Christopher Alexander's The Nature of Order,
by Nikos A. SalingarosoOo ONE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY'S MOST IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS
Ever since I posted Some Notes on Christopher Alexander, I have been deluged by questions about The Nature of Order. During its course of writing over several decades, The Nature of Order has expanded into its present format of four large volumes.
*Latest information, October 2003. The long publishing difficulty with Oxford University Press is over, and the book is now published by the Center for Environmental Structure and distributed by patternlanguage.com. Volumes 1 & 2 can at last be bought directly from natureoforder.com, Amazon.com and also from selected booksellers. Volume 4 is being printed now and will appear in a few weeks. Volume 3 is already proofread, and will appear last. Please visit the new website natureoforder.com which allows direct mailorder sales and wholesale sales to booksellers. It is also planned that the site will, in the near future, provide a list of booksellers who stock the book.
The Nature of Order has been in preparation for over thirty years, and encapsulates all of Christopher Alexander's theories. My own modest contribution has been to help Professor Alexander edit the manuscript during the past fifteen years. In this monumental book, Alexander develops a comprehensive theory of how matter comes together to form coherent structures. Paralleling, but not copying, recent results from complexity theory, he argues that the same laws apply to all structures in the universe; from atoms, to crystals, to living forms, to galaxies. Human beings apparently have a built-in (though subconscious) understanding of these laws. Man's creations have the option of following the same laws, or violating them. Those that follow them result in our greatest achievements, either as artifacts, as buildings, or as cities.
This book promises to be of interest to computer programmers, and in the words of some enthusiasts, could define "a new paradigm for programming". This is remarkable, since the book is written primarily in the interest of architects (of buildings, not software). It turns out, however, that the same organizing principles apply to computer programs as to buildings. This connection was made recently by several visionary programmers, and is being pursued in the PATTERNS movement. A good overview is the book by Richard Gabriel, Patterns of Software (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996; with a foreword by Christopher Alexander). There are notes of a review talk given by Jim Coplien on the Nature of Order, with commentary by Brad Appleton, which are highly recommended. Jim Coplien is writing a series of articles outlining the possible applications of the Nature of Order to software.
Far-reaching results on urban planning were given some years ago in Alexander's famous article "A City is Not a Tree" (see the article by Roger Evans in the Urban Design Quarterly) , and in the Pattern Language and A New Theory of Urban Design. His solutions were abstracted from and checked against urban sites that work, which is sufficient reason to apply them to urban sites that don't. He goes much further in The Nature of Order, showing that the rules governing the growth of neighborhoods and cities arise from fundamental laws of nature. Alexander has discovered the process that governs the growth of a successful city -- which is the same process by which organic and inorganic forms evolve. Surprisingly, the law concerns the process; not the form or plan. This whole approach might seem unfamiliar to urban planners who think in terms of static images, though biologists will immediately recognize it. These universal laws apply not only to "traditional" cities -- they apply to all cities, in every age and in every culture, that enhance human activity.
The first two volumes should be appreciated as a new approach to understanding structure, both natural and man-made. They span aesthetics, science, and architecture, and are relevant to any complex process. Volume 3 is of immediate interest to architects and urban planners, as it contains a large number of examples of the building process from the largest to the smallest scale. I am most deeply moved, however, by volume 4 of the Nature of Order, which is a deeply spiritual work. The last of the four volumes transcends architecture, and plunges into what it is that connects us with our universe. It reveals how superficial our century has been in addressing the fundamental qualities and needs of human beings. This volume promises to have a profound impact on our society; even our civilization. For that reason, it might ultimately be the most revolutionary aspect of the entire work.
oOo REVIEWS OF THE NATURE OF ORDER
The Nature of Order offers a golden thread that connects the innermost center of who we are as humans with the physical environment that we have the potential to create. It is an intimate journey which reunites our internal experience with the external world so as to create wholeness in the reader. It is written in painfully precise language in which the future of society has the potential to be written.
Peter Block, author and Organizational Consultant, Connecticut.A couple of years ago I read the unpublished manuscript of the Nature of Order and found it to be remarkable -- one of the most important books I've read.
Ken Foster, architect, Austin Texas.The Nature of Order is not only a summa summarum of what Oxford University Press has called "The World of Christopher Alexander", but it is surely one of the most ambitious books ever published. If its profound argument -- that order in both nature and in what we build are essentially the same -- is ultimately understood and accepted by serious readers it may prove to be one of the most consequential works Oxford has published in all its 500 years.
William McClung, special project editor for Oxford University Press, former senior editor of the University of California Press.My personal opinion is that this book will be recognized as one of the twentieth century's most important documents. Although I am admittedly biased, the same opinion is expressed by those who have had a chance to read copies of earlier drafts.
Nikos Salingaros, Professor of Mathematics, San Antonio Texas.The Alexander books are the most exciting thing I have read in a long time, and I think Alexander has made a SIGNIFICANT contribution to modern philosophy in general. ... my unbounded thanks to Alexander for this great seminal work ...
Christopher Skelly, President of Insight Resource Inc., New York.
oOo
THE NATURE OF ORDER
by Christopher Alexander
Table of Contents (tentative) Prologue: The Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe
Book One: The Phenomenon of Life
- Degrees of life
- How life comes from wholeness
- Fifteen fundamental properties
- The awakening of space
- The mirror of the self
- Beyond Descartes: A new form of scientific observation
- The personal nature of order
Book Two: The Process of Creating Life
- The principle of unfolding wholeness
- Structure-preserving transformations
- Examples in traditional towns and buildings
- Perversity and arbitrariness of early modern design
- 20th century cases where unfolding has occurred
- Is a hyper-modern process of unfolding possible?
- The fundamental process
- The sequence of forming centers
- Deep feeling
- A new architecture
Book Three: A Vision of a Living World
- The fundamental process repeated ten million times
- A new profession of architecture
- Forming a collective vision
- The hulls of public space
- Big buildings
- Housing, pedestrians, and cars
- Transformation of an urban neighborhood
- Volume, site, and space
- Structure of small buildings
- Uniqueness of each individual place
- The character of gardens
- Continuous invention of building details
- Ornament and color
- Hints of necessary changes in society
- Simplicity
Book Four: The Luminous Ground
- Towards the nature of matter
- Existence of the "I"
- Origins of living structure
- Ten-thousand pictures of the "I"
- The ground
- Color and inner light
- Pure unity: the goal of tears
- Pleasing your self: escaping the thought-police
- The face of God
- The nature of the universe
Epilogue: The Art of Building
An excerpt from Book 4 of the Nature of Order.
"The structure of life I have described in buildings -- the structure which I believe to be objective -- is deeply and inextricably connected with the human person, and with the innermost nature of human feeling. In this fourth volume I shall approach this topic of the inner feeling in a building, where there is a kind of personal thickness -- a source, or ground, something almost occult -- in which we find that the ultimate questions of architecture and art concern some connection of incalculable depth, between the made work (building, painting, ornament, street) and the inner "I" which each of us experiences.
What I call "the I" is that interior element in a work of art, which makes one feel related to it. It may occur in a leaf, or in a picture, in a house, in a wave, even in a grain of sand, or in an ornament. It is not ego. It is not me. It is not individual at all, having to do with me, or you. It is humble, and enormous: that thing in common which each one of us has in us. It is the spirit which animates each living center.
I believe that the ultimate effort of all serious art, is to be making things which connect with this I of the person. This "I," not normally available, is dredged up, forced to the light, forced into the light of day, by the work of art.
My hypothesis is this. That all value depends on a structure in which each center, the life of each center, approaches this simple,forgotten, remembered, unremembered "I." That in the living work, each living center really is a connection to this "I."
. . .
I believe that this is true; not just a nice way of talking. As I try to explain it, quietly for all its grandeur, and try to make the artist's experience real, I hope that you, with me, will also catch a glimpse of a modified picture of the universe.
For I believe it is the nature of matter itself, which is soaked through with I. The essence of my argument in Book 4 is that the I, the thing I call the I, which lies at the core of our experience, is a real thing, existing in all matter, beyond ourselves, and that we must understand it this way in order to make sense of living structure, of buildings, of art, and of our place in the world.
That very difficult intellectual path, is the path which lies before me.
I shall try to persuade the reader that this is literally true".
-- Christopher Alexander
oOo Christopher Alexander's webpage on the Nature of Order
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