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Christopher Alexander - From the Architecture category:
Complexity is one of the great problems in environmental design. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Architecture category:
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. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Architecture category:
From a sequence of these individual patterns, whole buildings with the character of nature will form themselves within your thoughts, as easily as sentences. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Choices category:
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. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Choices category:
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. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Construction category:
When you make something, cleaning it out of structural debris is one of the most vital things you do. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Construction category:
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. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Construction category:
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. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Creativity category:
These tools allow anyone, and any group of people, to create beautiful, functional, meaningful places. You can create a living world. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Drawing category:
Drawings help people to work out intricate relationships between parts. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Environment category:
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. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Environment category:
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. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Harmony category:
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. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Humanity category:
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. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Language category:
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. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Masters category:
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. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Order category:
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. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Pattern category:
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. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Planning category:
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... (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Problems category:
There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need only do inner work... that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself, he need only change himself... The fact is, a person is so formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Quality category:
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. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Satisfaction category:
People are deeply nourished by the process of creating wholeness. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Space category:
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. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Space category:
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. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Strength category:
Yet still, there are those special secret moments in our lives, when we smile unexpectedly - when all our forces are resolved... whatever it is you are doing at such a moment, hold on to it, repeat it - for that certain smile is the best knowledge that we ever have of what our hidden forces are, and where they lie, and how they can be loosed. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Technology category:
We must face the fact that we are on the brink of times when man may be able to magnify his intellectual and inventive capability, just as in the nineteenth century he used machines to magnify his physical capacity. Again, as then, our innocence is lost. And again, of course, the innocence, once lost, cannot be regained. The loss demands attention, not denial. (Christopher Alexander)
Christopher Alexander - From the Wonder category:
Most of the wonderful places in the world were not made by architects but by the people. (Christopher Alexander)
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