Christopher Alexander Quotes

This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.

On the geometric level, we see certain physical elements repeated endlessly, combined in an almost endless variety of combinations ... It is puzzling to realize that the elements, which seem like elementary building blocks, keep varying, and are different every time that they occur ... If the elements are different every time that they occur, evidently then, it cannot be the elements themselves which are repeating in a building or town; these so-called elements cannot be the ultimate "atomic" constituents of space.

The specific patterns, out of which a building or a town is made
may be alive or dead. To the extent they are alive, they let our inner
forces loose, and, set us free; but when they are dead they keep
us locked in inner conflict.

When they have a choice, people will always gravitate to those rooms which have light on two sides, and leave the rooms which are lit only from one side unused and empty.

Most of the wonderful places in the world were not made by architects but by the people.

Complexity is one of the great problems in environmental design.

In short, no pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world only to the extent that is supported by other patterns: the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it.

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.

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.

Drawings help people to work out intricate relationships between parts.

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.

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.

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.

One begins to think with that new building block, rather than with littler pieces. And finally, the things which seem like elements dissolve, and leave a fabric of relationships behind, which is the stuff that actually repeats itself, and gives the structure to a building or a town.

The difference between the novice and the master is simply that the novice has not learnt, yet, how to do things in such a way that he can afford to make small mistakes. The master knows that the sequence of his actions will always allow him to cover his mistakes a little further down the line. It is this simple but essential knowledge which gives the work of a master carpenter its wonderful, smooth, relaxed, and almost unconcerned simplicity.

A building or a town will only be alive to the extent that it is governed in a timeless way. It is a process which brings order out of nothing but ourselves; it cannot be attained, but it will happen of its own accord, if we will only let it.

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.

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.

To work our way towards a shared language once again, we must first learn how to discover patterns which are deep, and capable of generating life.

It is not possible to make great buildings, or great towns, beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way. And, as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form, as the trees and hills, and as our faces are.

I believe that all centers that appear in space - whether they originate in biology, in physical forces, in pure geometry, in color - are alike simply in that they all animate space. It is this animated space that has its functional effect upon the world, that determines the way things work, that governs the presence of harmony and life.

In my life as an architect, I found that the single thing which inhibits young professionals, new students most severely, is their acceptance of standards that are too low.

We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed and a context which we cannot properly describe.

It is possible to make buildings by stringing together patterns, in a rather loose way. A building made like this, is an assembly of patterns. It is not dense. It is not profound. But it is also possible to put patterns together in such a way that many patterns overlap in the same physical space: the building is very dense; it has many meanings captured in a small space; and through this density, it becomes profound.

All space and matter, organic or inorganic, has some degree of life in it, and matter/space is more alive or less alive according to its structure and arrangement.

All matter/space has some degree of "self" in it, and this self, or anyway some aspect of the personal, is something which infuses all matter/space and everything we know as matter but now think to be mechanical.

High buildings have no genuine advantages, except in speculative gains for banks and land owners. They are not cheaper, they do not help create open space, they destroy the townscape, they destroy social life, they promote crime, they make life difficult for children, they are expensive to maintain, they wreck the open spaces near them, and they damage light and air and view.

Every place is given its character by certain patterns of events that keep on happening there ... These patterns of events are locked in with certain geometric patterns in the space. Indeed, each building and each town is ultimately made out of these patterns in the space, and out of nothing else; they [patterns in the space] are the atoms and molecules from which a building or a town is made.

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.

There are some geologists involved with prospecting for oil and other hidden resources who can pick up a rock and say, 'Yes, there's oil under there.' A geologist who has been studying those kinds of rocks for 10 or 20 years is able to make that pronouncement.

When you make something, cleaning it out of structural debris is one of the most vital things you do.