i found the Course in Miracles gave me the way. There is an instruction, “what would you have me say, where would you have me go, what would you have me do?” always, when this is the preface, the right action, word, that represents Love arises, there is an intelligence that deep, that can be accessed this way. I rarely do this though 
i should maybe do this more, i spend a lot of time trying to be clever, or understood, or cool, or not hurt….. its hard to move over sometimes
Author Archives: loveyoga1
CA book 2 p160-180, On simplicity and more life in the 20th century – Rachel
p160-180 CA – on simplicity and lack of Rachel
Posted on January 29, 2012
Nosing gingerly into the lead in the Christopher Alexander races……
A sequence of quotes. Having grown up on council estates, and been around the shanty towns in South Africa, there is a certain element that may be being idealistically spun here, Yet it’s also true that there are poverty stricken and rural areas that really can embody and express what Alexander is trying to portray here….. back to South Africa, District 6 comes to mind, (although what also comes to mind is how it was torn down, the road can be long and hard)
P161 “there is in this landscape, the work of hundreds of people, leaving their trace, without concern for image.”
“It comes about this life, because no one has controlled it. The generative process is free, popular, with no rules or regulations – there is no image; nodesire for control – by anyone”
P162 ” it is a hard-working family that run this particular gas station, struggling for money, having neither time, nor money, nor interest in the superficial order of a corporate satellite gas station, which is more dependent on image and appearance.”
P162 “This shop, with its practical and unimpressive quality, has its own architechture, caused by the making of centres, where they had to be made.”
P167 “But, in the midst of this biting struggle, decisions are made by a family, and a ragged cloth, a raw window made from a sheet of plastic, are placed where they are needed – they rise in direct expression of need, desire, function and circumstance. However crude, these elements are adapted to life. Millions of people, housing themselves in this fashion, have created the beginnings of new cities, which are more organically connected to their own wishes, and to the slopes of the hills, to the position of the sun and wind, than the developer’s clean boxes”
I love Alexander’s focus on process, he is really clear on this and the characteristics of ‘good process’. I am grateful he goes to lengths to clarify what to him, makes ‘good.’
p173 “I started in this chapter to make a collection of places that I feel have life, places that were truly of our time, and flowing with love, or excitement, or energy……In every case the process was straightforward, simple, and above all, it is free; it allows the reality of the situation, the human needs, human joys, to find expression….. they are virtually unhampered by concepts or by too much thought about the intricacy and the design.”
The next few quotes help deep relaxation in the human body unfold 
p174 ” An unworried, unhesitating sequence of actions, creates unfolding, and creates life – because it is direct, motivated by practical concerns”
P174 “Pave the rivers edge, Put a railing there, Find a couple of tables, Put some chairs….. there is sublime confidence, and practicality, and simplicity.”
P174 “If we do one thing at a time, and if what we do is wholesome and sound, then whatever comes next will work…. we just go step by step, doing what is required, as well as what we are able, with confidence that the next thing, too, will work out somehow when its time comes, but that it need not be worked out now”
And, because he really does want to focus on the good, not just accept everything as it is, good, bad or indifferent, (yay Christopher) he sees what direction the choices made must clearly go in if we are to achieve what he is aiming for
P174 “The places of the 20th Century which I have shown have life because they are all done with confidence, optimistically, with love of life, without the planners excruciating attention to “problems” which is so often used as a hammer to destroy life and to destroy living structure”
So, I see this as a truly ‘living’ philosophy, ‘art form’ and a work of genius – exactly what we need to go forward, and very creative. I am still concerned that one wrong move in the unfolding, creative process, can ruin things, as so many ‘wrong’ moves occur on a day to day basis, (District 6) so……
p120-160 book 2 life enhancing versus structure-destroying Christopher Alexander – Rachel
Alexander re-illustrates the destructiveness of design in today’s world
P120 “shades of distinction make it easier to focus on what is more structure-destroying, and what is more structure-preserving. Becoming aware of such shades of distinction gives a realism and subtlety of discrimination to our judgements and makes the matter more interesting and real”
P121 “Mass contstruction of tracts… provide further example of structure-destroying process, when viewed in relation to the natural terrain”
P121 “Nearly all developer-built artificial communities, are based on structure-destroying transformations— merely from the fact that they are planned at all, rather than ‘grown.’
P128 “what has caused the new tradition of structure-destroying forms of this era, are mainly the machine-like processes of planning conceiving, budgeting, developing, construction contracting, construction labo, and so forth”
ouch – this is probably a metaphor for most of what is being done by most of us everywhere – again it’s a ‘process -’ a life-destroying one, that seems to have taken on a life of its own, and one that is immersed in the narcissism of our life and times
p129 ” Among architects, photographs of buildings in magazines became more important that buildings themselves… worst of all, because of the new role of images in society, many of us began to believe our own propoganda… it all came from images, hardly from life”
P132 ” The core of the modern design movement – a stiving for originality, newness, a breaking with tradition – was fundamentally a structure-destroying process, many of us architets, perhaps without realisint it, live in a world of fake, taught by fake, worked by fake, and transmitted the fake as an essential part of what we did.”
P136 ” All in all, modern society succeeded , in the last century, in creating an ethos where buildings, plans, objects, are judged only by themselves, and not to the extent which they support and enhance the world. this means that nature has been damaged, because it is ignored and trampled upon, because the modernist view saw no reason to respect them, to protect them. but, even more fundamental, it came about because the idea of creativity, which became the norm, assumed that it is creative to make things that are unrelated, (sometimes disoriented and disconnected just in order to be new) and that this is valuable – when it is merely stupid, and represents a misunderstanding, a deep misunderstanding of how things really are”
CA outlines the way that building needs to be approached, it it is to be life-enhancing, and its not from an image, its according to the minutest needs, of occupants, land and neighbours in the community, ie the whole
“P129 in order to be successful….. land, sun, rooms, structure, all take their shape, step by step, in a coherent and well-adapted manner that guarantees living structure to the emerging whole”
P130 “The essence, in all cases of unfolding, is common sense. You want to make a house, At each moment, you ask yourself, what is the most important thing i have to do next, which will have the best affect on the life of that house?”
“P 142 – keep on making the whole slowly”
“work at each thing until you like it”
“concentrate on beauty of the light”
“Repeat, this over and over again”
Then, he devotes a chapter to the goodness in our life and times, which is useful – as this is, exactly where we are
“however, that by itself, does not mean that everything is wrong with our era, or that we should turn our backs on it. If we are honest, we can still love where we are, we can find all the good there is to find, and we may find ways to enhance that good, and to find a new way of living that is appropriate to our time.”
p 70-120 CA book 2 the role and effect of finances and the economic structure on wholeness – Rachel
CA outlines the 15 principles again, as principles of transformation, he is looking to deeply critique and inform the ART of building.
P83 “these phenomena (the 15 principles) will occur without effort in any world where the wholeness is allowed to unfold smoothly and truthfully. Once this is clear we shall then have a vision of the world in which the world itself – all of it – animals, plants, mountains, rivers, buildings, roads, terraces, rooms and windows – is part of a single system and a single way of understanding”
“this concept will greatly deepen our appreciation of human actions in the art of building”
He, sees value as an objective truth
“within the framework of wholeness, we may begin to conceive of value as an objective phenomenon which arises inevitably from the existence of the wholeness as a structure.”
” good structure is a structure that has unfolded well through these transformations, arising step by step from what exists, preserving the structure of what exists and allowing the new to grow in the most natural way… this startling view provides us with a view of ethics and asthetics that dignifies our respect for what exists, and treasures that which grows from this respect.”
He again and again returns to perception needing to be holistic in order to be good and true, and the lack of this kind of perception in modern times
p88 “the mode of perception typical of primitive people tends to be holistic. There is no motivation which will tend to make people fracture the wholeness at any stage.”
P88 “evolution of a wall painting inside a traditional house……. looks and feels almost like part of nature, because of the smooth unfolding and unpredicted character.”
P92 “the traditional adzing process allows each timber to be hewn, shaped and carved, according to its place in the house. the carpenter looks at what he has done, judges it, checks it against the wholeness to see if it fits, and, as a result, he keeps the structure preserving process on course.”
p96 “the masons worked step by step, unfolding the whole, in such a way that the beautiful light fills the passage. This beauty of soft light could never have been provided in a set of drawings….. what led to this finely tuned harmony is the love and care”
p97 “in the case of a big city like Prague, St Petersburg…….Amsterdam – the result was that hundreds of millions of actions, taken one by one over several centuries, together created a living whole…. slowly, over two or three hundred years, a wonderful living harmony was built”
p101 “this harmony results because of a state of mind where the builders actually see the wholeness directly and accurately: that is, they see the systems of centres that see the wholeness. Once one sees these centres, and not something else, the centres get intensified, “
P102 ” in the vital and practical sense this environment is then functionally and practically alive – alive in common sense terms, it makes people feel alive to be there. Plants and flowers bloom.”
Again – To create life, in the world it is necessary to pay attention to the wholeness in the world
P103 “it is necessary to pay attention to the wholeness in the world. This “paying attention to the wholeness” is essentially synonymous with love of life”
p104″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 the laughter of children, to the smells of dinner being cooked. it means taking in the whole, enjoying it, seeing it all, bathing in it, Loving it”
He is right, this does not exist much in the modern world, either in building or in society – I do think he is tending to overglamourise traditional society in this respect
P108 “for a variety of reason, in modern society, the rules of the game, the schemat and images, have become more and more willful, more rule-bound, less and less in touch with the wholeness that exists”
P109 “what is built now is governed by images and rules. it is no longer automatically governend by the existing wholenss. it is now governed by what we decide”
“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 the laughter of children, to the smells of dinner being cooked”
This then gets very interesting, as its linking these ideas right into our economic and social systems. Its very true that we have been very biased towards the gigantic, why? I wonder and then looks at how building is now funded. Hmm, seems like to some extent, it is the banks fault again, and you know what, I would bet that it is, to a degree. Small is beautiful really needs to be brought back home, IMO. ALSO, think about it, the labour intensivity of what CA proposes could never take off in late stage capitalism, In order for his vision to take root and life, the whole of our culture needs to be transformed on a really deep level, at soul level. We hope this is happening now, but who only knows, And would this transormation be a case of preserving the old, and building the new, or something radically different in that it really would be whole, or wrecked, on way or the other
P115″the planners were strongly biased toward the gigantic, becuase it made life possible for them. ….Banks too, were heavily involved.”
p116 ” a process of building gradually, with available money, was replaced by a process in which buildings were financed by bank loans”
And he points out, its not just the designs that are structure destroying, its the processes also
” It is not only the creation of arbitary, greedy office blocks, hotels, and housing developments which distort and harm the land, its the processes that are destructive also”
harm the land” that is what we are doing, i guess we have always been doing and destruction is part of creation, but i do get what he means.
p35-80 CA book 2 – Rachel
We see CA looking again at approaching construction through the lens of the whole
” necessary to propose new mechanisms of emergence……..
a new principle……the unfolding of the whole, might have to be seen, in its own right, as a fundamental principle of nature ” – P35
“Is it not possible that the emergence of large scale pattern – global order – comes about merely from many small scale Darwinian step-by-step changes, but modified and improved by some kind of directional twist in the dynamics of the evolving system which makes it go towards global patterns of a certain sort, and that it is this pattern-seeking or pattern-creating tendency which must be taken into account, together with selective advantage of small steps, if one really wants a satisfactory explanation of the evolutionary sequences in detail?” – p43
“According to this view, the evolving system of the genetic material itself causes evolution to follow certain pathways, not only because of selective pressure from outside, but also by virtue of its own internal dynamical ordering tendencies. The results of evolution are then to be understood mainly formed, not by Darwinian selective pressure acting from outside, but by pressures created by the geometry and dynamics of the evolvin genetic system itself.” – p43
“If true – …. it means there is essentially something in the geometry of living systems which contributes order by itself: that the biological material evolves, and advances, on the basis of some tendency to order, embedded in the very action of the process, and interacting with the Darwinian selection.” - p42
But, again he says humans can violate these laws and have been doing far more in the 20th Century 
“Be clear what this means. The law of Gravity is a law of nature. It is not temperamental. It applies everywhere, all of the time. It applies in traditional society, and it applies in modern society. But, whatever law is making living structure appear is different. Evidently it sometimes breaks down and fails to operate…… it breaks down specifically at the macroscopic scale in the building production of modern society.” p45
In nature he says
“Through the impact of these transformations, larger wholes are created, intensified, more often than they are destroyed or weakened. The centres necessarily become more and more profound” p47
In architecture though
“the history of architecture,…. has been based on the idea that the architect’s vision arises, almost spontaneiously,…. in the breast of the architect—full-fledged, from thin air – and that the quality, depth and importance of the architect’s vision comes from this mysterious moment…
it (above) is not the way that profound living structures can be created”
And so, he is suggesting
” living structure always arises slowly, by successive transformations of what exists, gradually, and then decisively changes slowly until a new thing is born. Our idea… to create a profound building form, must be changed forever by this knowledge” p48
Here , it is very exciting to see his ideas around the importance of preserving structure and wholeness. God, this is so missing from the world generally, and even most spiritual paths. Get away from the world instead.
” A smooth transformation is one that preserves structure and wholeness” – p52
He points to the need for discernment, stressing again and again the element of preservation
“There are not an unlimited number of choices. Relatively few acts intensifies the structure which exists” – p53
“The procedure is always conservative (it preserves structure) and innovative (it creates new structure)” P53
“Thus the creation of morphological novelty ….. arises because there is invisible or semi-visible structure present and active, within the structure that exists, and it is this structure which gives birth to new possibilities…. even though it is a relatively mechanical procedure.”
this seems really important to me
“ALL THAT IS REQUIRED IS THAT THIS PROCEDURE IS SENSITIVE TO THE WHOLE AND IS INFLUENCED BY AND GUIDED BY THE WHOLE” – P54
“Extend and enhance the wholeness that exists (i am completely satisfied. I just want more) and so keep drawing the future from the present”p54
Its important to distinguish the fact that structure preservation is only a possibility and requires knowledge and discernment to put into practise. This again is extremely important, if we are to create a world that is harmonious. we need to think about this
“The wholeness that exists contains a seed or direction that points the way towards those transformations which are kind to it and away from those transformations that are unkind to it…. structure preserving or structure destroying” – p55/6
“Examples of structure preserving and structure destroying transformations are all around us” p56
“If we have a sequence of transformations, all of which are structure -preserving, then the result of these transformations is nearly always beautiful. …. they do not cause any upheaval……a good design evolves smoothly, almost automatically. However, even a single bad transformation can upset the smooth unfolding…. and the affect of one bad transformation is very hard to recover from…. It is as if, in dealing with the wholeness, we are dealing with a delicate material which remains in good condition as long as we are nice to it” – p61-63
CA – nature of order p1-40 book 2 Rachel
Been out of the loop so, again catching up, i am going to draw quotes p1 -40 and the 40- 80 and then 80- 120, and see what arises
“When a structure is living we will feel the echo of our own aliveness in response to it” – p2 – this seems true, and beautiful
From the introduction…
“I believe that many of those new artifacts and buildings, ….. are structures which can be thought, invented, created artificially, but, they cannot be generated by a nature-like process at all. The are struturally speaking, monsters”
“Nature itself could not, in principle create these structures”
So, it seems CA is drawing a distinction between nature and thoughts, so for him, thoughts are not a creation of nature?
Monster is a dramatic and poetic word
The enquiry that echos through my mind, is ‘is this true?’ because thoughts are surely a development consistent with nature?
This I love and find deeply resonant – the intention of this book is to
“take the necessary next step of investigating the process of how living structure creates itself over time” – P2
“It is my hope that a world of architechture, more suitable for human life, will emerge from this new view of living process” p2 – i hope so too
“We seek to make a living architecture, in which every part, ever building, ever street, every garden, is alive” – p2
“Even the smallest part of the physical structure, a brick, the mortar between two bricks, the joint of one piece of wood with another, also has this living character.” – P3
“And, the ten thousand centers, to be living centers, must be beautifully adapted to one another within the whole, each must fit the others, each must contribute to the others, and the ten thousand centers then – if they are truly living – must form a coherent and harmonious whole” – P3
“Processes play a more fundamental role in determining the life or death of the building, than does the design”- p3
Value is a really important issue for me
What CA says is that “when the wholeness unfolds naturally, value is created” – p6
and
” the design is indeed beautiful, but it can only be made as beautiful as it is within the tehnique, or process used to make it” p 8
eg, Kindess as part of a bargain, or a social contract, has as its purpose getting something. Real kindness is something quite different, something valuable in itself, it is a true process, not guided by the grasp for a goal or money, but guided by the minute to minute necessity of caring, dynamically, for the feelings and well-being of another. this is not trivial, but deep: sincerely related to human feeling, and not predictable in its end result, because the end result is not a goal”
so, Real kindness is a process true to our essential human instinct, and to what it means to be a person” p9
-
“In the mechanistic view of architechture we think mainly of design as the desired end-state of the building, and far too little of the way or process of making a building as somethng inherently beautiful in itself” – p12
He says” a process which is not based on making in a holistic sense, cannot create a living structure”
“since human beings are the first creatures on Earth who have managed to create non-living structure, the need to focus on non-living processes is new” - p15
It seems clear then that“to learn how to create living structures in buildings, we had better start by looking at nature” – p19
day 5 christopher alexander p160-p200 – rachel
I am still going with Heather. These quotes, so far, extrapolate Alexander’s subjective preferences. I am still open to seeing how this is an objective scientific reality tho…. not so far
p162 “every part, at every level, has a boundary which is a thing in its own right. this includes the boundaries themselves. they too have boundaries, each of which is a thing in its own right.”
“the limited idea of a main boundary by itself completely fails to convey the shimmering sense that is created when a thing has boundaries within boundaries, which are boundaries or boundaries, and that all together permeates its structures”
“one of the ways that centers help each other most effectively is by their repetition. Centres intensify other centres by repeating. they rhythm of the repeating centre, slowly, like the beat of a drum, intensifies the field effect. But this drum beat, when it intensifies the field effect, is not just simple repetition.”
p165 “It is a fact about the world that things repeat”
p166 “the repetition by itself, already begins to create a satisfying harmony.”
“often the calmest life arises when a thing, like a basket, is made entirely out of one kind of smaller element, repeating”
“a work of art has life, more or less to the extent that every single one of its component parts and spaces is whole, well-shaped and positive. “
p174 “in the present Western view of spacem we gave forgotten the powerful force of space…….we tend to see buildings floating in an empty space, as if the space between them were an empty se
P175 — I love this quote, how could you not?
“signifying God, as the carpet does, hence perfect unity, the positive character, the centredness of every particle of space, is an important practical and spiritual aspect of the carpet’s life”
The following quotes make sense
” one might even say that the beauty of the bowl is created by the fact that the space next to it is beautiful”
p175 “in a cruder work of art, the thing is shaped with careful intent but the space next to the thing is not”
p176 – “in a building which works well, the various parts are always spatially positive”
“the definition of positive space is straightforward: every single part of space has positive shape as a centre. There are no amorphous meaningless leftovers. Every shape is a strong centre, and every space is made up in such a way that it only has strong centres in its space, nothing else besides.”
P178 – “the main two practical results that happen from positive space in its various forms are a) that every bit of space is intensly useful, and b) that there is no left over space which is not useful.”
Lived and loved this, it still seems to be subjective tho…
p179 “When I began to look for living structures, I was surprised to find out how often, mixed with other properties, there was an element that seemed to defy analysis: the works contained elements with the most gorgeous, beautiful, powerful shapes. Sometimes this beauty of shape seemed subtle, complex, beyond analysis. I became aware of a special quality that I began to think of as GOOD SHAPE, but could not very easily explain it, or define it.”
“What did it mean? what is good shape?”
“the first thing to realise is that the good shape , no matter how complex, is build up from the simplest elementary figures”
“this clearly rules out amorphous blobs, vague shapes ect, and clearly includes squares, octagons, eight-blossomed flowers, 45 degree triangles ect,
P183 ” a well marked centre – not necessarily at the geometric middle”
“In the build up to a good shape the following elements are the most common: square, line segment, arrowhead, hook, triangle, row of dots, circle”
P 184 “Take the circle for instance, a symmetrical compact figure, which would appear to be a good shape – or so one would assume. But the circle has great problems. The space next to it is not easily made positive, not easily made into centres.”
“Above all, we must remember that the quality of good shape ours only when the shape itself, as a whole, becomes powerful and extraordinary, when we have a good shape by the principles that I have outlined.”
Day 4 Christopher Alexander p 120-`160 – Rachel
Here Alexander is talking about the importance of centres helping each other – and it is how they help each other we create more or less life.
P122 “the life or intensity of one centre is increased or decreased according to the position of other nearby centres. Above all, centres become most intense, when the centres which they are made of help each other. Exactly what help means in this context remains to be defined”
Yes – I love that – my moralising mind linking it to a discourse about the state of the world today – ecetera
P120 “to be more realistic, we need to imagine space as filled with such centres, all helping each other, all created by other centres, but all field-like, all radiating centredness…..
We may imagine, in this space, an overall field, in which, at each point there is an intensity – the life of that field at that point – together with vectors describing the impact of these centres on one another”
and
“each of the new structures we observe is “induced” within the field as a new centre of some kind.”
Stretching this point to its zenith
“Each centre is a field of other centres. By this definition, each of these other centres must then also be a field of centres. Thus a centre is a field of centres, and with that field, each centre is a field of yet other centres. There are no ultimate elementary components of the field, except the centres themselves”
Following? My headache is back
As he says ” in its great complexity, it is so unlike the structures, conventionally used, that it is not easy to grasp the nature of such a structure, let alone to represent it formally, as a well-defined field of a new kind”
Anyway, this seems to me obviously linked to buddhist thoughts on the nature of emptiness and form, interdependence, and field
then, though he goes on to actually try and define the centre more clearly
P121 “as a rough rule of thumb, we may keep hold of the idea that centers are coherent entitites, often marked by local symmetry, by differentiation, by the presence of a boundary, and by convexity, which co-operate to cause a field affect”
Finally – these two quotes jump out at me.
“It must be stressed that a centre does not get more life merely according to the number of its subsidary centres” (and how would we actually define this number?)
“Such an idea would only lead to the fallacy of baroque architecture, which piles on detail, but which never reaches a very intense kind of life. The Nubian door is an example of a very simple door, which gets enormous force as a centre, not from detail, but from very, very careful choice of shape, voids, and proportions, combined only with a tiny bit of detail. …..
Its centres are more carefully chosen for their intensity. Each centre, is in itself more intense, and the arrangement of the centres – few as there are of them – is calculated to make the larger centres as intense as possible. Though less worldly, it has more fire”
P133 “It is useful to bear in mind that the strong centres which occur in a living structure, are not only “great” as at Paestum, but also, down-to-earth and practical”
An important point, me thinks
P 134 – “The concept of life is deeply functional, not merely geometric”
Cristopher Alexander day 3 p80 – p120
So, as soon as I started looking at diagrams with dots in them and trying to see halos and lines that, as far as I could see, didn’t actually exist, I got a headache, and try as I did, couldn’t move past the dots – sigh
Three days of slumping, and something shifted, the metaphor of a sailing ship is really apt,
Going back to pick out quotes I see Christopher himself forwarns about this
P80 – ” These concepts – and therefore this chapter too – are rather abstract. However, I must ask the reader to try to grasp and use these concepts, because the wholeness, as I define it, and the centres I shall define as the building blocks of wholeness, are, in my view, the indispensible tools needed to understand life”
Having read through to around P180 now, i can use later ideas to make sense of what was sticking me - one concept that is particularly jumping to me at the moment is the importance of boundaries
P83 “the entities are usually bounded: that is, at their edge, there is often a sharp change of structure”
I am with Heather in that Alexander does seem to be trying to make a subjective assessement objective reality, and he says just hold open to the possibility its true, and he will explain better later, thats OK with me
Alexander on different degrees of strength – again headache strikes – what?
Going back over these initial pages is again rousing a fury in me, it feels healthy, feminine and I don’t know what its about exactly. Writing it down brings me back to calm
And moving back to the text, I see clearly, Alexander is making very clear the distinction between the idea of ’ a whole’ as a seperate entity, which in reality it cannot be, and a centre, as a focused entity and entirely defined by its relationships to other centres. This is shifting the paradigm of reality – and is far more accurate a guage for existence. At the same time it is opening and softening structures in the mind/brain, that have been there since a child. I love his use of the word ‘fuzzy’ here, that sums up the inner experience well.
P84 “When i call a pond a centre, the situation changes. I can then recognise that the pond does have existence as a local centre of activity – a living system. It is a focused entity. But, the fuzziness of its edges becomes less problematic. The reason is that the pond, as an entity, is focused towards it centre. It creates a field of centredness. But, obviously, this effect falls off. The peripheral things play their role in the pond. But, I do not need to make a definite committment about the edge, and what is in and what is out, because that is not the point. What matters in the existence of the pond as a coherent identity is the caused by a field effect in which the various elements work together to produce this phenomenon of a centre.
This is true physically in the actual physical system of the pond: water, edge, shallows, gradients, lilies – all help in the formation of the pond as a centre. And, it is also true mentally in my perception of the pond. That is why it is more useful, and more accurate, to call the pond a centre, rather than calling it a whole. The same is true for a window, door, wall or arch. None of them can be exactly bounded. They are all entities which have a fuzzy edge, and whose existence lies mainly in the fact that they exist as centres in the portion of the world which they inhabit.”
Which brings us to the contrast later in the next chapter, where Alexander, uses boundaryiness as one of the 15 characteristics of making the quality of ’more life’.
Cristopher Alexander -day 2 p40-60 – rachel
” i want it to be possible for us all to make buildings, benches, windows, which have that simple comfort in them”
“life is a quality of space itself”
“Life itself is damaged, and nothing which is perfect can be truly alive”
“the processes needed to create life were damaged in the 20th century”
“it is our main intention to make things which feel alive in our own time”
“this quality of life is a pervasive one. It includes the ordinary biological life, which we usually forget when we are trying to judge buildings, but it also includes a kind of life which happens, to a greater or lesser degree, in the very stones, concrete and wood posts of which the building is made. Thus, it is a kind of life which is profound in a painting of apple blossom by Van Gogh, less profound in an advertising poster. It is a quality that exists in space, in every stone, in every brush stroke, just as much as it occurs in every plant and every insect, and in the ducks,which walk about in my garden.
Thus, it is a conception of life and architechture in which the house i live in becomes a greater thing because of the ducks in the garden – and it is a conception in which the beautiful shape of a window not only gives more life to the window,, but also enlarges the window and the house.
It is also, a conception in which my own spirit, and the spirit in each of us, is enlarged to the extent that the spirit itself has greater life in it”
“many animistic religions too, for example, those of African tribes, or of the Australian aborigines treat each part of the world as having its own life and spirit”
The reason i am picking these sections out is simply that i want to really see how to build a better,more harmonious world, and these seem to highlight the issues neatly
for example,day 1 -we dont really understand order, this needs more investigation
the exploration of the qualities of life,and how these -can be more or less expressed is really fascinating
and,the extention of the definition of life is important
i have thought that the modern world view, and belief that animistic spirit based world views were immature was sort of wrong,,,, certainly that belief system was chucked out, not integrated and sythesised well. This seems to be moving in a different direction, and one i can relate to, and integrate
Also as a yoga teacher the practise of embodying spirit or revealing spirit in the body has been primary, i love to see this extended into buidlings and life generally, just reading this increases my well-being
