American - Architect | October 4, 1936 -
A building or a town will only be alive to the extent that it is governed in a timeless way. It is a process which brings order out of nothing but ourselves; it cannot be attained, but it will happen of its own accord, if we will only let it.
Christopher Alexander
BuildingProcessAliveNothingWay
From a sequence of these individual patterns, whole buildings with the character of nature will form themselves within your thoughts, as easily as sentences.
NatureCharacterThoughtsBuildings
Once you understand this way, you will be able to make your room alive; you will be able to design a house together with your family; a garden for your children; places where you can work; beautiful terraces where you can sit and dream.
WorkFamilyBeautifulChildrenYou
Speaking as a builder, if you start something, you must have a vision of the thing which arises from your instinct about preserving and enhancing what is there.
VisionStartYouSomethingMust
To work our way towards a shared language once again, we must first learn how to discover patterns which are deep, and capable of generating life.
LifeWorkDeepLanguageLearnWay
But in practice master plans fail - because they create totalitarian order, not organic order. They are too rigid; they cannot easily adapt to the natural and unpredictable changes that inevitably arise in the life of a community.
LifeCommunityPracticeCreateAdapt
Complexity is one of the great problems in environmental design.
GreatEnvironmentalProblemsDesign
Everyone is aware that most of the built environment today lacks a natural order, an order which presents itself very strongly in places that were built centuries ago.
TodayEnvironmentPlacesEveryone
In an organic environment, every place is unique, and the different places also cooperate, with no parts left over, to create a global whole - a whole which can be identified by everyone who is part of it.
EnvironmentUniquePlaceCreateOver
We define organic order as the kind of order that is achieved when there is a perfect balance between the needs of the parts, and the needs of the whole.
BalancePerfectKindOrderDefine
In short, no pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world only to the extent that is supported by other patterns: the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it.
WorldShortSameSizePatternsOnly
I mean, making simulations of what you're going to build is tremendously useful if you can get feedback from them that will tell you where you've gone wrong and what you can do about it.
FeedbackYouWrongBuildWillMean
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