The Nature of Order, Book One: The Phenomenon of Life

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.

In The Phenomenon of Life, the first volume in this four-volume masterwork, Alexander proposes a scientific view of the world in which all space-matter has perceptible degrees of life and sets this understanding of order as an intellectual basis for a new architecture. With this view as a foundation, we can ask precise questions about what must be done to create more life in our world - whether in a room, a humble doorknob, a neighbourhood, or even in a vast region.

He introduces the concept of living structure, basing it upon his theories of centers and of wholeness, and defines the fifteen properties from which, according t his observations, all wholeness is built. Alexander argues that living structure is at once both personal and structural.

Taken as a whole, the four books create a sweeping new conception of the nature of things which is both objective and structural (hence part of science) and also personal (in that it shows how and why things have the power to touch the human heart). A step has been taken, through which these two domains - the domain of geometrical structure and the feeling it creates - kept separate during four centuries of scientific though from 1600 to 2000, have finally been united.