The Nature of Order

The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe (ISBN 0-972-65290-6) is a four-volume work by Christopher Alexander published in 2003-2004. In his earlier work, Alexander attempted to formulate the principles that lead to a good built environment as patterns, or recurring design solutions. However, he has come to believe that patterns themselves are not enough, and that one needs a "morphogenetic" understanding of the formation of the built environment.

Volume 1 attempts to define "life" in the built environment and determine why one built environment may have more life than another. Important to this idea is his notion of centers:

Centers are those particular identified sets, or systems, which appear within the larger whole as distinct and noticeable parts. They appear because they have noticeable distinctness, which makes them separate out from their surroundings and makes them cohere, and it is from the arrangements of these coherent parts that other coherent parts appear. The life or intensity of one center is increased or decreased according to the position and intensity of other nearby centers. Above all, centers become most intense when the centers which they are made of help each other.

The first volume contains an exposition of what the author calls the fundamental properties, which are those that are possessed by environments which have more life. He argues that processes that lead to a good built environment are those that tend to increase one or more of these properties. He identifies fifteen geometric properties which tend to accompany the presence of life in nature, and also in the buildings and cities we make. These properties are seen over and over in nature, and in cities and streets of the past, but have all but disappeared in the deadly developments and buildings of the last one hundred years. The book shows that living structure depends on features which make a close connection with the human self, and that only living structure has the capacity to support human well-being.

The four volumes in The Nature of Order series are: The Phenomenon of Life; The Process of Creating Life; A Vision of a Living World; and The Luminous Ground.

External resources

• natureoforder.com
• Neat introduction to Fifteen Properties at livingneighborhoods.org
• Short summary of the fundamental properties by Alexander
• Overview of The Nature of Order at patternlanguage.com