The Nature of Order, Book Two: the Process of Creating Life (Hardcover)

Front-loading the primary subject, this opening sentence presents Alexander’s theory of living processes as the defining lens through which the properties of life, wholeness, and structure-preserving transformations shape how buildings, towns, and landscapes come to embody beauty, sustainability, and human meaning.

Christopher Alexander's series of ground-breaking books including A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building have pointed to fundamental truths of the way we build, revealing what gives life and beauty and true functionality to our buildings and towns. Now, in The Nature of Order, Alexander explores the properties of life itself, highlighting a set of well-defined structures present in all order and in all life from micro-organisms and mountain ranges to good houses and vibrant communities.

Scientifically, The Process of Creating Life is perhaps the most exciting of the four books. How do beautiful creations come into being? Nature can make an infinite number of human faces, each one unique, each one beautiful. The same is true for daffodils, streams, and stars. But man-made creations especially the towns and buildings of the 20th century have only occasionally been really good, more often mediocre, and in the last 50 years have most often been deadly. What is the reason for the difference? It hinges on the deep nature of the processes we use. Merely understanding the geometry of beautiful and living form (the topic of Book 1) is not enough to help us create such a living geometry.

In the 20th century our society was locked into deadly processes which created our current built environment, process that most people were not really aware of and did not question. Despite their best efforts and intentions, architects and planners working within these processes could not achieve a living built environment. Life and beauty in the built world arise only from processes which allow living structure to unfold. The secret lies in knowing, as nature does, what must happen in what order: what sequence of events allows a living form to unfold successfully?

Here, in Book 2, Alexander puts forward a fully developed theory of living process. He defines conditions for a process to be living: that is, capable of generating living structure. He shows how such processes work, and how they may be created. At the core of the new theory is the theory of structure-preserving transformations. This concept, new in scientific thinking, is based on the concept of wholeness defined in Book 1: A structure-preserving transformation is one which preserves, extends, and enhances the wholeness of a system.

Table of Contents

• PART ONE: Structure-Preserving Transformations
• 1. The Principle of Unfolding Wholeness.
• 2. Structure-Preserving Transformations.
• 3. Structure-Preserving Transformations in Traditional Society.
• 4. Structure-Destroying Transformations in Modern Society.
• INTERLUDE
• 5. Living Process in the Modern Era: Twentieth-century Cases Where Living Process did Occur.
• PART TWO: Living Processes
• 6. Generated Structures.
• 7. A Fundamental Differentiating Process.
• 8. Step-by-Step Adaptation.
• 9. Always Helping to Enhance the Whole.
• 10. Always Making Centers.
• 11. The Sequence of Unfolding.
• 12. Every Part Unique.
• 13. Patterns: Rules for Making Centers.
• 14. Deep Feeling.
• 15. Emerging of Formal Geometry.
• 16. Form Language.
• 17. Simplicity.
• PART THREE: A New Paradigm for Process in Society
• 18. The Character of Process in Society.
• 19. Massive Process Difficulties.
• 20. The Spread of Living Processes Throughout Society.
• 21. The Architect in the Third Millennium.
• APPENDIX: An Example of a Living Process: Building a House.

Christopher Alexander is a builder, craftsman, general contractor, architect, painter, and teacher. He taught from 1963 to 2002 as Professor of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and is now Professor Emeritus. He has spent his life running construction projects, experimenting with new building methods and materials, and crafting carefully articulated buildings- all to advance the idea that people can build environments in which they will thrive. Acting on his deeply held conviction that, as a society, we must recover the means by which we can build and maintain healthy living environments, he has lived and worked in many cultures, and built buildings all over the world. Making neighborhoods, building-complexes, buildings, balustrades, columns, ceilings, windows, tiles, ornaments, models and mockups, paintings, furniture, castings and carvings- all this has been his passion, and is the cornerstone from which his paradigm-changing principles have been derived. Professor Alexander is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received his doctorate in Architecture from Harvard University after completing degrees at Cambridge University in mathematics and architecture. He is the winner of the first medal for research awarded by the American Institute of Architects, a member of the Swedish Royal Academy, recipient of the Distinguished Professor Award from the American Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, and the recipient of the Vincent Scully Prize awarded by the National Building Museum in the US, among many other prestigious awards throughout his career. Christopher Alexander writes ""I believe we are on the threshold of a new era when the proper understanding of the deep questions of space, as they are embodied in architecture will play a revolutionary role in the way we see the world and will do for the world view of the 21st and 22nd centuries, what physics did for the 19th and 20th.