The Phenomenon of Life

The Nature of Order #1

by Christopher W. Alexander

In Book One of this four-volume work, Alexander describes a scientific view of the world in which all space-matter has perceptible degrees of life, and establishes this understanding of living structures as an intellectual basis for a new architecture.

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 the cities and streets of the past, but they have almost disappeared in the impersonal developments and buildings of the last hundred years.

This book shows that living structures depend on features which make a close connection with the human self, and that only living structure has the capacity to support human well-being.

Genres: Architecture, Philosophy, Design, Science, Nonfiction, Art, Reference

476 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Christopher Wolfgang John Alexander was an Austrian-born British-American architect and design theorist. He was an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His theories about the nature of human-centered design have affected fields beyond architecture, including urban design, software, and sociology. Alexander designed and personally built over 100 buildings, both as an architect and a general contractor.

In software, Alexander is regarded as the father of the pattern language movement. The first wiki—the technology behind Wikipedia—led directly from Alexander's work, according to its creator, Ward Cunningham. Alexander's work has also influenced the development of agile software development.

In architecture, Alexander's work is used by a number of different contemporary architectural communities of practice, including the New Urbanist movement, to help people to reclaim control over their own built environment. However, Alexander was controversial among some mainstream architects and critics, in part because his work was often harshly critical of much of contemporary architectural theory and practice.

Reviews

[Mekon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Christopher Alexander has a special place in my heart. Reading his 'A Timeless Way of Building' helped enthuse me about architecture so much that I quit my job and took a degree in the subject. I'd been looking forward to reading his four-part work 'The Nature of Order' for some time, but had put it off until I had enough time to spend on the massive tomes.

Leafing through the book, the first thing I noticed was the conventional organisation of the contents - unlike his early works in which key points and paragraphs were highlighted to allow the reader to skip through less important background and examples. This really ought to lend weight to the text as a whole - every word should be read, it's all important. I'm not sure that's altogether true, particularly towards the beginning of the book where Alexander seems almost apologetic for his radical conclusions even before he's tried to explain his ideas.

He makes a slow and rather repetitive start, but he's asking us to leave our preconceptions behind and consider a new paradigm, so it's good that he takes the time to support his argument with examples and references. Footnotes would have been nicer, but we do get a good chunk of references and quotations at the end of each chapter. As the book moves on, the pace quickens and we are offered increasingly specific situations and techniques as illustrations. Finally, a set of appendices tries to set out a more formalised, mathematical approach to the ideas in the book.

So, what of those ideas? The key concept here is that life is an inherent property in matter and it permeates the entirety of space. Needless to say, Alexander is expanding the definition of life past a strictly biological set of rules. Life as defined here is a function of order, it lies most strongly within symmetries. These symmetries and repetitions, both spatial and temporal, create centres where the field of life is most concentrated. These centres are both made up of smaller centres and jointly form greater centres, each centre imposing its influence on others around it. Everything is then part of the whole, rather than seeing a figure against a background we should take it all in, as an all-permeating, ever-varying field.

As to whether I was convinced by the arguments in the book, well, I'm part-way there. Alexander's style is conversational and accessible, enough to cajole the reader past the more awkward assertions. His sincerity is without doubt and he clearly writes from the heart, but at some crucial points the clarity is obscured by his choice of words. For example - in his insistence that his centres and the zones around them are 'real' and not simply a mathematical construct, we are given a reasoned geometrical explanation but only a set of exemplars from which to infer a physical presence. I felt I was grasping for his concept of reality and whether it lay in a sensory or intellectual realm. His decision to branch off from a pre-Cartesian concept of space makes things hard to understand for a twenty-first century reader.

The mathematical reasoning in the appendices seems far too reductive to be generally applicable. Whilst the text argues for a multidimensional theory which unifies matter throughout the universe, we're presented with a mathematical example which considers a single dimensional array of just seven binary digits. On the plus side, he points towards further work being carried out by Nikos Salingros, research which is ongoing at http://p2pfoundation.net .

In conclusion, the book is a good grounding in Alexander's thoughts but rather than being the culmination of 27 years of research as suggested in the cover notes it feels like a snapshot in a lifelong quest which is slowly groping towards an understanding of space and time. As this is the first of four books, I consider it an introduction and hope for more clarity and depth in the following volumes.

[Phát Lạc · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mình không nghĩ còn có quyển sách nào nói về cái Đẹp với một tư tưởng đẹp, đáng chiêm nghiệm và có tiềm năng ảnh hưởng sâu sắc như quyển này. Cẩn thận khéo đọc xong nhìn mọi thứ không bao giờ như trước nữa (nhưng bạn sẽ ko hối hận vì điều đó).

Mình có giới thiệu tóm tắt, dĩ nhiên là toàn spoilers, ở đây.

Phần 1: http://lacde.blogspot.com/2016/09/chr...

Phần 2: http://lacde.blogspot.com/2016/09/chr...

Phần 3: http://lacde.blogspot.com/2016/09/chr...

Phần 4: http://lacde.blogspot.com/2016/09/chr...

Phần 5: http://lacde.blogspot.com/2016/09/chr...

Phần 6: http://lacde.blogspot.com/2016/09/chr...

Phần 7: http://lacde.blogspot.com/2016/09/chr...

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

The ideas in this four-volume treatise could create a real paradigm shift in Western Cartesian thought. They suggest a much more humble, and much more graceful vision of the human species. They suggest wholly new directions for scientific inquiry. They suggest a much more inclusive concept of "life". They suggest a much more beautiful vision of the universe than modern religious or secular schools offer. I try to carry this book in my mind and heart wherever I go.

[Cian · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are going to read only one thing this year (or any year), I think you should choose the first 80 pages of The Phenomenon of Life.

The first two chapters lay the groundwork for the rest of his thinking, they are an accessible and eye-opening introduction to Alexander's take on the physical make-up of the universe. If you can get behind the idea that every physical thing has a degree of life (which Alexander makes a compelling case for), you can enjoy this book. While Alexander is focused on the creation of beautiful buildings in most of his work, this book is much broader and deals with more fundamental physical and geometric principles. I think a biologist may appreciate this book even more than an architect.

He writes clearly and informally, he simply writes what he means to say. As someone who has read many architects' works, this is refreshing and free of verbiage posing as ideas. The man just has great ideas and writes them down.

Essential reading for architects and anyone concerned with the creation of things; be they objects, applications, products, buildings, artworks, or companies.

[J.D. Steens · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this first of a four volume set, Alexander argues that modern architectural design reflects a mechanistic worldview, originating with Descartes, that "isolates things" and stresses facts, not value. The result for architectural design is a focus on function, not on a function-ornament unity, and a "climate of arbitrariness" and "an architecture of absurdity."

Alexander believes there's objective truth when it comes to design. It is founded on a "deep structure" within nature and is an actual thing "in itself." That structure contains a wholeness with a spatial center that radiates outward as a field, integrating the whole within itself and with the world beyond. Based on his years of cross-cultural observations, Alexander believes that objective standards for good and bad can be evaluated against fifteen criteria (e.g., levels of scale, with subtle gradients; strong center and subcenters that are related as a field; borders that focus on the center and the whole, yet relate to the outside; repetition and roughness; "echos" where everything seems related; and a void where there is simple, silent, empty space). In varying degrees, good design has most of these components, which gives human design a feeling of "life." Bad design looks at human product and nature, and function and ornament, separately, without integration.

The author's methodology for developing these criteria is similar to the test that eye doctors give for vision, comparing two photos in tandem, with him asking which one has more "life" than the other. This is where it gets interesting. The author believes that he has achieved a significant agreement across cultures and media to demonstrate that such subjective evaluations arrive at the "deep structure" that he sees as objective truth. While many of his examples are clear enough, I had an opposite reaction to a significant number that he favored. The carpet designs were cold even though they had a center. The historic building front comes across as a forbidding wall. The cornfield that he sees as a simple void comes across as pure monotony. Much of what he favored had people in them, and that is what brings life to architecture even in the slums of Bangkok. Others had vegetation, but absent from his examples were barren deserts that in my view are filled with the "life" that Alexander is rightly after.

I do not believe Alexander makes his case for his "objective theory" of design. How much of what we see depends on who we are, innately and by experience. Some of us are texture eaters; others eat for taste. Some see colors on bare walls as life giving; others want centers, borders, gradients and definition. How much of what we value comes from our cultural exposure; how much of what we dislike comes from the baggage we bring to our perspective. The Japanese examples were interesting but overly tidy; the photos of the cafe in Linz seems particularly uninviting; the pictures of woods and ponds seem buggy.

Even so, Alexander makes the reader think about the criteria for how we evaluate design. He challenges us to look beyond fad and cultured opinion to look more deeply at what we see in the world in general, not just in architecture.

[Guilherme · Rating 2 out of 5]

At first I found this to be some infuriatingly vague verbiage in the same vein as The Secret, except instead of "good things happen if you think about them", the key phrase is "Everything is connected".

Then it hit me and now I'm impressed. This man has written a 500-page treatise on how he hates modern architecture. The exact line is somewhere in 1940, but halfway through the book, I could tell whether the dude liked or hated something purely based on when it was made.

Of course, he never uses the terms 'like' or 'hate'. He says these buildings lack 'life', but once you use the word 'life' to describe a quality, your bias is pretty well estabilished, isn't it? You're not going to tell someone their face lacks life and expect anything but your face to have more punches in it.

The author goes on to describe a list of loose rules that, when applied, will create 'life' in any architectural or otherwise endeavour you choose to pursue. Prepare for wonderful pearls of wisdom such as "Everything is composed by centers that are defined by their relationship to other centers".

If you really want to never design anything modern again, or if you're the sort of person that likes couching their ideas on generalized wise-sounding vagueness to sound like a genius, this is the book for you.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alexander may be more famous to non-architects than architects thanks to his book A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction where he discusses good and bad points of rooms, buildings and cities based on empirical studies, a very craft and engineer oriented method. His goal is to understand what makes good places to live, work and play. In this book series he tries to organize these findings using a theory of aesthetics he's developing.

His use of subjective experiments is interesting, artists and others can try doing these in there own specialties to boost their composition process. The criticism of modern architecture is spot on, I think many of us have experienced crappy, life destroying buildings and Alexander wants to change that. Some of his ideas on this subject I think are very useful and universal.

Now some of the more difficult bits, it's lucky that he added so many illustrations because it breaks up some of the wordiest prose that I've read in a while. I also feel that people and cultures are too variable for a universal, one size fits all, theory of beauty, but that may be my own cantankerous and crotchety opinion. Since there's a science, Alexander feels there is a statically perfect structure (the city of God?) and doesn't seem to leave room for buildings to evolve, for an opposite view see Baldwin's How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built.

This is more of a philosophy book than one about architecture and I don't recommend it as your first Alexander read. Try The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World-Systems or the The Production of Houses.

[Taylor Ellwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is as fascinating book that explores how life shows up in building design. The author presents a holistic and dare I say spiritual approach to building design that is eye-opening. The various examples and case studies illustrate the principles he discusses. What I found really helpful was how this book helped me further revise my own understanding and experience of space and how we live in space.

[eververdant · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've found that the experience of walking in a contemporary building feels categorically different from stepping in a building from before the 20th century. Perhaps it's because the role of an architect has become increasingly separated from the physical building itself — buildings are often designed by people who don't spend time in the buildings they construct, perhaps planned on a wholly different continent. Maybe it is a long-developed aesthetic manifestation of 17th century rationalist thought, interested in the functional mechanisms of detached parts, in each nook and cranny of modern life. Whatever the reason, contemporary architecture often feels more like a generic concept of a place, imagined with pencil and paper, rather than a place that was built for specific needs, time, and place. Sure, a contemporary penthouse is cleaner and more streamlined than a medieval hovel, but many people feel that popular 20th century architecture lacks the warmth of previous eras, even veering on the uncanny.

Many people feel this way, but it appears that our vocabulary for analyzing architecture has largely been whittled down to purely utilitarian claims like cost, efficiency, and prestige. If you say that a city hall with the form of a concrete industrial turret is any "worse" than a city hall made of polished pillars supporting an intricately carved dome that appears to lift itself to the celestial sphere — on what grounds can you say that?* Isn't that just your personal vibe?

When you don't have language to express this discomfort, critiquing modern architecture may just seem rude, pretentious, or uncultured. Yet, we can observe what kind of architecture people spend thousands of dollars to visit, or the building they use as the backgrounds for their wedding pictures. Notre Dame, the Taj Mahal, and the Forbidden City contain a magnetic, enduring beauty that seems less common with contemporary architecture.

To understand the quality of a given building, Christopher Alexander proposes a humble question — does a building have life?

Now, what does that mean? Alexander can't be referring to purely biological processes, because physical buildings contain few. Instead, he refers to "life" as a subjective feeling of wholeness, experienced when a space feels livable and harmonized with its surroundings. It encompasses something like the freedom for healthy activities to take place within a particular space.

Here's an example he uses: think of a house with a window to an open, inviting field where a mother can watch her children play while carrying out her personal tasks. This gives her the freedom to have some free time to spend on her own tasks indoors, while keeping on eye on the kids in a way that doesn't take up too much mental bandwidth. The kids are in a place that's not only safe, but good for running around (as opposed to say, the kitchen with a glass-doored cabinet of fine china). Compare this to say, living on the 10th floor of an apartment complex, in which she can either watch her children play outside, or perform her personal tasks, but not both simultaneously.

Another example would be a floor design in which there are different rooms for different types of activities, in which an individual can choose differing levels of privacy. These rooms also connect in cohesive ways, such that the most public areas are the first to access, and they connect to rooms that with related activities. Compare this to an open floor plan in which everything happens in one space, and only one type of public social organization can take place, rather than providing different scales of rooms for different functions.

Christopher also applies this concept more subtly to geometric patterns in rugs, in which some patterns, through interconnecting shapes, repeated motifs, or elegant boundaries appear to make us feel more "alive" than looking at flat, weird, and incongruous patterns.

It gets kind of mystical, which is maybe what architecture needs. It's kind of hard to explain without listing a variety of examples, which Alexander does well. If you read this book, you can't go into it with the expectation for "beauty" and "good form" to be laid out like the building instructions of an IKEA bookshelf. In that sense, it reads more like a set of allegories than a how-to guide. But that expectation of rigid, explicit mechanism is Alexander's main critique of 20th century architecture. He believes that understanding the relationship of function and beauty is not something that can be understood hypothetically without application to a particular context, or without consulting the inner emotion of the architect. "The feeling of life within a space" is something that an architect should train, not unlike a meditator who reaches states that are someone ineffable from an outside perspective.

Though Alexander uses this mystical tone, he attempts to take concepts that are more intuitive and make them empirical. For example, to justify some of his principles, Alexander interviews his students about how much "life" in contained in a particular building has and records the results. He may claim that because a traditional Japanese tea table received more votes than a Bauhaus chair, the concept of life is proven on an empirical basis. I think I see the reason why he would appeal to empiricism for credulity, but I don't know if this really works. It seems like he simultaneously critiques the contemporary approach to aesthetics for relying too heavily on quantitative metrics, and then uses a similar approach to prove his principles of architecture. I mention this because empiricism is less than 1,000 years old, but smart, sturdy, exquisite architecture is thousands, if not tens of thousands of years old. I'm not sure if Alexander's theory really needs empiricism in the same way that physics, chemistry, or astronomy are dependent on empiricism.

Regardless, I get this sense reading the book that even if you don't agree with his theoretical approach, he is onto something palpable. The book feels like a breath of fresh air — beautiful buildings are identifiable, feasible, and we can point to principles that can create then. His fifteen fundamental properties of good design gave me a lot to think about, and they were helpful to put into words why the design of some buildings work and some don't. Whether you agree with his explanation, if you can see that he recognizes a type of beauty that is often not given attention in architecture, then it's not too unlikely that he's found a clever way to get there.

* Referring to Boston City Hall vs. San Francisco City Hall

[Evrim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am learning so much...Some one else remarked that Christopher Alexander may well be the name that is remembered from our time in 500 years time. I have to agree.

[Erika RS · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Phenomenon of Life sets out to redefine how we think about architecture, design, and even the nature of reality itself—and it partially succeeds. Alexander argues that structures can possess a quality of life, which emerges from their coherence and wholeness. This is formalized as "centers" and the relationships between them. The book is primarily a philosophical treatise, though it includes some practical tools for design.

Alexander’s goal is to move away from functional, mechanical views of what makes a structure good or bad. He frames life and beauty in terms of spatial coherence: centers are not just isolated points of interest but dynamic zones of interaction, strengthened by their relationships to other centers. He defines 15 fundamental properties of strong centers (levels of scale; strong centers; boundaries; alternating repetition; positive space; good shape; local symmetries; deep interlock and ambiguity; contrast; gradients; roughness; echoes; the void; simplicity and inner calm; not-separateness). For those familiar with A Pattern Language, these properties abstract some of the common qualities found in its patterns. This abstraction makes the properties harder to apply directly but also more flexible. The discussion of these properties, combined with examples and illustrations, anchors the book’s more abstract ideas in tangible reality.

Where Alexander starts to lose me is in how he tries to make a case that these properties can be intuitively—yet objectively—sensed by human feelings. It’s not that I disagree with the idea that spaces and structures possessing these properties are more intuitively appealing—the examples convincingly show that they are. However, Alexander’s arguments often veer into “No true Scotsman” territory, where those who disagree with his judgment of which of two options is better are deemed out of touch with their underlying feelings.

Even when the conclusion feels convincing, one wonders how much the examples were curated to support the thesis. The book would have been stronger had Alexander included examples of “good” designs from areas outside his aesthetic preferences and “bad” examples from traditions he generally admires. Such inclusivity would have made his arguments more robust and less susceptible to the suspicion of confirmation bias.

The book’s attempt to formalize these concepts scientifically—while remaining rooted in subjective feeling—also feels precarious. While Alexander’s goal of grounding his ideas in objectivity has merit, his reliance on emotional resonance as evidence often feels strained. The “mirror-of-the-self” approach, in particular, leans heavily on anecdotal rather than conclusive reasoning.

Still, The Phenomenon of Life is a compelling and challenging work that pushes the boundaries of how we think about space. Its core ideas about wholeness, centers, and the properties that bring them to life are deeply impactful and serve as an interesting extension for those already familiar with Alexander’s better-known works, such as A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building. Even where it stumbles, the book sparks thought. For those willing to engage critically, it offers invaluable insights into structure, life, beauty, and connection.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite this book being beloved by the majority of reviewers here, I must confess a different experience: I found this volume to be quite tiresome. This is a hard-won opinion: I fought my way through the main text and most of the appendixes. I found myself presented with arguments against views I didn't have while the suspicions that were raised were left unanswered or confirmed.

The challenge is that without these arguments, there's no doubt the book is beautiful. I can imagine a book presenting these ideas gently, as series of statements of beliefs & tastes, calling one's attention to particular properties in understated ways. I'll never believe that the dynamic experience of being alive is determined by fifteen static geometric properties, but I still think he's on to something with those properties. The strategy of attempting to read wholenesses, centers, and the properties that follow from these is still of critical interest.

I won't bore myself (much less you dear reader) by trying to finely parse what I found agreeable, disagreeable, tautological, insightful, trivial, extrapolating to universals from specific cases, unaddressed nonsense, etc. Nor do I currently find within myself the energy to extract what's good from the mass of conflated ideas. I think what can be of service is to tell you where to find the good stuff should you find yourself in possession of a copy through the library or such:

* Feel free to look at the pictures and the general form of the book throughout
* chapter 3, particularly parts 1-7 on wholeness and centers, is a good introduction to the concept
* chapter 4, on how life comes from wholeness explains these centers have aesthetic relevance
* chapter 5, fifteen fundamental properties, describes the ways Alexander has discovered of how wholeness and centers can be arranged to have this positive effect
* chapter 11, the awakening of space, talks about how function emerges from seemingly ornamental characteristics shaped like the above

You could probably enjoy yourself a four or five star book with just this focus.

I, in a move that now seems rather rash, bought the whole series at one go based on the quality of Alexander's previous work. I now give myself the permission to browse the remainder, but learn from my example, and buy 'The Timeless Way of Building" or "The Oregon Experiment" first if you're looking to invest.

[Phoenix · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read both of Alexander's "A Pattern Language" and "The Timeless Way of Being". "The Nature of Order" is similar. Alexander has spent a good part of his life developing a philosophy of aesthetics as it relates to structure. I am not an architect but I tend to deal with project design and many of the ideas he presents as applied to architecture can be applied in other areas as well. The notion of what constitutes "goodness" is universal.

I have posted his 15 principles on my filing cabinet and intend to give his arguments some thought before going ahead to the second book. It is interesting to consider that what we appreciate most, be it an inanimate object such as a rock or a piece of music, the layout of a building or the complexities of human relationship is the degree to which each exhibit "life". Alexander took years to come up with his categorizations and conclusions so it is natural that one should take a bit of time to digest what he says. I do hope the publisher keeps this series in print so that I can return to it later. (Judging by the # of comments on and sales rank of successive volumes 2-4 I sense a dwindling audience or at least cautious audience.)

I recommend this book to artists, architects, those interested in the philosophy of aesthetics, and designers of all kinds. Alexander's work is poetic and mystical and relies heavily on internal insights and so will not appeal to everyone, however I regard myself as fairly grounded in realism, spreadsheets and decision making and find his work worthy of consideration.

[Rex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since discovering the work of Christopher Alexander, I have sensed a fundamental accord between his instincts and mine. The Timeless Way of Building struck me with extraordinary force, and I concluded that Alexander, for all his pomposity, was on to something vital. Still, I approached this four-volume exposition of his ideas with some reserve. I am wary of anything that looks like New Age kookiness, and for the most part Alexander does not bother to emulate the restrained conventions of respectable academic writing. Alexander writes instead with a clarity and messianic urgency that ushers the reader into his vision. And, at the far end of this first book, despite its length and repetitiveness, I admit myself again persuaded of the fundamental ideas. There is plenty of intriguing philosophical work out there pointing to what Alexander calls the “living structure” of all creation; but the unique strength of The Nature of Order is that its proofs are direct and empirical, convincing to the extent that the reader’s responses match Alexander’s. As a result, there are those who may shrug off the whole project, but anyone willing to follow Alexander through his reflections and self-scrutiny may discover “treasure hid in a field,” a genuine conversion of perception.

[David Hunter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A phenomenal book, if you can pardon the pun. I strongly disagree with some of his ideas and points, for example that the degree to which an object is healthy or life-giving can be determined by the degree to which it strengthens our essential humanity. Maybe this is just a poor choice of wording on Alexander's part, but it seems like this places humans on the pinnacle of creation, judging all else, and leaves no room for evolution past humans, or for alien judgements.

However, the essential idea, that structures in the world can be evaluated as life-giving or as live-damaging, I find fascinating and I look forward to seeing how he further develops and expounds on this idea in later volumes.

[Jint'ar Darvek · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It is the nature of order for matter to be alive."

A post-Cartesian, post-rational (not irrational) framework for awakening to the living nature of all space, matter, and structure.

Life is not merely biological.
It is a deep property inherent in space and matter.

This sets a new foundation for architecture, urban planning, design, craft, and art that truly lives.
When the built world lives, the people who use it do too.

Sorely needed, especially in the "developed" nations.

The people who left sore reviews about the author disliking modern architecture seem to have missed the point of the book.
They would do well to re-examine page 330,
where comparisons are made between buildings by Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe.
In one pairing, it is clear the Mies building is more alive than Corbu's.
In the second pair of images, the converse is clearly the case.

It's impossible to get the most of this book so long as one insists that the mind is the highest faculty.

Alexander's hypothesis is that
matter and space have different degrees of life
and that this is more straightforward than the hypothesis that
matter/space is a neutral machine which has to be able to produce the almost magical qualities we see.

This is now one of my favorite books.
Looking forward to the next 3 volumes.

[Private Account · Rating 5 out of 5]

What if beauty is not subjective, what if it is not in the eye of the beholder? What if beauty is an objective fact that we have been taught to not know?

I love how Alexander’s books are beautiful. Every time I picked up this book I felt happy to hold something so lovely in my hands. It now annoys me that other books are not beautiful, and especially other books I have read on the subject of beauty. How could anyone take seriously a book on the subject of beauty that isn't beautiful?

Alexander writes respectfully and compassionately. So not only does his book look lovely and good, it feels lovely and good to read it.

This book is a study of how architecture enriches our lives or diminishe our lives. It is a study in how we can feel more alive, how we can feel more free in our daily lives, and how we can feel more awe when we look at the world.

Alexander argues for an objective rather than a subjective worldview and especially for an objective definition of beauty. He laments the loss of objective definitions that happened about a hundred years ago (thank you, Kant). He understands the history and ramifications of the subjective “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” philosophy that took over, but he does not argue against this idea from a philosophical standpoint, but rather a physics/mathematical/biological standpoint and sometimes a psychological one. “Not all nature is equally beautiful. Not all of it is equally deep in its wholeness. Some of nature may be 'better' than other parts of nature.”

He argues that there is no dichotomy between head and heart, just people not trained in consciousness, that there is no difference between form and function (the moral is the practical) but there are people who can see beauty and people who can’t. Seeing beauty is a skill anyone can learn though. It is also a skill we are all born with that is taken from us due to our schooling or socialization. He makes the claim that children are better at seeing beauty, so I did a test on Anders, age 3, who I have always thought has very good taste. Anders did well, choosing what Alexander would have called the objectively beautiful picture 90% of the time.

From a child psyc point of view: What Alexander refers to as a child's ability "to see beauty," and his art students' ability "to blur in order to see beauty," is perhaps what has been studied in children and is called lantern consciousness versus spotlight consciousness. This is the skill many Western adults lose that prevents them from "seeing" beauty in its wholeness as opposed to its pieces. And yes, this is one of the goals of education.

His essay, “The personal nature of order,” is his version of Ayn Rand’s "The Romantic Manifesto." Hers is better though because he argues that we all feel the same about a given work of art (or building or whatever) whereas she argues that we will all feel the same about a given work of art BUT that we will all feel differently about that feeling, so our response to the art will be different. So whereas he insists that beauty would make everyone feel at peace, she would argue that beauty would make everyone feel at peace, but there is a secondary emotion and that is how we feel about feeling at peace. When some people feel at peace they feel deeply happy and content. When others feel at peace they are troubled, like something is wrong, and seek a stimulant. So whereas Rand recognizes this psychological issue of secondary (and tertiary emotions), Alexander doesn’t. Though both would agree, “If you are properly educated you will feel the correct thing." Alexander calls this “real liking” as if to say: "You may think you know what you like, but I really know." All that being said, to a certain extent, Rand writes arrogantly and Alexander writes compassionately, making Alexander more accessible.

Alexander argues that freedom is the most important thing for human happiness, that freedom is happiness, the freedom to act and pursue our goals. He says, “True freedom lies in the ability a person has to react appropriately to any given circumstance… A person actively solving problems is more alive.”

Anything that gets in the way of your pursuit (like the government) hampers life. Rand and Branden agree that it is not the pursuit of happiness, but the happiness of pursuit that makes us happy. The freedom to pursue the achievement of our values is happiness.

Being surrounded by life (energy centers) increases our life because the outside world is our mirror. Our outer world creates our inner world and vice versa. You can know all about a person’s psychology by seeing their home—how cluttered, how bogged down, how dusty. The space you create IS your inner life as represented by you. This is why people, clear people, energetic people, are those people we all want to be around. Because of the mirror neurons. Happiness, peace, joy--they are literally contagious. As are misery, sadness, anger. The book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives concurs.

Our mirror neurons work not only with people, but with the outer world.

Alexander doesn’t believe seeing the world as individual entities is helpful, so much as seeing the world as “life centers.” He argues that for something to be beautiful, all energy centers which are not absolutely required must be avoided—form and function are one.

A few times in this book Alexander makes cutting, uneducated remarks about money and businessmen, and how they have destroyed architecture. Sigh. He would really benefit from studying Austrian economics. He has no idea how perfectly his worldview fits with theirs.

[John Sponenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

for a person not in a design field parts were difficult to understand but since finishing I've noticed I am looking at buildings, landscape and interiors in a whole different way. I know I've learned something valuable having read this.

[Peter Van · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book offers a gentle way to change your perspective and how to observe 'life'.

[Rilka]

This book both demands and makes an offering of faith in equal measure. I'm a convert to what Alexander calls, in another essay, the long path that leads from the making of our world to God.

[sare · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing, a revelation

[Fan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a special view of defining beauty, how much life something has, and to see things through our daily environment

[Irene · Rating 3 out of 5]

Truth-be-told, I never actually finished this book. The book was probably most interesting because, even though I disagreed with (or possibly didn't understand) half of his points, the half I did get were enlightening. Also a good thing to note is that much of what he writes on is basic/common knowledge to anyone who has studied an art-related field, but the connections he draws from this knowledge is worth the read. :)

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

i've read the first 4 chapters for an incredible Place Theory class i'm taking with Doug Paterson at UBC. the class in blowing my mind. so great to talk about in an intelligent stimulating manner so many of the things the rile me up. alexander's approach towards viewing the world, the way one meditates or reads poetry speaks to me. i think this man is a genius. 17jan 2010

[Paul Brooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

The question of life and what it is is no easy discusion. Alexander is able to apply his philosophy of design to one of histories most difficult questions in a way that is convincing to say the least. 'Dead' is a concept that is of little use here.

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

You can't see the buildings around you the same after this eye opening book.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's no need to rush through these volumes.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christopher Alexander takes a good stab at why a lot of modern architecture sucks, but also what makes things good. I thought I wasn't into architectural theory, but I really got into this one.

[Nynke Fokma · Rating 5 out of 5]

No words ...

[Logan Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

He has some great ideas, but his writing leaves something to be desired.