The Phenomenon of Life by Christopher W. Alexander

At the core of living processes lie structure -preserving transformations (or what in later work he calls wholeness-extending transformations). In Book Two: The Process of Creating Life, Alexander (2002b) claims life and beauty in the built world arise only from living processes which allow living structure to unfold. These facts, in themselves, warrant attention. Or that one feels more alive when surrounded by people who themselves feel more alive. Nor can one doubt but that it is possible to sense the whole in a work of art, a building, an event, or one’s life. Whether or not one thinks Alexander succeeds in formulating a rigorously scientific view of life and living structure, it is hard not to agree with his claim that some places at certain moments feel far more alive than do others. “When something works, or is ‘functional,’” he claims, “its space is awakened to a very high degree. More specifically, he suggests that wholeness can be tested empirically through what he calls the Mirror-of-the-Self Test: “Comparing A and B, which one makes me feel the most wholeness in myself, which allows me to come closest to my own life, which makes me experience life most deeply?” (p.

In his view, this approach extends and supplements the arena of permissible scientific observation in such a way that “ the self of the observer is allowed to come into the picture in an objective way” (p. He introduces the concept of living structure based on the concepts of centers and wholeness, and he identifies 15 fundamental properties from which all wholes are built. In his view, this provides an intellectual basis for a new architecture and enables one to ask precise questions about what must be done to create more life in our world.

In Book One, The Phenomenon of Life, Alexander (2002a) proposes a scientific view of the world in which all space-matter has perceptible degrees of life. My intent with this review is to draw attention to it, critically assess the few reviews that have been published, and articulate some important connections between the book’s claims and the planning theory literature. Twenty-seven years in the making, Christopher Alexander’s lavishly illustrated, 2,200 page, 4-volume The Nature of Order is an extraordinarily beautiful, visionary, ambitious and controversial book that has, astonishingly, not yet been reviewed by any major scholarly urban planning journal.

The Phenomenon of Life by Christopher W. Alexander