properties, beautiful and suited to their environment. These poetic sketches and scenes really serve as the question — they show us the character our cities might have, and provoke us: what form language could become a part of our reality… could let us build like that?
Simplicity (ch.17)
Our final facet of living process — the most important and ineffable. Here simplicity is a definitive quality of the process — not a mechanical simplicity of barren and uninteresting geometry, but a simplicity that speaks to depth.
In this chapter, more than any other, we begin to glimpse the ideas that we will come to discuss in Book Four. We feel the spiritual weight with which Alexander conveys the idea of simplicity, and also feel the reverence with which he views the whole of space, and every decision made in building and art that is a part of it.
Alexander’s concept of simplicity is both procedural (what is the simplest thing that can be done to enhance the whole, bring life into its centers?) and also visible (are we creating geometric coherence, maintaining internal purity?) We move from the idea of complexity and the packing of centers in Book One towards an ideal of simplicity as an elegance of their relationships.
We also take a new and deeper look at symmetries, which I can barely begin to unpack here. To start: “Everything in nature is symmetrical unless there is a reason for it not to be (p.471).” This idea of symmetry and its reasons is an arrow we can follow through into the realm of simplicity.
Asymmetries (should) come along from the reasons that generate them. A simple, harmonious structure should have a clear correspondence between its internal similarities and differences and those of its context. Simplicity is recast from a false ideal of minimalism through a paucity of structure to a straightforward (deceptively simple/operable) ideal — no move made without a reason. (And where do we get our reasons? We need only go back to the idea of bringing forth the life of the whole, introducing more living centers, step by step, into the whole at hand [in each moment making the simplest possible move to do so.]) Easy!
A gift awaits readers at the end of this chapter. An early look at the unresolved forces that drive the ideals of symmetry discussed here…
Digging in to Feeling
Yodan’s primary question to the group: how do you work with feeling? What does feeling mean for you?
I answer in this seminar, right off the bat, with an example from work earlier in the day. A colleague and I were planning the sequence of a new design project, specifically around how and when the group should work together, and how some of the decision points would coalesce. As we drew out version of the plan, I could “feel” when tension existed — could follow the threads of work unfolding — and in visualizing the state of the project, ‘feel’ if this configuration we’d set up was harmonious or not.
In this example, I noted there were a few places my colleague who had run less instances of the work, didn’t also feel these same tensions. And I brought this example to class with contribution of “visualization” as a precursor to feeling, where mockups, prototypes, or experiments weren’t available. I sidestepped the most important part of the question and offered something fairly irrelevant. However, and take this as the signal of a quality-run seminar discussion, as the discussion evolved I found the mark I didn’t realize I had missed, and was able to think with and build upon it. Especially as Or and James contributed to the mix.
Projections
Or shared the way he uses feeling in his work, in one specific instance of working through digital building models. He spoke metaphorically, a feeling of building a ship in a bottle, hands removed from direct manipulation, a barrier between himself and the real physical object the model represents, and yet… able to project himself into it and be led by the feeling of what it could be. By the vision of an unrealized and living whole. What he spoke was a visceral exposition of the experience of having ones’ own body act as sensing instrument, the basic idea that Alexander invokes in developing the Mirror of the Self.
I imagine it’s similar to how I’d felt earlier that morning, in feeling out a project plan. Visualization was not the important factor, rather, a resonant awareness that I could sense, while imagining different ways the plan would unfold, each move somewhere on the spectrum from disorder and tension to harmony.
So there is a two-way relationship being discussed. For we, with our bodies, can sense and feel, but it is not an act in isolation. There is some sense (as in the Mirror) of Self-in-Object, and a measure Feeling-Object-Provokes-Within-Self (as dictated by the degree of life in the structure.)
James also helped reframe the conversation, once gain back into the language of centers and wholeness, as Or did in Week #7. He approached it on a grand scale: ultimately, we are all a part of one center, inseparable from its wholeness and also separately identifiable. When we think about working from this frame, where the wholeness undergirds our reality and all-there-is is composed of inter-related centers, then the discussion must inevitably move to one of relationships between centers. Maker-as-center and object-as-center, on a similar playing field, capable of relating to one another (or not) in the same way any two arbitrarily selected centers may work with one another.
Sense-making Metaphors
As I think through Yodan’s question of feeling, and what was discussed in seminar, two speculative-metaphorical views come to mind. Loose attempts to grapple with this fundamental operation that drives our ability to work from feeling.
One about “Projection:” In the Mirror of the Self, we ask ourselves if I can see me in the object. If it, in itself, contains a picture of our whole self. And it’s really working on two levels: I attempt to project “myself” (please don’t forget we are operating on a non-idiosyncratic and universal version of “personal”, the self that Muni and Narendra describe in self as community) into the object, while in turn the object projects feeling into me. The degree to which these resonate are the degree to which I am in a place of “feeling.” Or is it the other way around? An object or the unfolding notion of a work projects feeling into us, and the degree to which we can project ourselves into that feeling (or find ourselves there?) is how we can sense the direction to move forward.
One about “Inhabitance:” As living centers, a highly complex and ordered class of living centers, we can take other centers into ourselves, we can allow them and their qualities to inhabit our awareness, with practice and attention. (Remember the meditative/transformative aspect of working the Mirror of the Self — here we can see it as practice, as training, to build such an awareness.) From a place of being-inhabited-by the structural reality of the centers we are working on/with, then we ourselves attempt to inhabit this center with our self. This doubly-embedded inhabitance of Object-into-Self and Self-into-Object is the mechanism by which we access the potential depth of feeling of decisions, as we work from the mind’s eye. (The same is true of existing objects/environments/activities, but I would posit the first layer of embedding can happen much more easily, a more simple coupling.)
I’m sure in reality, it’s not Projection, it’s not Inhabitance, it’s not both, and it’s not neither. What’s happening is probably somewhere in the middle…
Structural Coupling
In attempting to grapple with these types of interactions, and the source of where feeling may come from, one idea first encountered in Understanding Computers and Cognition comes to mind: Maturana’s idea of “structural coupling” of biological systems. It’s working in a similar space and uses the language of ‘living systems’ in its framing of the biological world. As we work from the theory of centers and wholeness, each center is indeed a ‘living system’ (that may just be very much alive or very little alive, but always a matter of degrees.)
So it’s an interesting exercise to think through the mechanism of structural coupling not as a biological reality but instead a structural reality. I pull two images to illustrate, from “An Introduction to Maturana’s Biology.” At this point, it’s only a thought experiment, a placeholder for investigating more deeply:
Imagine, in Figure 4: “Living centers are structurally coupled by recurrent interaction.”
And also, in Figure 5, “A history of recurrent interaction leads to structural congruence. The living center and circumstances change together.”
Perhaps what Maturana saw in the inherent operations of living systems is a characteristic of all living structures — just on far differing scales of time-and-hierarchy than in the scope of his initial investigations.
A Platform on Which to Stand
It’s not all firm ground, for me. Even now, 12 years out from training in experimental design (cognitive psychology) and computer science, discussing the degree to which centers/space/objects make us feel, is clearly incongruent with my educational experience.
How to try and explain what is held as unexplainable? To think through a theory of the fundamental primitives of our existence? To base a theory of building on a new conception of the nature of space? The effort feels quixotic within the bounds of the currently restricted reductionist view of scientific method. If we maintain a set of blinders that refuse to acknowledge already, that we have always been a part of the system we study, it is extremely difficult to get going. The mechanical-reductionist view drives technological advancement at a staggering pace, and drives a wedge further and further between us and the life of the world we are a part of.
And yet, this staggering reality of experience, the wonder, awe, sorrow, and joy that wells up when we encounter vibrant life, unfolded needs no theoretical basis or educational acknowledgement to operate in and upon us. It only requires attention, connection, and care, in a world increasingly distracted, disconnected, swaddled in the false feeling of a mass consumer culture.
From this frame, the remarkable ambitions of the Nature of Order only grow larger and more meaningful. This is where we must make use of it: to point the way, to shine a light, to scaffold a new platform on which we can stand. We must avoid a religious-and-dogmatic adherence to the fundamentals espoused in this extraordinary research (in the Kuhnian sense). We must work with it, test it, extend it, use it wherever possible to help rekindle peoples’ and communities’ connection to life. To find more and more ways to build living centers and living structures as beacons of light and life.
The Nature of Order is one strong and vibrant living center, among many to come, in the larger whole of our progress towards building a living world.
Closing
In the conversation, Tom asks of what we’re working on, “How do you bring it back out into the world? How do you offer it in a way where the community feels, the same way as you feel about it?”
I note that there is not, directly, in the material we are working through, a focus on the operational aspects of working with/in the community. That, if we take the prior move of recasting ‘the community’ as an operational center, composed of many other centers of individuals and organizations, then there is a new avenue of exploration for how any given built/planning should relate to these additional contextual centers. (It is not neglected in Alexander’s lines of thought, as The Oregon Experiment, for example, was set up entirely to build a community-driven planning scheme for the University of Oregon.)
Yodan mentions that they have had some success doing just that, in the Building Beauty program: involving staff, students, locals, visitors and others with the school. I feel like I should have known, must remind myself that I am, for now, just a free-tier member of the reading seminar — only engaged with a small portion of the depth this program has to offer.
And that’s Week 9 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.
