Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Selected Reviews
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Christopher Alexander, 2002-2004. The Nature of Order, vols. 1, 2 & 4. Berkeley, CA: Center for Environmental Structure |
Reviewed by Shierry Weber Nicholsen
Christopher Alexander is an architect who, since the 1960s, is very well known and controversial. His four-volume The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe is his masterwork, some 20 years in preparation (1)
As its subtitle indicates, Order goes far beyond architecture. It is so articulate about the process of building and making and the characteristics of meaningful form or structure in any human-made or naturally created thing, that it is well worth the reading time—over 2,000 pages—and money—75 dollars per volume.
Order has invaluable things to say about the nature of the universe and its connection with the process of creating. The volumes are illustrated with photographs of heart-piercingly wonderful artifacts, art works, and buildings from many cultures and eras, and equally satisfying photographs of natural phenomena. In this review, I introduce some of Alexander’s key formulations and comment on how they resonate with my own experience as a sculptor.
The notion of aliveness—that something has life and feels alive—is the keystone of Alexander’s work. A work that has aliveness, he says, is like a living being; it has something akin to selfhood. A work, a being in this sense, may be understood as a “field of centers.” Center is a pivotal concept for Alexander and refers to a concentrated locus of aliveness or selfhood. A “field of centers” is a system in which the different interrelated centers intensify one another’s aliveness.
In the first volume of The Nature of Order, entitled The Phenomenon of Life, Alexander identifies 15 qualities that add to the aliveness of structures of any kind. These 15 qualities, or properties, as he calls them, are not “rules” to be followed so much as empirical formulations of the characteristics of works that seem particularly alive.
Alexander’s discussion of these 15 properties is one of the most immediately engaging and rewarding parts of the Nature of Order. The concepts are easily grasped, and the illustrations are apt and beautiful. Some examples of these 15 properties are:
§ roughness, the wabi sabi quality of imperfection, illustrated by the way the stripes on a zebra are not perfectly parallel and complete;
§ boundaries, illustrated by the numerous hairlines and other boundaries that form such an important part of the pattern of an Oriental carpet;
§ deep interlock, illustrated by the geometric patterns of the tile of a mosque;
§ non-separateness, illustrated by a photo of a water’s edge;
§ gradients, different levels of scale in the same piece, illustrated by a Persian carpet.
For me as a sculptor, it is easy to see how such properties contribute to a piece of sculpture. More so, the notion of a field of centers and the specific properties that Alexander identifies are helpful for understanding what makes a particular piece of carving work. As a work on the nature of art and beauty, The Nature of Order is unusual because it is written by a practicing artist and because it devotes attention to the process of art-making as well as to finished works of art.
Alexander has always attacked dead, mechanical buildings and artifacts and the worldview that justifies and produces them. This criticism is understandable given his emphasis on aliveness, which cannot be created or enhanced by sticking individual pieces together. To be made more alive, the various aspects of a work must be worked on in their relationship to one another so that the interdependent aspects intensify one another’s aliveness: “Extension, enhancement, and deepening of the whole are the crux and target of all living process” (vol. 2, p. 251).
Alexander’s second volume is called The Process of Creating Life, a title that refers to both the process of biological development and also to the process of creating aliveness in works of art or buildings. The key concept here is what Alexander refers to as unfolding wholeness. That is to say, one works with an eye to the deepening wholeness of the thing (i.e., increasing intensity of the interdependent field of centers), and one does that by working with the wholeness as it unfolds.
Alexander talks here about “structure-preserving transformation.” In other words, the elaboration from the initial idea (embryonic germ) retains the initial “center” as it intensifies and elaborates that initial center. The initial idea is only the first step; you look at what you have after the first step and see how you can move a little bit farther toward wholeness. Then you look again after the second step and see what you have and how you can make it more alive, and so on: “Possibly the most basic and necessary feature of any living process is that it goes gradually. We cannot create unfolded living structure by drawing it as if it had unfolded and then building it by different means. It really must unfold in real time” (vol. 2, p. 230-31).
And what does all this say about the nature of the universe? The possibility of making a work more alive implies that space/matter, the substance of the universe, has the potential for aliveness. Like the Buddhist notion of the plenum, which can give rise to all things, the Luminous Ground (Alexander’s title for volume 4), is space/matter that is alive or potentially alive. The creation of form is what makes space/matter more alive.
Thus the work itself—not only the living biological creature but also the work of art or the building—is not only a being in itself but also a place where space/matter has become more alive. As a being with aliveness, the work has the quality of selfhood and, in this sense, is the mirror of the human self who is in relation to it.
I’ve presented these ideas in very condensed form, but Alexander’s depiction of the sense of selfhood is compelling. His ideas speak to a question that is relevant for all artists—What is the relationship between the mind of the maker and the made, non-human thing? How shall we characterize the kinship with the work of art that both maker and viewer experience? Alexander would define that kinship as a commonality of aliveness/selfhood.
Volume 4, The Luminous Ground, elaborates these ideas of aliveness and self-hood that appears in space/matter and link the human self with the universe, including works of art. Two parts of this final volume were especially interesting to me. First, I appreciated a long section on color, illustrated primarily by paintings from my own favorite colorists, Matisse and Bonnard, as well as others. Alexander’s point here is that the universe we know is colored! (And though we don’t talk much about it, all carvings are also colored). It is not so much individual colors in isolation that feel alive, Alexander says, as the unity of color produced by the mutual intensification of colors in, for instance, a painting, yielding what he calls “subdued brilliance.”
Another important theme in volume 4 is contained in Alexander’s phrase “making a gift to God.” While we may not all want to use the term “God,” I think we can recognize what he is talking about. What Alexander means has to do with lack of egotism in the work: One strives to make the work more and more itself, a being with aliveness, thus contributing to the work of creation, rather than to make an object that will reflect well on the maker—i.e., an object that bears the traces of its maker’s egotism. Alexander describes experiences where there was a clear choice between, on one hand, making something perfect or beautiful or, on the other hand, making it as a gift to God—i.e., more fully alive.
This is a choice I know from my own sculpting experiences. The form in which I currently work is stone-carving. Although Alexander rarely speaks of sculpture per se, the way he talks about the act of making certainly speaks directly to my own carving experience. Particularly apt is his comment that, in making something, he looks for the places that seem dead and then tries to find the “latent centers” and bring them out. He also speaks of narrowing his eyes and looking for the “gray spots of disunity” to see what needs to happen to bring the parts into coherent relationship with the whole.
When I am carving and the piece has taken shape, I too find myself looking for the dead areas. I tend to talk to myself and say things like, “That’s too flat,” or “That’s too lumpy,” trying to put into words what feels bothersome about a particular portion of the work. Then I try to imagine how it might be different—for example, less flat or less lumpy. That means noticing something that is already present implicitly but needs to be enhanced to bring the area into relationship with the rest—a movement, a curve, a bending toward, a connecting with.
I think that the common notion of “seeing what is in the stone” means something like this process. It is not, at least for me, seeing instantaneously something that one might make but, rather, a process of being guided by the stone in that the deadness feels bad to me (and presumably bad for the stone as well). I find that I almost sense the stone as a body and can feel its constricted or flabby places that can then be pared or released.
Working with stone does seem a matter of “unfolding wholeness”—in the sense that you are committed to what you have done and can only shape the stone from there. Revision of the piece doesn’t ever mean starting from scratch but rather “making it more alive”—i.e., enriching the interrelationships in the whole.
And what about the question of when a particular carving is finished? When is it a thing in itself standing apart as a being separate from me? Alexander says the created thing won’t feel like a separate being until it’s become to some degree alive. Which isn’t to say that the next time I look at my carving I won’t notice dead spots I wasn’t aware of before, or whole perspectives where I can see that a slight revision would create more life. In this way continues the process of looking anew with each step but in such a way that one is always strengthening and elaborating what is already begun.
Alexander’s formulations have evolved in this way over the 20 and more years he has been working on The Nature of Order. I am grateful for his perseverance in writing with such detail and depth about the process of creating aliveness.
Note
- The four volumes are published by the Center for Environmental Structure, Berkeley, California. I do not discuss volume 3 here because it had not yet been published when I first wrote this review. That volume is Alexander’s effort to present a viable architecture for our modern time; much of 20th-century architecture he considers dead and deadening rather than alive and enlivening.
Shierry Weber Nicholsen is a Seattle psychotherapist in private practice. Her Love of Nature and the End of the World (MIT Press, 2002) was reviewed in the spring 2003 EAP.
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“Love must enter in” In order to make buildings by unfolding—hence by structure-preserving transformations—it is necessary, truly, to pay attention to the wholeness of the world. This “paying attention to the wholeness” is essentially synonymous with love of life. After all, the wholeness—that wholeness which exists around us at a given place and time—is indeed the whole-ness. Paying attention to the wholeness means that a person is paying attention to the whole, to everything: to the life of water, other people, the thirst of a stranger, the stars in the black sky. It means paying attention to the emptiness of the desert, to the passion of an old woman sitting on her doorstep, to one’s own passion, to the passions of the people all around, to the running of the water on the ground, to a banana skin on the ground, to the laughter of children, to the smells of dinner being cooked. It means loving the glistening white plaster on the wall, the subtle evening light. It means taking in the whole, enjoying it, seeing it all, bathing in it, loving it. Of course, love in this sense does not enter in when nature blindly carries through its structure-preserving transformations. But for a person, doing a structure-preserving transformation means paying attention to all this, grasping it fully, taking it all in—loving it—and then extending it. For a person to become part of that wholeness, to extend it, love does—must—enter in. —The Nature of Order, vol. 2, pp. 103-04.
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