Christopher Alexander Quotes

33 quotes in 619 categories

• 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…
• Drawings help people to work out intricate relationships between parts.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• When you make something, cleaning it out of structural debris is one of the most vital things you do.
• The more living patterns there are in a place - a room, a building, or a town - the more it comes to life as…
• 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…
• From a sequence of these individual patterns, whole buildings with the character of nature will form themselves within your thoughts, as easily as sentences.
• In an organic environment, every place is unique, and the different places also cooperate, with no parts left over, to create a global whole -…
• 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:…
• 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…
• People are deeply nourished by the process of creating wholeness.
• 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…
• 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…
• The structure of life I have described in buildings - the structure which I believe to be objective - is deeply and inextricably connected with…
• Most of the wonderful places in the world were not made by architects but by the people.
• 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…
• I believe that all centers that appear in space - whether they originate in biology, in physical forces, in pure geometry, in color - are…

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