What begins with a dot ends with an encounter with the “face of God.”
Take a blank piece of paper, Christopher Alexander urges, and put a dot anywhere.
Instantly, the page’s character changes.
The dot creates a number of different spaces, which he calls “centers.” Each of those centers relates to the others. When one changes, all change. And anyone who experiences those spaces also changes.
The dot exercise reflects larger truths about buildings and towns, parks and campuses, roads and riverways.
Good places are really a collection of centers, positioned alongside and sometimes overlapping each other. Each center has its own character—not just scale and materials and shape, but also feelings of warmth and character and naturalness. To succeed, each center relates to other centers. To have a living quality, every center needs to make everything nearby better.
Consider, for example, a house. A cottage may be built with a timber frame, which creates squares of plaster, which help to define the windows and doors. Inside, windows on different sides bring an endless play of light. Arches or columns define the walls. Outside, a garden and pathway meander around the house’s periphery. The pathway then ambles through a rose archway and out toward the road.
Each of these centers—the framing, panels, arches, windows, gardens, pathways—evokes distinctive feelings. Each relates to the others. Each makes the others more whole, alive, soulful.
This way of thinking -- placing feelings and "wholeness" over all other concerns in designing and buildings homes, schools, civic centers, train stations, and more -- has been a hallmark of Christopher Alexander's work for four decades.
Alexander's work begins with an evocation of feelings.
We notice, for example, a sense of awe while in the parks of Frederick Law Olmsted. We notice an uncanny quality of life in some of the great old brownstones of New York, the twisting streets of San Francisco, or great old college campuses like Harvard or Yale. We notice a rare sense of both order and discovery at the University of Virginia. We find ourselves overwhelmed at Westminster Abbey or an old German village.
We also notice a sense of dread while near the vast compounds of public house, Brutalist buildings like Boston's City Hall, or even major arts destinations like Lincoln Center. We go to a vast stadium surrounded by parking spaces and we're let down.
Alexander's work begins with a basic insight: We humans do relatively few things, over and over. We eat, sleep, work, learn, play, read, talk, love. We do these things over and over again, in countless variations. The job of any community, therefore, should be to create the conditions for us to do all these things as creatively as possible. The job of architecture should be to create the kinds of places where these activities happen most effectively and soulfully.
Alexander's most famous work is A Pattern Language, a work that details 253 different ways to design the world -- from whole regions all the way down to a corner of a room. That book might be the most important single work on architecture and place in American history.
In all of his work, Alexander rails against modern approaches to building. Traditional structures work, he says, because they emerged from a living process. They were built to fit the land. An innate understanding of beauty informed their design. Natural building materials gave them character. Each piece was the result of time-honored techniques of craftsmanship. And they were allowed to evolve to fit the needs and desires of users.
Nowadays, we design every inch and every corner ahead of time, use
artificial materials, mechanize the construction process, and fail to
relate the building’s pieces to each other or their setting.
In The Nature of Order,
Alexander lists 15 features that make a structure great. The ideas are
familiar to longtime followers. But he makes a much bigger claim about
why these features work.
All good spaces, he argues, are living things that establish spiritual connections with people. Good buildings—and furniture, gardens, art, and artifacts—reflect the most basic elements of the human experience. They elevate people to higher places, where they can realize their abilities and also connect with all humanity.
15 Elements of Place
In The Nature of Order, Christopher Alexander identifies 15 features that give life to buildings and other structures.
- Levels of Scale: The pieces of structures range in size, with “definite jumps” from one level to the next.
- Strong Centers: Structures are comprised of a series of adjacent and overlapping centers, each which improves the others.
- Boundaries: The edges of space are well marked, with the size of the edges dependent on what’s inside and outside.
- Alternating Repetition: Design includes many recurring themes, separated with some variations.
- Positive Space: No spaces are “leftovers,” but rather complete in their own right.
- Good Shape: Elementary forms—circles, rectangles, hexagons, rhombuses, semicircles—combine for form more detailed shapes.
- Local Symmetries: A structure’s overall balance exists not just at a grand scale, but in the minute details as well.
- Deep Interlock and Ambiguity: Pieces fit together so that each becomes part of the other.
- Contrast: Different colors and forms sit astride, each helping to define the other.
- Gradients: Shapes, colors, details, and directions change gradually to draw the user into the space.
- Roughness: The texture of space reflects complexity, doesn’t gloss over it.
- Echoes: Different aspects of a space recur, in varied form, so that one aspect always provides reminders of others.
- The Void: Open spaces allow focus as well as deeper experiences of more detailed parts of the structure.
- Simplicity and Inner Calm: Geometrical simplicity fosters a sense of groundedness.
- Non-Separateness: Things do not exist in isolation, but rather connect to and improve things nearby.
Greater than the Sum of Parts
All of these elements add up to something profound.
Alexander talks about “The I,” a mystic chord that connects people to great structures. And he says the “face of God” is made manifest in great structures. The more a structure reflects man and nature, “we come closer to reality, closer to the stuff, to the void, to the underlying ground of which the universe is made.”
Alexander is not just being poetic here. He means this literally. How can this be so?
The answer is that good structures of all kinds look a lot like natural things—the structure of a leaf or a dewdrop, a meandering river, a hill or a hollow, a cove or a meadow—even the movement or repose of animals. All these things grow organically. They relate to each other, sometimes snugly and sometimes with tension, but always with energy.
Life fosters life. Architecture should be part of that process.
