This book constitutes the 9th volume of Alexander’s series on his rethinking of the profession and its practice. It contemplates on architecture as meaningful place for people.
Alexander starts the discussion with an argument that “our world is dominated by the order we create,” yet we tend to overlook the basic definition of ‘order’ itself. He particularly criticizes the practice of creating order in current architectural discipline as falling behind in comparison with physics and biology, and that modern architecture fails to create coherent order, or “real beauty.” He then argues, just like in supporting the idea behind ‘The Pattern Language,” that ninety percent of human feelings are the same, and that is the most important reasons for conceptualizing our worldview and explaining why the universe comes into existence. Modern architecs, according to Alexander, is the victim of the mechanistic world view, that even if they can feel the beauty of comospolitan order, they can hardly escape this mechanical world-picture, and that their sens of beauty is distorted, or in Alexander’s own words, our physical world “are created because of an entanglement between the nature of architecture, the practice of architecture, and the mechanical conception of the universe.”
Defining what order is has attempted scientists and artists since a long time, including Alexander. He takes a great length to trace these attempts and find one that are useful for architects and builders. Through the examples of The Tower of the Wild Goose (Hunan Province, China), the Tomb of Timur the Great (Samarkland), the columns of the Ise Shrine (Japan), the glass and iron roof structure in London, and the Palm House in the Botanical Garden at Berlin Duhlem, the bamboo tea bowl, and even Mozart’s symphony, Alexander poses an usual question for viewers that what our intuitive feel for order is among all the cited examples, for which he concludes that “there is no conception of order which helps us create the profound life that can exist in buildings and in other artifacts.” (13). He goes on to challenge our whole idea of order, and states that our “wrongheaded foundation” has given us an utter inadequacy for understanding and creating beautiful orders. (14)
The author also mentioned the “founder” of the mechanistic worldview – Descates, with his own saying “if you want to know how something works, you can find out by pretending that it is a machine. You completely isolate the thing you are interested in – the rolling of a ball, the falling of an apple, the flowing of the blood in the human body – from everything else, and you invent a mechanical model, a mental toy, which obeys certain rules, and which will then replicate the behavior of the thing.” Alexander acknowledges this Cartesian thought in discerning how things work, but warns us that “this process is only a method,” which renders things in isolation but does not show how reality actually is. (16)
Alexander goes on to point out the destructive impact of this mechanistic point of view in modern architecture and does not hesitate to criticize master builders such as Buckminster Fuller, who had chosen a single aspect of design (such as light-weight structure or energy efficiciency) to deliver forms that are often “hard to use,” and not pleasant to the eye, as well as the single purpose for the look of some postmodern architects in using neoclassical features without related content on the inside. In both cases, the mechanistic worldview of separating things dominate the design process. He realizes that these opposite opinions are quite the same in principle. Alexander, instead, dreams of “a sharable point of view, in which the many factors influencing the environment can coexist coherently, so that we can work together – not by confrontation and argument – but because we share a single holistic view of the unitary goal of life.”
With that, the author proposes a new world view that sees the world as a totally different kind of place, where distinction between function and ornament disappears, and where ordinary life conforms with order. He is in search not only for ‘order,’ but rather the ‘nature of order’ itself. Only by doing so, he would argue, that we can escape the inaccurate conception of the ‘existing order.’ In his own words “to make good architecture, we must fundamentally alter our idea about the nature of order – about the kind of thing it is.”
Part One
- The Phenomenon of Life
What is living structure?
What is life in building?
What is a living world?
What is the structure of a living world?
- Degrees of Life
- Wholeness and the Theory of Centers
- How Life comes from Wholeness
- Fifteen Fundamental Properties
- The Fifteen Properties in Nature
Part Two
- The Personal Nature of Order
- The Mirror of the Self
- Beyond Descartes: A New Form of Scientific Observation
- The Impact of Living Structure on Human Life
- The Awakening of Space
quotes:
” The present conception of matter, and the opposing one which I shall try to puts in its place, may both be summarized by the nature of order. Our idea of matter is essentially governed by our idea of order. What matter is, is governed by our idea of order. What matter is, is governed by our idea of how space can be arranged; and that in turn is governed by our idea of how orderly arrangement in space creates matter. So it is the nature of order which lies at the roof of the problem of architecture.” (p. 8)
” The idea of order as a precise concept first entered physics as a by-product of thermodynamics, when the orderliness of molecules in a perfect gas was analyzed numerically by Ludwig Boltzmann in 1872 through the idea of entropy. Unfortunately the order which can be treated as negative entropy is too simple, and, for complex artistic cases, almost trivial. In the 20th century, the hunger of the scientific community for some precise concept of order was so great that attempts to extend the notion of thermodynamic order to cover all order were made by many writers outside the field of physics. Sober generalizations of the thermodynamic concept of order were also made by physicists. None of this went far enough to be helpful to artists.” (10)
” Complex patterns generated by interacting rules are more interesting, and raise the possibility of seeing all order as the product of a computable generative process. This could give us a general view of order as any system produced by interacting generative morphological rules.” (10)
” Deeper theories of order have been attempted. A preliminary sketch of a very much deeper theory was once made by the physicist Lancelot Whyte, who tried to develop a view of all biology as a science of asymmetrical ordered structures. The theory of catastrophes, which tries to describe the birth of configurations out of chaos, has been developing in recent years and is considered by many to be promising. Perhaps one of the clearest statements so far has been expressed by the physicist David Bohm. Bohm tried to outline a possible theory in which order types of many levels exist and are built out of hierarchies of progressively more complex order types.” (10)
” But none of this… is… useful to a builder. Even the most… is still not deep enough or concrete enough to give us practical help with architecture, where we actually try to create order everyday.” (10)
