Christopher Alexander: Generating a Living World (pt1)

Ontological Design for Back Loop Realities

The philosopher-architect Christopher Alexander devoted his entire life to the questions of “what creates more life?” and “what creates wholeness?” He considered this question across all categories: people, animals, ecosystems, landscapes, gardens, buildings, artifacts, art, and objects— from the grandiose to the ordinary. His journey was both intellectual and empirical, philosophical and aesthetic, personal and universal. It led him to discard the many dualisms that plague us today — subject/object; natural/man-made; wild/domestic; process/pattern. He intuited vast potential in the universe to create beauty and order, and remained persistent in his efforts to convince people that humans had this same capacity, if they were willing to look deeper into the “nature of order,” and “principles of wholeness.” His seminal work, a four-volume, 2000 page “essay on the art of building and the nature of the universe” is widely regarded as a singular achievement of the human mind and spirit. He inspired many architects, and his “pattern language” approach to design sparked a side industry of pattern languages across many disiciplines.

Alexander understood that the human subject was not separate from their environment, but somehow the interior forces and the exterior forces flowed together as a whole. The key to creating move aliveness was to enable all the forces to work together in a generative way. When all the forces are coherent, a new quality emerges, a “quality without a name,” something both ordinary and sacred. Speaking of his vision of a living world, he wrote, “the core of the matter lies in the way that centers are being formed.”

For Alexander, living centers are not built from parts, but from flows of unfolding forces. He proposed that

all living 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 keep creating living wholes.

I believe all living processes are sequences, or combinations, or combinations of combinations, of this kind of unfolding process.

Centers involve flows of animals, plants, elements, the earth’s hydrological, meteological, astrological cycles, people’s work, play, leisure— street corners, gardens, an old tree stump, a hearth, a horse cart — are all in some sense both living centers as well as centers of life, receiving and generating flows.

Alexander describes the places that most exemplify this living quality. They are not slick, pristine, well-groomed modern places. They are places where we feel we belong, just like we feel a belongingness in nature. They have a “rubbed-in, used, quality.” They are living processes because they have been lived by people and people have lived through them. The quality, just like life itself, is “rough and ready,” while also evoking pleasure, ease and familiarity. No design, created purely out of context, has this quality initially. It must be worn into the place by the living flows of people, animals, plants, and other creatures passing through. Objects find their way there, to occupy their places too, contributing to this quality. Alexander recognizes the quality as the Japanese term “wabi-to-sabi” or “rusty beauty.” In our fast paced world, we do not have the luxury of building through timeless living process, where the building up and wearing in of the place happens continuously. “But,” Alexander writes, “some buildings, some landscape — invite it, encourage it, foster it.”

The key point here is that wear itself is a design principle.

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[Side bar: Wabi-sabi Zen

Wabi-Sabi Zen is the place where objects tell their stories. Wabi refers to the inner life, a spiritual path or narrative, in other words, the story. Sabi refers to material things, the objects.  Zen refers to the practice of attention — to the mind that notices.

Wabi-Sabi Zen refers to storied objects and the mind that notices.

Wabi-sabi  is a Japanese aesthetics that is associated with the earthen & elemental materials, whose form has grown organically, and whose shape, textures, shades and hues are a result of being weathered by natural processes over time. Wabi-sabi explores impermanence, the ability to cherish an object in its passage through time.  In this sense, wabi-sabi is not separable from its story and its environs.

What to Notice

a fragile 'thou", a hungry tiger, a steamed pod on my plate, the color of orchard grass, the scent of abandoned bluebooks, a thirsty cow, an angry boss, the smiling farmer all coated with husk ... the sweet lustre of one of your girls, the word someone tosses about like a head, tumbled with dreads... the way someone cries when they're lonely, and laughs when they are simply alone -- although I did not hear them then, I only hear them now

End Side Bar]

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Ontological design depends on our capacity to sense the flows of wholeness and the living centers they can generate. The very first step is to understand our own selves as centers of generative potential. How we understand ourselves has enormous impact on what is possible for us to achieve. It is possible for us to create a beautiful world, places that thrive and in turn help us flourish.

In 1996 Christopher Alexander, the philosopher-architect was invited to be the keynote speaker at the OOPSLA conference. This may seem odd since OOPSLA stands for “Object Oriented Programming Languages and Applications.” At the dawn of the digital age, young people had found in Alexander’s pattern language approach, a powerful new way to build software. Code reimagined as place-making. Software reimagined as objects that grow. These were beautiful, powerful ideas that revolutionized our world. Yet, Alexander, always the formidable observer of all the forces flowing through the system, knew that something was amiss. The revolution was lacking the exactness it needed to make the vision of a more beautiful world unfold from the digital revolution. The man who had written 20 years before the conference of the “exactness” that was required to produce a certain living quality (“the quality without a name”) understood that it was somehow lacking in this generation of innovators. Alexander captured this notion in a passage about building a table for the blackbirds

Suppose that I am trying to make a table for the blackbirds in my garden. In winter, when the snow is on the ground, and the blackbirds are short of food, I will put food out for them on the table. So I build the table; and dream about the clusters of blackbirds which will come flocking to the table in the snow. But it is not so easy to build a table that will really work. The birds follow their own laws; and if I don’t understand them, they just won’t come. If I put the table too low, the birds won’t fly down to it. If it is too high in the air, or too exposed, the wind won’t let them settle on it. If it is near a laundry line, blowing in the wind, they will be frightened by the moving line. Most of the places where I put the table actually don’t work. I slowly learn that blackbirds have a million subtle forces guiding the in their behavior. If I don’t understand these forces, there is simply nothing I can do to make the table come to life. So long as the placing of the table is inexact, my image of the blackbirds flocked around the table eating is just wishful thinking. To make the table live, I must take these forces seriously, and place the table in a position which is perfectly exact.

Lacking “exactness”, the promise of the digital revolution was just wishful thinking— something most of us realize today. Back then, it would have come as a surprise even to those who were devoted to the vision, those who arrived at the future before the rest of us. Therefore, after a careful speech about beauty and wholeness, Alexander concluded with a dire warning:

I heard a rumor at breakfast that some of the people in this room have begun to worry about their jobs. I have no idea if that is true. But I was told there is an undercurrent of unease as to where all this—software design—is going. There is a huge expanding phenomenon of programming as an art, and yet an uneasiness about where it is all headed? What is it going to do?

My comment on this? Please forgive me, I'm going to be very direct and blunt for a horrible second. It could be thought that the technical way in which you currently look at programming is almost as if you were willing to be "guns for hire." In other words, you are the technicians. You know how to make the programs work. "Tell us what to do daddy, and we'll do it." That is the worm in the apple.

What I am proposing here is something a little bit different from that. It is a view of programming as the natural genetic infrastructure of a living world which you/we are capable of creating, managing, making available, and which could then have the result that a living structure in our towns, houses, work places, cities, becomes an attainable thing. That would be remarkable. It would turn the world around, and make living structure the norm once again, throughout society, and make the world worth living in again.

This is an extraordinary vision of the future, in which computers play a fundamental role in making the world—and above all the built structure of the world—alive, humane, ecologically profound, and with a deep living structure. I realize that you may be surprised by my conclusion. This is not what I am, technically, supposed to have been talking about to you. Or you may say, Well, great idea, but we're not interested. I hope that is not your reaction. I hope that all of you, as members of a great profession of the future, will decide to help me, and to help yourselves, by taking part in this enormous world-wide effort. I do think you are capable of it. And I do not think any other professional body has quite the ability, or the natural opportunity for influence, to do this job as it must be done.

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Who, if anyone there, remembers that significant warning? It seems to me that it was the most important part of the occasion. It was both a golden moment and a missed opportunity for designing new ontologies for back loop realities. In 2009, following the OOPSLA event, in anticipation of the influence that Alexander’s The Nature of Origin might have on the agile community in specific and the programming community in general, a trio of young people¹ wrote an article titled Agile, Anthropology, and Alexander’s Architecture: An Essay in Three Voices, stating:

During its formative decades the software community looked twice to the Theories of Christopher Alexander for inspiration, both time failing to completely master the architect’s most useful insights. Now a third opportunity presents itself with Alexander’s recent publication, The Nature of Order. Serious apprenticeship, however, imposes a prerequisite of sober self-reflection and evaluation. What, really, is the nature of the developer’s tasks? Under what philosophical umbrella has the software community matured until now?

Part of the blame was placed on the community itself. Dave West argues that, despite Alexander’s influence to support design patterns — first in the late 60’s and again in the late eighties— “neither time has been for the better and that it’s our own damn fault.

Even if our profession was young and still seeking an understanding of itself and its task, in both cases we eschewed the tougher, more significant, teachings in favor of the more familiar but lesser ones. … We’ve hit a dead end with our overly rationalist ‘engineering’ mind set.

Part of the problem, however, lay in the language of patterns themselves. Patterns were taken up as rules to govern design, or instructions to be implemented, rather than as a compendium of examples derived from Alexander’s deeper insight into The Timeless Way of Building. This problem stalked the pattern language approach in almost all disciplines, eventually turning the promising efforts pattern-languaging communities into interesting exercises in pattern-matching abstractions. ² The patterns themselves unfolded from Alexander’s deep insight into wholeness and sensitivities toward QWAN (the quality without a name), and without having them first, people — programmers and builders alike— could not piece them together to create beauty. Christopher Alexander himself recognized this shortcoming, which he curiously pre-warned us about in the beginning sections of The Timeless Way of Building. First, on the dedication page he wrote

To you, mind of no mind, in whom the timeless way was born.

Secondly, he wrote:

It is a process which brings order out of nothing but ourselves.

Thirdly, he emphasized

To seek the timeless way we must first know the quality without a name.

And the final installment of the introduction section, he wrote

Indeed this ageless character has nothing, in the end, to do with languages.

This recognition, led Alexander to a decades-long pursuit to understand unfolding wholeness. This pursuit led Alexander to a spiritual place, to a kind of religious conversion. As Jenny Quillien relates:

In Nature of Order, the entire focus shifts … to wholeness. Holiness, if you will. Building for Alexander is a spiritual endeavor; the search for Go is low-key in the early books but comes out loud and clear in NO. (W)holiness of increased life in the built environment is his goal; unfolding is the methodology.

I few weeks ago I was at the house of friends of mine (and POP-UP School people to boot!) and saw a large container with beguiling ceramic beads in it. I picked out one of the nicest pieces, which was multicolored and jewel-like, and my friend said — take it. Although we both knew it was the nicest piece, when she said “take it” I instantly knew it wasn’t “mine.” There was a more sober, earthier piece further down the pile. That’s the one I want to take back with me. My friend gave me an immediate smile of recognition.

In the article, Jenny reminds us that Alexander was experimenting with the different ways people responded to objects when instead of asking “which one do you prefer?” — they were asked “which one is more like your ‘self’? People were surprised how much their perspective shifted between the two. Something different was being used to evaluate. In the first case that something was like an objective measure, something perhaps more generalized and socially conventional. In the latter case— the “self” was evaluating the objects. Jenny reflects: “Alexander is counting on our ability as ‘living structures’ ourselves to discern between degrees of life in the objects around us and, with practice, to improve on that ability, making increasingly fine discernments.” To which Pam Rostal responds:

This reminds me of how C. S. Lewis described ‘joy’ as the feeling we get of being home in a place we’ve never been before. Somehow, the Absolute in such a place resonates with the Absolute within us.

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The Nature of Order

The Nature of Order is itself a beautiful example of unfolding process. Christopher Alexander called it “an essay” ³ but it is not your everyday ordinary essay, since it runs over 2000 pages in total. To essay, also means to strive; and I think this is the sense he means — he is essaying his way through the nature of order. The four volumes unfold as follows:

Book One: The Phenomenon of Life
Book Two: The Process of Creating Life
Book Three: A Vision of a Living World
Book Four: The Luminous Ground⁴

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Book One begins with a prologue to the entire series. Here Alexander shares his difficulties in accepting the implications of his own journey— spiritual and religious implications that his formal training, as a mathematician and empiricist would find ridiculous. “Even now, on some days,” he reflects,

I look at the theory I have formulated in these four books and can hardly believe that it is true. It provides a view of the universe which is so surprising, and so much at odds with the normal common-sense ways of thinking about physical reality we have currently, that it seems almost like a fantasy, like some kind of science fiction.

He was fueled by his commitment to understanding beauty and learning how people could reclaim the ability to build beautiful buildings and landscapes. He credits his success with basing everything on the real nature of human feeling — that he has tried to honor and respect the capacity for people to feel what is beautiful, to feel what is more alive. Alexander quickly realized that our ability to create beauty is tied up with our conception of the nature of order. Being confused by the nature of order is the root of the problem of architecture. But no formal conception of the nature of order could correct this confusion. The solutions were to be found elsewhere—through processes where beauty and aliveness, and wholeness are disclosed— in human feeling and open heartedness.

Alexander goes on to describe and illustrate how objects and scenes have different degrees of life. More degrees of life is related to a sense of wholeness, of connection and relationship, of the vitality of youth and also the sense of having accumulated experience. A slumhouse can have more life than a postmodern construction. His states his fundamental hypothesis as:

What we call “life” is a general condition which exists to some degree of other, in every part of space: brick, stone, grass, river, painting, building, daffodil, human being, forest, city. And further: The key to this idea is that every part of space— every connected region of space, small or large— has some degree of life, and that this degree of life is well defined, objectively existing and measurable.

But what is doing the measuring?

Alexander identifies what he calls “wholeness and the theory of centers” as the essential qualities in what has more life. A center does not have to be “in the center” of something. A center is a point of relation, a grounding point from which life can propagate. Take a blank sheet of paper. Mark it with a dot anywhere on the paper. The location of the dot determines what becomes possible — the kinds of symmetries of asymmetries unfold from the chosen spot. A sheet of paper with a dot on it has a kind of wholeness that the paper does not. We might say the paper remains latent until the dot potentiates in it. The dot sits in a specific location, and implies what might unfold. There is a gradient array susbsisting in the possible relationships that the dot can unfold. The dot becomes a provocation. It already has meaning and generates meaning …

There is a felt sense of the latent potential of a greater wholeness and forces that make the situation come alive …

This simple exercise allows us to attend to the way that the body anticipates what comes next, where life is going — perhaps the multiple directions that the forces are moving within. It is not a given. We get to amplify some of those forces and set aside others.⁵

The word “center” and the term “wholeness” are very closely related. Something that is “whole” not only is composed of parts, wholes are composed of centers which ground, and free up the forces to generate wholeness. Look at the image of the tree below. Can you relieve yourself of seeing only whole-part relations and look more deeply to see the centers at all scales from which the wholeness grows …

In your minds eye, looking both from above or below, you might be seeing something like this

Look closer, look deeper, you would see incredibly rich complexity

Now take a look at a forest of trees from above — they produce more living centers, more dense patterns of wholeness …

Working with centers-unfolding-wholeness means capturing the essence of what creates these living patterns and employing that essence, that process of creating beauty, and generating more life.

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[Watch: Christopher Alexander’s photos
Can you sense into the living centers of each photograph, notice what gives them life, what makes them wholes?

End of Watch]

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Life comes from wholeness and wholeness grows from living centers

Centers co-create themselves. This is not the same as a simple holarchy where there are lower parts and greater wholes. Wholeness can unfold from an original center, establishing other centers at both smaller and larger scales, and the original center may “disappear” and yet, still, somehow contribute to the wholeness and its ongoing unfoldment. For example, think of a tree that is a center in an opening of a forest. A strangler fig begins to grow around it and the tree eventually dies, leaving something like this:

The original tree is somehow still the center of this wholeness, and yet it is no longer there. It is somehow there and not there at the same time. It is in a sense the center of the historical epoch of what today is the strangler fig landscape. The center is a seed or, as Carlos Casteneda would say, the assemblage point. It is an assemblage point in time, that is concretized as a living structure in space. Like the wind, which cannot be seen, only the effects of which can be perceived —- the center is there and not there at the same time. It is pure temporicity.

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Alexander also talks about centers as being composed of vector-like forces within a dynamic field. We intuitively perceive these forces and intuitively sense their center as the still point, the still point which is held by the balance of forces. The center is destroyed when the balance is distorted. Consider the following figure as an example of vector-flows or forces in a field:

Consider also these images. Is there a still point or are there many still points that somehow compose a wholeness that has a center, although it is not the kind of center that you can point to— it doesn’t exist in space, it is a reconciliation of forces in and across time.

A structure, garden or landscape in which the forces are working against itself, has no center, and thus leans toward destroying itself. But what does “destroying itself” mean here? It means the tendency of the thing to seek life, to establish a living center around which the forces may become coherently whole. All “destructive tendencies” are actually this — the force of life wanting to become whole.

In the midst of “destructive tendencies” Alexander calls for people to function as living centers, as seed-centers where life can spontaneously regenerate. What does this mean for we, the people gathered in between worlds, facing the earth’s 6th mass extinction?

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In Part Two of Book One

Christopher Alexander introduces the surprising feature to his notion of living structure. He introduces this as follows: “[Living structure] cannot be fully understood if we regard them merely as something in Cartesian space, a mechanism separate from ourselves. Rather, it turns out that

[L]iving structure is both structural and personal …
it is both rooted in structure and rooted in feeling …

This attitude, this revelation, repairs the split between the objective and subjective aspects of experience, and

leads to a mental world where art, form, order and life unite our feeling with our objective sense of reality, in a synthesis which opens the door to a form of living in which we may be truly human.

It seemed to him to be an inflection point, a threshold moment at which the destructive forces of modernism may find their seed in the human, as the living center of a new, vital, vibrant, and thriving world.

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What does it mean for something to be personal?

A thing is truly personal when it touches us in our humanity.

The trivialization of the word “personal” is part of our present popular culture, immersed in mechanistic cosmology. But from the point of view of the world-picture in this book, “personal” is a profound objective quality which inheres in something. It is not idiosyncratic but universal. It refers to something true and fundamental in a thing itself.

I believe all works which have a deep life and wholeness in them as “personal” in this sense. Indeed, this quality is an essential and necessary part of what I have identified as life in things. When we are dealing with realm of personal feeling in which feeling is a fact— as much a fact as the radiation from the sun, or the swinging of a pendulum.

When the field of centers is authentic, it is always personal. If it appears to have the right structure but is not personal, it is empty structure, only masquerading as life— and, in every case like this, it will turn out that we have misjudged it structurally. The existence of a personal feeling in a thing or system is not a subjective quality of limited validity, but an objective quality whose existence is as fundamental to any given situation as the more mechanical facts to which we are accustomed.

After introducing this notion of the personal, Alexander allows it to percolate in an invisible way through books 2 and 3, ultimately picking it back up and extending it to something even more surprising. His message — that personal feeling, living centers, wholeness and the quality that makes things come alive — are all somehow one integrated or equivalent notion. “Feeling and life” are somehow the same thing, he writes, and they are “integrated in each person’s heart,” erasing the structural duality of subjective/objective and in-here/out-there. This is architecture raised to the power of spirituality.

Alexander moves on to talk about the other side of the equation, in terms of the “mirror of the self.” If the object is experienced as feeling in the self, then the chiral twin of that is that the self is perceived in the object — hence the object becomes the mirror of the self. The self, however, is mostly confused. It becomes distorted by living in ugly environments that are devoid of “self”, and we are misled by advertising and social opinions developed under the spell of materialism.

[Each] architect, each designer, is a little lost, mentally flailing around trying to do a good job without being sure what that means— all because we have a foundation of quicksand for the judgments he/she/we are called upon to make every moment of the working day.

What is ecologically appropriate, what is socially and psychologically valuable, what is beautiful to the eye, what is comforting to the soul— these are all wrapped up together in the global judgment of wholeness.

Toward the end of Book One, Alexander thought his experience of wholeness could be regarded as a rigorous scientific understanding of space. Returning to the exercise of a single dot on a blank sheet of paper, he writes: “… the wholeness created by a single dot sitting on a sheet of paper consists of a series of convex segments of space.”

Alexander concludes Book One by reminding us that the built environment plays a significant role — if not the most significant role — in the possibility for humans to thrive. That life depends on life, has more to do than just with eating. Life needs to be surrounded by things that have life which are, by nature and design, expressions of wholeness.

By illustrating the existence of living structure, I have shown, I hope, that the phenomenon of life is something greater, more profound, and more general, than what we have come to this of, and accept, as biological life.

This is a new way of looking at architecture. The intellectual foundation of this vision is the idea that space itself, matter itself, has life in varying degrees. There is a convergence of function, geometry, and feeling in space; this space is conceived as a living fabric that— through its structure— encompasses these things. Space does not merely contain living structure. Space has life, to a greater or lesser degree. It is the space itself which resembles self, which functions, which works, which has living structure in it, and which has life.

The life which appears is an attribute of space itself.

Our job, as architects, builders, citizens, is to create this life in the air and stones and rooms and gardens— to create life in the fabric of space itself. This is not merely a poetic way of talking. It is a new physical conception of how the world is made and how it must be understood.

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This essay is part of an online course series I will be offering in September, 2024 called “Ontological Design for Back Loop Realities”

Upcoming: September Course: Christopher Alexander: Generating a Living World
Includes all course content, 5 two-hour live online sessions and video recordings.

1. Jenny Quillien, Pam Rostal and Dave West

2. There is an interesting confluence here between the pattern-recognition AI and large language modles, and the engineering mindset to pattern languages. I would love to dive into this thought, but it is beyond the scope of this article. Maybe another day.

3. An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe

4. Ronen has compiled a great way to access all the four books by reading excerpts here
https://iamronen.com/quality/christopher-alexander-the-nature-of-order/

5. Here is a wonderful example of the exercise
https://iamronen.com/blog/2018/01/23/drawing-centers/