معماری- خيال

Christopher Alexander

Architect, scientist, and writer Christopher Alexander is one of the most remarkable thinkers and makers of our time. His many books include A Pattern Language (1977), The Timeless Way of Building (1979), and A Foreshadowing of Twenty-First Century Art: The Color and Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets (1993). This essay is his recent effort to distill the major discoveries in his masterful four-volume The Nature of Order (2002-2005), published by the Center for Environmental Structure in Berkeley, CA. He wishes to thank Maggie Alexander and Randy Schmidt for help in editing this essay. © 2007 Christopher Alexander. www.patternlanguage.com.

I am a scientist. The science of the last four centuries and especially the science of the last 150 years has profoundly shaped our culture and our civilization. We are now living in a world defined by a widely accepted group of statements and kind of knowledge that was non-existent before. These have changed our view of what a human being is. The offshoots of science have changed how we look at ourselves, how we think and feel, and how we view our social institutions, political institutions, love, war, and race. How we view children and how we view old age. How we view art and the making of things. How we view the birth and death of the cosmos.

Yet in this exuberant and fascinating surge of modern science, with all its authority and power, the divide between fact and value remains hardly changed at all. The questions of what we ought to do, how to solve problems, how we may attain the peaceful form of existence in which a person lives with quiet in one’s heart, how to act to protect the planet, how to act so as to protect and help the wretched of the Earth, how to bring loving kindness into the workplace—these issues have hardly changed. If anything they have become more extreme, and every day more painful.

Science rarely helps us with these matters. We scientists have not yet laid down a way of thought that gives us a foundation of careful and tender action that deals with everyday life, makes common sense, and leads to actions that make the Earth more whole in its people and in its soil and substance. Indeed, the philosophy of science, which has brought us so far, has also made it more difficult to address these issues. The findings of science have intentionally separated the process of forming mechanical models of physics from the process of feeling and from appreciation of the poetic whole that forms our own existence.

In brief, then, we have not yet found a model through which we may understand things in an overall, wholesome way that is both rooted in fact, as deciphered by scientific effort, and also gives us a foundation for ethical daily thought and action. As a result, to put it bluntly, we do not know who we are. We can hardly act without floundering morally or emotionally. Often, we find ourselves in the greatest pain because things do not hold together. We cannot find a comfortable picture of our daily actions in relation to the larger whole of the Earth and universe.

In The Nature of Order, a four-volume work mainly written in the 30 years from 1975 to 2005, I have tried to construct a coherent picture that makes sense of these matters and gives us something worth living for.

How does The Nature of Order work? First, although the book is long, it is modest in intent and deals with something so ordinary that most scientific works never touch it—namely, the everyday world around us, the world of rooms and streets, houses and trees.

The four books of The Nature of Order continually try to describe our everyday world in objective terms, yet at the same time deal with the emotional world that this objective, ordinary world raises in all of us. It is an exploration of the way that we sentient, feeling creatures interact with our surroundings, and of the way that interaction leads us to understand ourselves and the nature of our lives, and ultimately even to understand, in part, the nature of our own souls.

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At the heart of this exploration there is a logical and empirical thread of argument that may be viewed as the core of my four books and that establishes the necessity of a new view of ourselves in relation to the world. This view ultimately nourishes (and, if accepted, could become the foundation of) a new kind of hope that is all the more profound because it integrates knowledge from philosophy, science, and religion to help us to experience the wholeness of the whole.

It could even shed light on the way wholeness occurs in the universe so that we might find help wrestling with the question of God. It might give us a path for our own access to that mystery, yet couched in acceptable, concrete terms of scientific reference.

The sequence of my argument follows a brief introduction to each of the four books and is arranged, as the books are, in four parts.

Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life