REVIEWS OF THE NATURE OF ORDER


The Nature of Order offers a golden thread that connects the innermost center of who we are as humans with the physical environment that we have the potential to create. It is an intimate journey which reunites our internal experience with the external world so as to create wholeness in the reader. It is written in precise language: In my view, the kind of language in which the future of society will be written.
Peter Block, author and Organizational Consultant, Connecticut.

A couple of years ago I read the unpublished manuscript of the Nature of Order and found it to be remarkable -- one of the most important books I've read
Ken Foster, architect, Austin Texas.


The Nature of Order is not only a summa summarum of what Oxford University Press has called "The World of Christopher Alexander", but it is surely one of the most ambitious books ever published. If its profound argument -- that order in both nature and in what we build are essentially the same -- is ultimately understood and accepted by serious readers it may prove to be one of the most consequential works Oxford has published in all its 500 years.
William McClung, special project editor for Oxford University Press, former senior editor of the University of California Press.


My personal opinion is that this book will be recognized as one of the twentieth century's most important documents. Although I am admittedly biased, the same opinion is expressed by those who have had a chance to read copies of earlier drafts

Nikos Salingaros, Professor of Mathematics, San Antonio Texas.


The Alexander books are the most exciting thing I have read in a long time, and I think Alexander has made a SIGNIFICANT contribution to modern philosophy in general. ... my unbounded thanks to Alexander for this great seminal work ...

Christopher Skelly, President of Insight Resource Inc., New York.

... this incredibly dense and fascinating work (Book 2) ...

Joyce Berry, Former senior editor, Oxford University Press, New York.

... To all of you: I received volume 1. Absolutely Marvelous. Congratulations. Better even than expected, and well worth the 20 year wait. Eagerly awaiting its successors. All the best for the New Year - Tom ...

Tom Cheetham

... I believe he is likely to be remembered most of all, in the end, for having produced the first credible proof of the existence of God ...

I am going to forego a general introduction to Alexander's long series of works, of which the Nature of Order is the theoretical culmination. ... Suffice it to say that the theoretical works all anticipate and point to the much greater scope and ambition, and to the deeper vision of the four volumes of the Nature of Order. It is a moving work, architecturally, spiritually, and philosophically.

Eric Buck, Department of Philosophy, University of Kentucky.

"...realistically not many of the books we discuss will be remembered two or three hundred years from now...this may be an exception..."

... Five hundred years is a long time, and I don't expect that many of the people I talk to in these pages will be known in the year 2500. Christopher Alexander may be an exception ...

David Creelman, Author, Interviewer and Editor, Knowledge Manager HR.com, HR magazine, Toronto, Canada.

... Book 2 alone is likely to change the whole field of Computer Science ...

Richard Gabriel, Department of Computer Science, Stanford University.

... In these postmodern times of distortional postructural theories and cynical deconstructivist designs, Alexander's work is a beacon illuminating a way to make the world more robust, beautiful, and kind. Such a world is utopian, of course, and never really gained in real life. Yet books like The Phenomenon of Life and real-world projects like his Mexicali experiment and Japanese Eishin School demonstrate at least a partial actualization of his extraordinary vision. In turn, this vision and work may well inspire a new generation of practitioners and thinkers, and so a virtuous circle may proceed. ...

David Seamon, Professor, Department of Architecture, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS. 6606.

Dear Chris, I have been keeping my eyes open for this book ever since I learned you were writing it back when I was your student in the early '80's. The class that I took from you in which you taught some of your theories about the nature of order was the most interesting and most memorable in my entire educational experience. It was the only class that provided me objective criteria with which to observe, perceive, and analyze architecture or, for that matter, many other types of man-made artifacts that, 20 years later, I still consciously remember, think about, and use today. Your ideas were a revelation to me, profound and fundamental.

One of the most miserable moments in my life was the theft of a car I owned. Not because the car meant anything to me but because all my notes and projects from your class were in the car. I was left with nothing but memories about the ideas to which you introduced me in that class.

... now finally the book I have waited for for almost 20 years is going to be published. I have ordered all of them and can hardly wait until I receive them.

Lee Mudrick, Santa Barbara, California

... one of the most influential people who has ever been in the design world. His influence on us, operationally, has been enormous ...

Andres Duany, Congress Of New Urbanism founder, Miami, Florida.

Alexander's genetic scripts are likely to become as ordinary as reading and writing; and will play a role so fundamental in the future, that their widespread use cannot even be imagined today. Twenty years ago, the idea of spread sheets had barely been invented. Today, it is hardly possible to imagine modern accounting, business planning, or business practice without spread sheets. Yet twenty years ago, almost no one except the inventors and developers, knew that a simple device could put complex arithmetic manipulation of charts, cash flows, payroll, under the user's control on a home computer.

The scripts which Alexander has invented have a similar, perhaps greater potential, in the field of building. Today it is assumed that buildings can only be designed by specialists, and as a result we live in a world where they rarely, if ever, meet the needs of their inhabitants. No one knows that a device exists, in principle, with which all users and architects and builders they themselves could lay out buildings, to their own satisfaction, with a device no more complicated than an Excel spread sheet.

I believe that the design of buildings -- more beautiful buildings, better designed, more organic, and more appropriately fitted to need and terrain, each unique to its special place -- can one day be done by everyone in the world, with the help of Alexander's genetic scripts. This will change the world as effectively as the advent of printing changed the world. The physical environment, which we consider today, an almost hopeless task can, and will, under this advent of this step forward in technology, become something which everybody in the world takes part in, and with means as simple as the scripts which they can find and download from their computer.

Doug Carlston, Silicon Valley Luminary and former President of Broderbund

... he is single-handedly trying to destroy the trillion dollar construction industry ...

Joel Garreau, Writer and Journalist, Washington, DC.

... "Alexander's approach presents a fundamental challenge to us and our style-obsessed age. It suggests that a beautiful form can come about only through a process that is meaningful to people. It also implies that certain types of processes, regardless of when they occur or who does them, can lead to certain types of forms."

-Thomas Fisher, Progressive Architecture

... It seems quite likely that Pattern Language is the best-selling architectural treatise ... of all time.

Bill Saunders, Co-Editor of Harvard Design Magazine

... Personally I have for a long time been interested in the reevaluation of medieval architecture and urbanism within the classical tradition. Surprisingly I find this interest supported by thinking referring to New Sciences. I am reading "The Nature of Order" by Christopher Alexander which seems also to offer very sharp perspectives bridging over some prejudiced antagonism between classicism and non-classical architectural cultures. Remembering the depreciative comments on Byzantine Architecture which have been made recently on this list referring to arguments of clumsy detailing and a lack of artistical refinement I was very pleased to find Alexander widening his range of value criterias to a more comprehensive notion of wholesomeness and aliveness, meaning a complexity and subtle interaction of patterns which support beauty in an objective and universal manner.

Lucien Steil, Editor, Katarxis

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