Review of Christopher Alexander's "The Nature of Order".
From Vogue pour l'Homme, Paris, January 2004By Nikos A. Salingaros.
Every few centuries, humankind undergoes a paradigm shift. New ideas revolutionize the way people think and how they confront their world. A set of ideals is taken up and spreads into society. Such movements require that the population be ready to accept them; a large number of people who share the same frustrations are already thinking along similar lines, so that the message resonates with the multitude and is not simply a cry in the wilderness. The shift represents the "tipping point", catalyzing a reaction that has been unable to take off because it was lacking a few essential pieces. Usually, one person conceives the vision as a whole for the first time, and this completed vision moves people to adopt it.
The architect and scientist Christopher Alexander is offering us a potential paradigm shift with his new four-volume work "The Nature of Order". It outlines a way of understanding and connecting to the universe, and a way of generating the built environment. Cutting past much of twentieth-century aesthetic and ideological dogmas, Alexander suggests that we have lost touch with our most basic human feelings, and proposes methods to reconnect us to ourselves, and to our world. While this work is ostensibly a manual on a "New Architecture", it is really a roadmap of how to appreciate again (for the first time for many readers) both natural and artificially created beauty. It is also a manual on how to be alive to the maximum extent possible by manipulating our surroundings; hence the connection to architecture.
Book 1 offers straightforward empirical tests that tell us whether any artifact, building, or built environment makes us feel more alive or less. It is a simple matter, therefore, to choose our surroundings so that we always feel alive. These tests are based on both perception and geometry; properties common to all structures that make us feel alive. Amazingly, these geometrical properties are also found in structures that ARE alive, as with biological organisms, and also in the extended sense of inanimate structures formed by nature. Alexander then shows that these properties were understood intuitively by all the greatest artists, artisans, and architects of the past, who used them subconsciously to create humankind's historic works of art. That is, until the twentieth century, when those pursuing innovation started to violate them.
Alexander convinces even the most skeptical reader by giving lengthy discussions in Book 2 based on scientific arguments. Anyone with an amateur's interest in popular science can easily follow his explanations, and they serve to overwhelmingly validate the claimed results. This is the wonderful aspect of this work: Alexander alternates between sensory tests that convince us in our heart and viscera that what he says is true; and detailed intellectual arguments that do the same for our rational, thinking mind.
Book 3 is devoted to the art and science of building and design: everything from the scale of an entire city, to a neighborhood, to a single building, to an individual room, to a tile that will ornament a room and make it "alive". By itself, the existence of living structure on every level of scale will undoubtedly provoke a revolution. For Alexander convincingly argues that we connect to structure on every scale, and that the ideology of "pure form", which eliminated built ornament and coherent substructure on the human scales from the height of a person down to the width of a hair, was fundamentally destructive.
Even in the field of architecture, where hagiography is standard practice, and where buildings by star architects are declared to be "miracles", Alexander creates deep anxiety. The worship of star architects is a game played by architectural critics and an entrenched power establishment. Architectural propaganda is meant for the masses, and is not taken seriously by those who are part of the machine. Yet anyone who reads Alexander's new book will be struck by the fact that this is a genuine paradigm shift, and not just another architectural deception intended to promote new faces and a new style. People are used to pretend prophets and cannot face the genuine thing: they tend to become hostile and lose all rationality.
Alexander ultimately and inevitably approaches the religious dimension. He has not shirked his duty, and faces this difficult confrontation head on in Book 4. He is fully aware of the philosophical and religious implications of his work, and devotes considerable thought to analyzing their consequences. When people begin to study this book, and the inevitable war with established architecture breaks out, thoughtful persons will find the truths in the connection to religion a comforting solace until the dust has settled. Then, the world can begin to rebuild itself on human and timeless principles free of a destructive dogma that took it over during the twentieth century.