The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe

by Christopher W. Alexander

Christopher Alexander has been a legendary figure in architecture for nearly 40 years. World-renowned for his revolutionary theories on the art of building, Alexander now caps his lifetime of profoundly original thinking about the meaning and purpose of architecture with this magnum opus, The Nature of Order . In these four books, Alexander constructs an entirely new cosmology, grounded in the latest scientific knowledge, and integrating the perennial wisdom of the centrality of human experience and values. In this way, Alexander reunifies for the field of architecture the 400-year old split of Body (structure) and Soul (feeling).

Alexander explores the properties of life itself, highlighting a set of well-defined structures present in all order and in all life from micro-organisms and mountain ranges to good houses and vibrant communities.

Taken as a whole, the four books create a sweeping new conception of the nature of things which is both objective and structural (hence part of science) and also personal (in that it shows how and why things have the power to touch the human heart). A step has been taken, through which these two domains the domain of geometrical structure and the feeling it creates kept separate during four centuries of scientific though from 1600 to 2000, have finally been united.

The Nature of Order constitutes the backbone of Building Ecologic Design Construction Process , an initiative aimed at radically reforming architecture education, with the emphasis of making as a way to access a transformative vision of the world. The 15 fundamental properties of life guide our work and have given us much more than a set of solutions. The Nature of Order has given us the framework in which we can search and build up our own solutions.

In order to be authentically sustainable, buildings and places have to be cared for and loved over generations. Beautiful buildings and places are more likely to be loved, and they become more beautiful, and loved, through the attention given to them over time. Beauty is therefore, not a luxury, or an option, it includes and transcends technological innovation, and is a necessary requirement for a truly sustainable culture.

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

2143 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

[Yodan Rofe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I studied with Alexander in the 1990's while he was working on completing this series of books. Each book has its own value. The first book teaches you to see the world differently, and connect to it personally. The second book makes you understand that wholeness, and life are always a result of particular processes that allow them to come about, and cannot be designed and built in the way we ususally do things today. The third book shows you Alexander's experiments and built projects, as examples of the first two books, and as a way of showing that this kind of world is possible. The last book discusses what this means for our way of understanding the world, the universe and our spirit.
To be read slowly, and studied deeply, particularly by trying to implement it in your life and work.

[Stephen Paisley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Way too long. And yet so vital that it almost doesn't matter. It will change the way you see.

The chapters on color in book 4, alone, are worth the price of admission. And it ain't cheap.

[sam tannehill · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you like other books by Christopher Alexander, you have to read this set. But, in my opinion I gained so much more from his other books than from the Nature of Order. The goal of the Nature of Order is to explain a new "world-picture" that Alexander formulates in an attempt to transition away from a mechanistic worldview to a worldview where all matter-space and governing physics is a function of animate, spirit-filled "centers" of geometric origin. It is important in this worldview also to view geometry not as static, but as part of a process that extends wholeness of "living structure".

Reading through this, I thought this is quirky and maybe not necessary. And eventually started to suspect things about his worldview that were based on, essentially, animism or pantheism or panentheism. And then, in the last volume, he explicitly states this view as essential to his formula of centers as living beings and fifteen fundamental processes of extending and supporting centers in the overall wholeness of the living structure.

Did I still enjoy reading this book? Kind of. Part of it is very thoughtful and wholesome. His fundamental desire is to create beautiful architecture. The other part is hard to engage with because it either seems absurd or overwrought. Terms are not really defined even though Alexander says they are, and as he advances his arguments and descriptions it is hard to follow because you are either missing the definitions or the terms seem to change their meaning. There is also a lot of confusing language that contains internal contradictions but sounds mystics and so is expecting a pass, like, the universe is connected to the most personal self but in this connection your self becomes the most impersonal in the oneness of the universe (paraphrased).

I am really interested in architecture. I am also really interested in biology, cosmology, physics, theology, and worldviews. So, I liked this set and wanted to read it to the end. But I was also disappointed by the worldview proposed therein. It doesn't reconcile with me as something that is reasonable or true. On the other hand, most modern architecture also doesn't reconcile as reasonable or beautiful, and Alexander's architectural works are beautiful and thoughtful. It is interesting to see the mindset from where his works come from.

If you do not know who Christopher Alexander is, I would recommend not reading these first. I would, in fact, save reading these until you had first read much more by him.

[Shante' Zenith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although Christopher Alexander begins with architecture, what he is saying can so easily be extrapolated to describe all living processes. I’m reminded in his writing of John Berger’s description of the poetic as a “shelter to the experience which demanded, which cried out” (c.f. And Our Faces). There has always been a resonance between theatre and architecture, between the poetic and building—my mentors’ teacher Jacques Lecoq pinpoints this when he says that as theatre creators, we must be “architects of the inner life” (c.f. The Moving Body). Many of the concepts that Alexander introduces in his book are similar to those of the gift as described by Lewis Hyde. The living process that Alexander describes is, like the gift, something that cannot be made, but only generated. There is an element of giving up control and surrendering to that which already exists. Within this recursive, iterative process of creation, something beyond our control can emerge.

[Mahipal Lunia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant is the only word tht comes to kind to describe this work

[A · Rating 2 out of 5]

Volume 1

[Jarett Metcalfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing set of books must read for any designer!

[Charlie Kester · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alexander's latest and what will probably be known as his magnum opus.