In 2005 I reviewed the first two books of architect Christopher Alexander’s four-book magnum opus, The Nature of Order in two columns—Life, the Nature of Order, and Everything1 (May 2005) and The Process of Creating Life2 (July/August 2005). 20 years later I am finally getting around to reviewing the second two books.
Books of ‘pragmatic mysticism’—that is, books that speak of spirituality in work, craft, or daily life—comprise a reasonably robust genre. Those that have profoundly affected my inner world and daily work include Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Nevil Shute’s Round the Bend, and Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (don’t you dare laugh). And of land surveying books in particular, I will mention Gurdon H. Wattles’ Writing Legal Descriptions, as Wattles’ simple, clear, precise language, and his fidelity to truth and law, were inspiring to me when learning to love land surveying… and maybe not incidentally, I discovered while writing this column that 1979 editions of Writing Legal Descriptions, if in reasonable condition, sell online for well north of a hundred dollars.
All of architect Christopher Alexander’s books are of this valuable genre, none more so than the volume I extol here, The Nature of Order, Book Three: A Vision of a Living World. In books one and two of his magnum opus (The Phenomenon of Life & The Process of Creating Life) Alexander shows, with reasoning as deft and convincing as an elegant mathematical proof, that the quality of being (fundamental to his work) that he calls life is real and vital, that life is present in nature and to greater or lesser degree—or indeed, all too often, negative, life-destroying degree—in the human-constructed world, and that by designing and building according to an unfolding process of structure-preserving transformations humans are able to deliberately imbue the built world with life and strengthen the life of natural space, thus combatting ugliness and perhaps defeating (at least for a time, at least in some corners of the world) the civilizational ennui that is the residue of ugliness. These two volumes are something like textbooks of architectural theory; Book Four: The Luminous Ground, is among Alexander’s most explicitly spiritual texts, so profound and useful to seekers that I believe it will, someday soon, be accepted as inspired Taoist scripture.
A Vision of a Living World inhabits a sweet spot between textbook and scripture, in which Alexander lays out in detail his proposed fundamental process that will, if followed, unfold living objects, gardens, homes, building and campuses, cities… a beautiful built world in which humans feel comfortable and at home, in which they feel they belong. Of this fundamental process Alexander says:
“I am proposing that in the course of all planning, building, conceiving, designing, landscaping, or making a building, throughout, at every stage, all the processes are composed of millionfold repeated applications and combinations of a single type of unfolding process, governed by certain transformations which make each center help the larger centers and thus keeping creating living wholes. I believe all living processes are sequences, or combinations, or combinations of combinations, of this kind of unfolding process.”
The Fundamental Process
I summarize Alexander 7-step fundamental process below; italicized comments are mine:
1) At each step, the process begins with a perception of the whole… of that part of the world where we are working. We look at the whole, absorb it, try to feel its deep structure. With phrases like ‘perception of the whole’ and ‘feel its deep structure’ appearing in the first step of the fundamental process, you see why I characterize Alexander as a mystic, but given that he is describing a building process—which he himself successfully employed to complete 100s of buildings in his own general contractor firm—you can see also where the ‘pragmatic’ part comes from. And those of you have ever built anything good—did it ever result from a process where the ‘whole’ of a place or situation was not at least partially apprehended?
2) Within the whole, we consider the latent centers which might be worked on next… (these centers) are dimly, partially visible, large, medium, and small. Alexander writes elsewhere, “When I use the word center, I am always referring to a physical set, a distinct physical system, which occupies a certain volume in space, and has a special marked coherence.” For more on the primacy of centers in Alexander’s thinking, see my column, The Process of Creating Life (American Surveyor July/August 2005)
3) We choose one of these latent centers which, if established or strengthened next, will do the most to give the whole an increase of life. We work to intensify that living center…
4) At the same time… we try to intensify the life of some larger center that it belongs to.
5) Simultaneously, we also make or strengthen at least one center of the same size… and make it positive. In The Phenomenon of Life, Alexander says, “What I call positive space occurs when every bit of space swells outward, is substantial in itself, is ever the leftover from an adjacent space. We may see it like a ripening corn, each kernel swelling until it meets the others…
An almost archetypal example of this positive and coherent state of space may be seen in the 17th century Nolli plan of Rome. In this plan each bit of every street is positive, the building masses are positive, the public interiors are positive. There is virtually no part of the whole which does not have definite and positive shape. This has come about, I think, because each of these spaces… has been shaped over time by people who cared about it, and it has therefore taken a definite, cared for shape with meaning and purpose…” Positive Space is the fifth of the 15 Fundamental Properties that Alexander posits in The Phenomenon of Life and which permeate all four books of The Nature of Order. (see box)
6) Simultaneously, we also start to see, and make, and strengthen smaller centers within the one we are working on—increasing their life, too.
7) Once the whole has been modified by this operation, we start again. “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” —T.S. Eliot
The bulk of A Vision of a Living World is devoted to describing, often in minute detail, how application of the fundamental process has resulted in living spaces large or small, sometimes in Alexander’s building projects, sometimes not. The first of these examples is a disquisition on the unfolding of Venice’s St. Mark’s Square over 900 years (560 A.D. – 1532 A.D.) and, on the other end of the scale, we find deep dives into Alexander’s use of digital finite element analysis solutions to resolve truss issues (see box), and into the design and construction of individual homes, of drinking glasses commissioned by the “Glass Works of Leerdam, Holland” (they’re exquisite) and several small, rough, ineffably charming dolls made to order for his own children.
A Miracle of The City
I lived in downtown San Francisco for a couple of years, and it was my good fortune to visit often one of Alexander’s least known built works, the Fort Mason Bench, to which he devotes 8 pages of A Vision of a Living World. To visit yourself, go to the famous Greens vegetarian restaurant, walk east through the parking lot, keeping the arts and culture center and festival pavilion (and San Francisco Bay) on your left, and continue on past the quaint former firehouse (now another art center) and you will find yourself in a secret garden of sorts, a “very strangely shaped” concrete deck and iron railing “with a peculiar and awkward asymmetry” perched atop a rocky seawall, made enclosed and private by piers to the west and east that frame the view of Alcatraz and the Bay, and by the steep hillside to the south with its staircase switchbacking up to community gardens and Fort Mason proper… and forming the strong center of this awkward niche of bayside peace and whispering quiet, you will find Alexander’s bench, built by the great man’s own hand (along with “about twenty student apprentices”) over a couple of weeks in April 1988.
I often had the bench to myself for most of an afternoon, reading and sketching, or might amicably share the view of Alcatraz and tall ships with a hushed family, or a fellow loner fishing or eating lunch. Sometimes I would take a special woman there, to assay her aesthetic sense, and on rare occasions I would take a city friend, letting them in on the secret of a place that was, to me, a miracle of The City.
During these happy hours I would always intensely feel the life of the place, enlivened as it was by the unfolding of the fundamental process, and I could also always detect and feel Levels of Scale, Simplicity and Inner Calm, Not-Separateness and all the rest of Alexander’s 15 Fundamental Properties.
To me the Fort Mason Bench is a construction, and place, which embodies thunderous quiet majesty, as holy in its way as any great cathedral or Zen Garden or mountain temple. But perhaps you will have to go there yourself to feel such things.
An Alexandrian World
Like any mystic, pragmatic or otherwise, Christopher Alexander is a visionary… as indeed is obvious from the very title of Book 3, A Vision of a Living World. His concluding essay begins:
“We have a vision, now, of buildings taking their form continuously through a smooth step-by-step process in which each step preserves the structure of what was there before.
In this visionary process the land—the Earth—gets differentiated continually to develop and increase its harmony. We reach a view of architectural structure in which gradually, painstakingly, step by step, the world is created in a way that millions of people can take part in, and each small process adds one tiny bit of structure, deepens the structure.”
And after establishing that application, by humans, of the fundamental process necessarily and properly introduces “rectangularity” into nature—the Earth—he proposes that the resulting built world preserves the Earth,
“…in a new version of its wild state which is a managed and protected ecology… the landscape which extends out from houses and downtown building complexes, reaches out into the land… so that buildings, gardens, and lanes are seen and experienced as one integrated structure… The overall conception of this integrated habitat/wilderness may be compared to the zones created in ancient England or China where not only towns and villages, but also hedges, coppices, stone walls, terraces, streams, bridges, paths, fields, meadows, forests, glades are all part of one managed system… in a way that allows people to exist in balance with nature.
And it is made by processes which, also, are part of nature. The process itself is to be part of nature.”
It has become apparent that I accept Christopher Alexander as an inspired prophet of the built world, preaching civilizational renewal via intentional preservation and construction of objects, buildings, and cities using a fundamental process that strengthens and concentrates the life of all the world. I don’t know about you of course but speaking for myself I heartily agree that civilization is in dire need of spiritual renewal, and I don’t how it might possibly come about… except by means of Alexander’s fundamental process.
Angus Stocking is a former licensed land surveyor who has been writing about infrastructure since 2002 and is also the host and producer of the podcast Everything is Somewhere.