Christopher Alexander famous quotes

Drawings help people to work out intricate relationships between parts.
-- Christopher Alexander

#Drawing #People #Work Out

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

#Patterns #Way #Firsts

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.
-- Christopher Alexander

#Character #Space #Events

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.
-- Christopher Alexander

#Space #Profound #Together

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

#Home #Past #Men

Complexity is one of the great problems in environmental design.
-- Christopher Alexander

#Design #Environmental #Problem

People are deeply nourished by the process of creating wholeness.
-- Christopher Alexander

#Creating #People #Process

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

#Happiness #Men #Needs

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.
-- Christopher Alexander

#Beautiful #Dream #Children

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

#People #World #Wonderful

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

#World #Patterns #Size

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

#Character #Patterns #Building

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.
-- Christopher Alexander

#Thinking #Self #Space

The buildings that I build very often have a dreamlike reality. I don't mean by that they have a fantasy quality at all, in fact quite the reverse. They contain in some degree the ingredients that give dreams their power... stuff that's very close to us.
-- Christopher Alexander

#Dream #Mean #Reality

I mean, making simulations of what you're going to build is tremendously useful if you can get feedback from them that will tell you where you've gone wrong and what you can do about it.
-- Christopher Alexander

#Mean #Gone #Feedback

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

#Vision #Instinct #Arise

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.
-- Christopher Alexander

#Believe #Color #Space

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.
-- Christopher Alexander

#Mistake #Simple #Differences

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

#Growth #Balance #Development

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

#Believe #Swag #Feelings

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

#Men #Names #Roots

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

#Cleaning #Debris

The more living patterns there are in a place - a room, a building, or a town - the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self-maintaining fire which is the quality without a name.
-- Christopher Alexander

#Fire #Self #Names

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

#Unique #Different #Environment

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.
-- Christopher Alexander

#Alive #May #Patterns

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
-- Christopher Alexander

#Order #Today #Environment

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

#Life #Space #Degrees

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.
-- Christopher Alexander

#Block #Thinking #Giving

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

#Two #Design #Kind

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

#Light #Two Sides #People

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.
-- Christopher Alexander

#Acceptance #Students #Architect

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.
-- Christopher Alexander

#Beautiful #Tree #Looks

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.
-- Christopher Alexander

#Block #Space #Different