Living Wholeness

David Lorimer • Scientific and Medical Network • www.scimednet.org

This is a tour de force of a book which I intend to review one volume at a time over the next four issues in order to try to do it fuller justice as well as to remind readers of its existence. Christopher Alexander taught for nearly 40 years in the Department of Architecture at the University of California and is now Director of the Center for Environmental Structure. The book is described as ‘an essay on the art of building and the nature of the universe’, and the other three volumes are subtitled The Process of Creating Life, A Vision of a Living World and The Luminous Ground. This first book lays the groundwork and is a seminal text in the formulation of a new world view that entails in its turn a new architecture. It also shows how closely current architectural idiom is tied in with a mechanistic conception of order. I should mention at the outset that these are large format illustrated volumes where the illustrations play a critical role in enabling the reader to grasp Alexander’s thesis.

Alexander begins with the statement: ‘our world is dominated by the order we create’, and it is evident that building is an important kind of order-creating process. As The Prince of Wales has also argued, the nature of architecture is bound up with the world-picture that dominates a culture. We in the West are still in the grip of a mechanist-rationalist view which informs our root metaphors and assumptions, more especially in biology and cognitive neuroscience and psychology. His premise is that the way in which we understand matter reflects our basic idea of order. Mechanistic order has no intrinsic connection with our humanity (or indeed with life!), while Alexander’s own ideas on order emphatically make that connection in a rigorous way. The importance of investigating the very nature of order is reflected in the following remark: ‘So long as we have a confused or inaccurate conception of what kind of thing order is, we shall inevitably make buildings which are ugly, houses which do not support ordinary human well-being, gardens and streets which are at odds with nature, and a world which destroys our souls.’ (p. 23)

The reader now begins a journey towards this new concept of order, with the help of contrasting buildings and a new understanding of familiar concepts like life, wholeness, feeling, value and beauty and the ways in which these terms are interconnected within a new world view. Take ‘life’ first: the reader is invited to look at two pictures of buildings, townscapes or landscapes and decide which has more (degrees of) life in terms of their feelings. Alexander gives the results of an experiment he carried out with a group of 110 architectural students where he showed them a Bangkok slum and a modern octagonal house, asking which had more life. 89 chose the slum, 21 said the question was unfair (!) and none chose the modern building. So there was a near-unanimous convergence of feeling. On this kind of basis Alexander begins to connect order, value, feeling and beauty.

He then introduces some new concepts: living structures, degrees of life in buildings and centres within wholes or the structure of a living world of wholeness. For Alexander, ‘every single part of the matter-space continuum has life in some degree’, and this degree can be sensed and felt by the human being. This applies equally to phenomena in the natural world and in the built environment; also to human beings – we can easily sense a life-enhancing presence. In nature the degree of life is related to the degree of health. The author takes the reader through a number of examples in traditional buildings and works of art, so that one begins to develop the very sense of life for oneself. The objects include arches from different cultures, vases, carpets, furniture and statues as well as entire buildings. The end of the second chapter brings a comprehensive statement of his hypothesis:
 

‘What we call “life” is a general condition which exists, to some degree or other, in every part of space: brick, stone, grass, river, painting, building, daffodil, human being, forest, city. And further: they key to this idea is that every part of space – every connected region of space, small or large – has some degree of life, and that this degree of life is well defined, objectively existing and measurable’.

 
This means that each element within a building or landscape has a degree or intensity of life that contributes to the sense of the whole. Here the idea of ‘centres’ within wholeness is explained, an idea which has some parallels with Koestler’s nested holons, but which represents separable but related coherent wholes within a larger whole – such as individual panes in a rose stained glass window or patterns within a carpet. The key insight is that these centres are forms within wholeness, not parts of a mechanistic system. Indeed, I realised that one should not refer to parts at all when considering wholes as a part relates strictly to a mechanical system. So it is even misleading to say that the whole is more than the sum of its parts! This wholeness penetrates the very essence of physical reality in a field-like manner and must be restored to its primary position in our world view. The centres within this wholeness can only be defined in relation to other centres in a single configuration or structure.

In order to add substance to these qualitative concepts, Alexander now spends the next two chapters elucidating fifteen fundamental properties that apply both to nature and buildings and art. Not surprisingly these properties intertwine: levels of scale, strong centres, boundaries, alternating repetition, positive space, good shape, local symmetries, deep interlock and ambiguity, contrast, gradients, roughness, echoes, the void, simplicity and inner calm, non-separateness. A bare list of attributes does no justice to the richness of Alexander’s analysis and illustrations. My only reservation was that more account could have been taken of insights from Goethean science. These chapters continue the reshaping and deepening of the reader’s sensibility in both conceptual and aesthetic terms. By the end of this process, a new view of nature emerges where ‘value, emerging as a deeper life in the wholeness of the world, turns out to be a fundamental aspect of nature itself.’ (p. 295). Architecture can now contribute to the overall emergence of living structure in the world.  The insistence on the fundamental nature of values dovetails nicely with Basarab Nicolescu’s thinking in his Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity also reviewed in this issue.

The second part builds on the personal nature of order as inherent in the nature of order and the universe. Indeed our happiness can be a reflection of the presence of deep wholeness, for instance with beauty. Alexander elaborates: ‘once we recognise that feeling and life are somehow one and the same thing, and that the structure we call wholeness is connected with a ground where matter becomes personal, then we begin to see the depth of revolution in thought to which the idea of wholeness leads. The external phenomenon we call wholeness or life in the world and the internal experience of personal feeling and wholeness within ourselves are connected. They are, at some level, one and the same thing.’ Thus, for Alexander, the connection between order and feeling is fundamental. A further implication is that centres that have life increase our own sense of abundant life because we ourselves are living centres. So one has to ask what features are actually life-enhancing in a consumer society that only understands pleasure rather than joy.

The next chapter asks to what extent buildings mirror the self, with the help of a series of illustrations. Then a chapter on a new form of scientific observation, which again might have drawn on Goethe. However, here too we have a new concept of expanding or contracting our sense of humanity, which corresponds to the relative degree of life. This sets the scene for a chapter on the impact of living structure on human life; here the sense of freedom becomes central and Alexander’s aim is to maximise this sense of personal freedom in his designs. The final chapter discusses the relationship between ornament and function, which have become separated in modern times. Alexander considers this with examples of living rooms and their various elements, showing how these aspects can be harmonised. He suggests that the secret of balance lies within the living centres and their mutual relationships exhibiting ornament and function together.

The importance of this book (or rather the first volume) lies in the way in which it overcomes the split between inner and outer, subjective and objective, feeling and reason, humanity and nature, value and fact. Nothing less is required for the renewal of our culture, and Alexander makes a substantial contribution to this process.