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A Christopher Alexander quote thread:
“In the 20th century we have passed through a unique period, one in which architecture as a discipline has been in a state that is almost unimaginably bad. Sometimes I think of it as a mass psychosis of unprecedented dimension.”
“In the 20th century we have passed through a unique period, one in which architecture as a discipline has been in a state that is almost unimaginably bad. Sometimes I think of it as a mass psychosis of unprecedented dimension.”
“Very few people realize, I think, how much of the present confusion which exists in the field of architecture is wound up with our conception of the universe”.
“This business of isolating things, breaking them into fragments, and of making machinelike pictures (or models) of how things work, is not how reality actually is. It is a convenient mental exercise, something we do to reality to understand it.”
“The mechanistic idea tells us very little about the deep order we feel intuitively to be in the world. Yet it is just this deep order which is our main concern.”
“All of this sounds abstract. But its impact on our world has been enormous. It has created a mental climate of arbitrariness, and has laid the foundation for an architecture of absurdity.”
“So far the 20th-century response to the arbitrariness inherent in mechanistic thought has been to keep asserting the dignity and privacy of value . . . it has a superficial permissiveness which seems to encourage different opinions.”
“What we need is a shareable point of view, in which the many factors influencing the environment can coexist coherently, so that we can work together . . . because we share a single holistic view of the unitary goal of life.”
“The new view will show us the world as an altogether different kind of place from the one we have imagined. When we are done, everything will look different, not only buildings.”
“Flowers, puddles, waterfalls, bridges, mountains, the moon, the earth, the tides, the waves of the ocean, paintings, the rooms in which we live, the clothes we wear—all of these will be different in our eyes and will appear to us as something fresh and marvelous.”
“We shall, then, literally, be living in a different mental universe.”
And here’s Alexander arguing for the “aliveness” of space itself. This book doesn’t have a comprehensive bibliography, which has me wondering about the influence of Bergson and Whitehead here.
I’m thinking of Whitehead when he writes, “For us the red glow of the sunset should be as much a part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon.” Alexander is articulating a value ontology that Whitehead would’ve loved.
It’s an old essay (from 2012), but I sketched out some of Whitehead’s central ideas, as related by Isabelle Stengers, here: knowledgeecology.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/thinki…
People like Whitehead and Alexander understand that there’s a deep contradiction at the heart of modern metaphysics, within which accounting for the appearance of living things is actually impossible.
At the end of the paper I included this diagram, which was my attempt to describe something like the division Alexander notes between publicly available (but mechanistic) objective facts and privately held (and therefore arbitrary) opinions about values.
