Words matter. These are the best Christopher Alexander Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Once you understand this way, you will be able to make your room alive; you will be able to design a house together with your family; a garden for your children; places where you can work; beautiful terraces where you can sit and dream.
But in practice master plans fail – because they create totalitarian order, not organic order. They are too rigid; they cannot easily adapt to the natural and unpredictable changes that inevitably arise in the life of a community.
Nowadays, the process of growth and development almost never seems to manage to create this subtle balance between the importance of the individual parts, and the coherence of the environment as a whole. One or the other always dominates.
There is one timeless way of building. It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it has ever been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way.
We define organic order as the kind of order that is achieved when there is a perfect balance between the needs of the parts, and the needs of the whole.
Drawings help people to work out intricate relationships between parts.
Complexity is one of the great problems in environmental design.
In an organic environment, every place is unique, and the different places also cooperate, with no parts left over, to create a global whole – a whole which can be identified by everyone who is part of it.
The structure of life I have described in buildings – the structure which I believe to be objective – is deeply and inextricably connected with the human person, and with the innermost nature of human feeling.
Images in the 20th century had a unique power where image became divorced from reality, and often more important than reality… Buildings were judged – at least by members of our own profession – more by the way they looked in magazines than by the satisfaction people felt when using them.
Everyone is aware that most of the built environment today lacks a natural order, an order which presents itself very strongly in places that were built centuries ago.
Speaking as a builder, if you start something, you must have a vision of the thing which arises from your instinct about preserving and enhancing what is there.
When you make something, cleaning it out of structural debris is one of the most vital things you do.
From a sequence of these individual patterns, whole buildings with the character of nature will form themselves within your thoughts, as easily as sentences.
To seek the timeless way we must first know the quality without a name. There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.
