The Nature of Order

The Phenomenon of Life

Volume 1 attempts to define "life" in the built environment and determine why one built environment may have more life than another. Important to this idea is his notion of centers:

The first volume contains an exposition of what the author calls the fundamental properties, which are those that are possessed by environments which have more life. He argues that processes that lead to a good built environment are those that tend to increase one or more of these properties. He identifies fifteen geometric properties which tend to accompany the presence of life in nature, and also in the buildings and cities we make. These properties are seen over and over in nature, and in cities and streets of the past, but have all but disappeared in the developments and buildings of the last one hundred years. The book shows that living structure depends on features which make a close connection with the human self, and that living structure has the capacity to support human well-being.

The Process of Creating Life

The second book describes the process of creating "life", which is an evolutionary process. Complex systems do not spring into existence fully formed, but rather through a series of small, incremental changes. The process begins with a simple system and incrementally changes that system such that each change preserves the structure of the previous step. Alexander calls these increments "structure-preserving transformations," and they are essential to his process.

Where book one introduces the reader to 15 geometric properties that make up living systems, Alexander reframes those geometric properties as structure-preserving transformations in and of themselves rather than being the results of other transformations. For example, Alexander claims that Levels of Scale will arise naturally as a result of structure-preserving transformations, but he notes that Levels of Scale can also be viewed as a transformation that introduces level of scale into a given structure. A skilled designer would use this transformation to add depth to a particular part of the system that was being built.

Alexander contrasts structure-preserving transformations with Structure-destroying transformations, which he feels are common in modern architecture. Alexander himself does express some sympathy for those who have used these processes to design buildings that he feels are devoid of "life":

Volume 3, the last of the four books to be published, is the least theoretical of the books and the most compelling from a practical point of view. In Book 3 Alexander presents hundreds of his own buildings and those of his contemporaries who have used similar methods consistent with the theory of living process. The projects include neighborhoods, housing built by people for themselves, public buildings, public urban space, ornament, colors, and details of construction innovation. Hundreds of color photographs offer concrete examples of the kind of spaces, things and buildings you can achieve when you put Alexander's theories into practice.

These photos of buildings, and the discussion of each, demonstrate exactly what Alexander means when he talks about living structure, and using life-creating processes to create beautiful places and buildings. These places are more than just pleasant to look at, and be in - they reach an archetypal level of human experience, reaching across centuries, across continents, across cultures, across technology, across building materials and climates. They connect to us all. They connect us to our own feelings.

All four books of The Nature of Order present a new framework for perceiving and interacting with our world, a methodology for creating beautiful spaces, a cosmology where art, architecture, science, religion and secular life all work comfortably together. The third book shows us—visually, technically, and artistically—what a world built in this cosmology and framework is likely to be like for us. Six hundred pages of projects built and planned over a thirty-year period, including many un-built experiments, illustrate the impact which is likely to follow from the use of living process in the world. The book provides the reader with an intuitive feel for the kind of world, its style and geometry, which is likely to follow, together with its ecological and natural character. It closes with an assessment of the archetypal character such a new, living world, is likely to reveal.

With these examples, lay people, architects, builders, scientists, artists, and students are able to make this new framework real for themselves, for their own lives, and for their own work. Alexander gives us a feast for the eyes, the mind, and the heart.

The foundations of modern scientific thought, four centuries old, are firmly rooted in a conception that the universe is a machinelike entity, a play of baubles, machines, trinkets. To this day, our real daily experience of ourselves has no clear place in science. It is little wonder that a machinelike world-view has supported the deadly architecture of the last century.

This mechanistic thinking and the consequent investment-oriented tracts of houses, condominiums and offices have dehumanized our cities and our lives. How are spirit, soul, emotion, feeling to be introduced into a building, or a street, or a development project, in modern times?

The Luminous Ground, the fourth book of The Nature of Order, contains what is, perhaps, the deepest revelation in the four-volume work. Alexander addresses the cosmological implications of the theory he has presented. The book begins with a critique of current cosmological thinking, and its separation from personal feeling and value. The outline of a theory in which matter itself is more spirit-like, more personal in character, is sketched. Here is a geometrical view of space and matter seamlessly connected to our own private, personal, experience as sentient and knowing creatures. This is not merely an emotional appendix to the scientific theory of the other books. It is at the core of the entire work, and is rooted in the fact that our two sides - our analytical thinking selves, and our vulnerable emotional personalities as human beings - are coterminous, and must be harnessed at one and the same time, if we are ever to really make sense of what is around us, and be able to create a living world.

Alexander breaks away completely from the one-sided mechanical model of buildings or neighborhoods as mere assemblages of technically generated, interchangeable parts. He shows us conclusively that a spiritual, emotional, and personal basis must underlie every act of building or making. And then, in the middle of the book, comes the linchpin of the work - a one-hundred-page chapter on color, which dramatically conveys the way that consciousness and spirit are manifested in the world.

This is a new cosmology: consciousness inextricably joined to the substrate of matter, present in all matter. This view, though radical, conforms to our most ordinary, daily intuitions. It may provide a path for those contemporary scientists who are beginning to see consciousness as the underpinning of all matter, and thus as a proper object of scientific study. And it will change, forever, our conception of what buildings are.