Architect Christopher Alexander, a ready-made hero of the battle against the celebration of of soul-less boxes, and something of a prophet without honor in his own profession publishes his magnum opus this month. Even people who aren't building a house or constructing a database are fascinated by his previous book ''A Pattern Language,'' a recipe book of ''patterns,'' or archetypal elements that can be combined to form a structure as small as a desk or sitting area or as large as a city or region
The patterns, distilled from (mostly premodernist) examples all over the world, are what the authors believe best foster the comfort, activities and social lives of the people who live in them. To use a key Alexander word, these patterns help make a building ''alive.'' ... In a profession that seems indifferent to the concerns and delights of ordinary life, Alexander has always been a humanist, a proponent of window seats, sunny spots and arcades. Last year, Alexander began the publication of ''The Nature of Order,'' his four-volume magnum opus, the second volume of which appears next month. An unclassifiable work, ''The Nature of Order'' offers the results of his quest to figure out what underlying principles make his patterns work. It has some of the same qualities that make ''The Timeless Way of Building'' and parts of ''A Pattern Language'' a tricky sell to hardheaded empiricists wary of any whiff of the metaphysical. Clearly influenced by Taoism, Alexander unabashedly uses words like ''wholeness''and complains of the prevailing Cartesian ''mechanistic'' view of the universe. ''The Nature of Order'' has vast ambitions; it floats a hypothesis that Alexander hopes will lead to ''a new view of space and matter'' and to a different conception of ''the fundamentals of the way the world is made.'' This theory, very crudely summarized, would be based on the understanding that order is inherent in space and systems and that they are more or less ''alive'' based on the quality of the order they manifest. Read full article here
