Top 31 Christopher Alexander Quotes

#1. 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

Christopher Alexander Quotes #75869
#2. When you make something, cleaning it out of structural debris is one of the most vital things you do.

Christopher Alexander

Christopher Alexander Quotes #147803
#3. 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

Christopher Alexander Quotes #163860
#4. There are some geologists involved with prospecting for oil and other hidden resources who can pick up a rock and say, 'Yes, there's oil under there.' A geologist who has been studying those kinds of rocks for 10 or 20 years is able to make that pronouncement.

Christopher Alexander

Christopher Alexander Quotes #182046
#5. 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

Christopher Alexander Quotes #222356
#6. Most of the wonderful places in the world were not made by architects but by the people.

Christopher Alexander

Christopher Alexander Quotes #240722
#7. A building or a town will only be alive to the extent that it is governed in a timeless way. It is a process which brings order out of nothing but ourselves; it cannot be attained, but it will happen of its own accord, if we will only let it.

Christopher Alexander

Christopher Alexander Quotes #494789
#8. 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

Christopher Alexander Quotes #555079
#9. 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

Christopher Alexander Quotes #564171
#10. 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

Christopher Alexander Quotes #564817
#11. 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

Christopher Alexander Quotes #589491
#12. Images in the 20th century had a unique power where image became divorced from reality, and often more important than reality ... Buildings were judged - at least by members of our own profession - more by the way they looked in magazines than by the satisfaction people felt when using them.

Christopher Alexander

Christopher Alexander Quotes #601882
#13. 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

Christopher Alexander Quotes #603425
#14. 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

Christopher Alexander Quotes #701246
#15. 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

Christopher Alexander Quotes #725668
#16. 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 ... If you're working correctly, the feeling doesn't wander about.

Christopher Alexander

Christopher Alexander Quotes #741217
#17. 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

Christopher Alexander Quotes #800338
#18. We define organic order as the kind of order that is achieved when there is a perfect balance between the needs of the parts, and the needs of the whole.

Christopher Alexander

Christopher Alexander Quotes #800465
#19. Drawings help people to work out intricate relationships between parts.

Christopher Alexander

Christopher Alexander Quotes #912514
#20. 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

Christopher Alexander Quotes #949653
#21. 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

Christopher Alexander Quotes #966165
#22. 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

Christopher Alexander Quotes #1191338
#23. 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

Christopher Alexander Quotes #1210761
#24. People are deeply nourished by the process of creating wholeness.

Christopher Alexander

Christopher Alexander Quotes #1283107
#25. But in practice master plans fail - because they create totalitarian order, not organic order. They are too rigid; they cannot easily adapt to the natural and unpredictable changes that inevitably arise in the life of a community.

Christopher Alexander

Christopher Alexander Quotes #1342594
#26. Complexity is one of the great problems in environmental design.

Christopher Alexander

Christopher Alexander Quotes #1398163
#27. 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

Christopher Alexander Quotes #1422245
#28. 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

Christopher Alexander Quotes #1494848
#29. 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

Christopher Alexander Quotes #1698779
#30. 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

Christopher Alexander Quotes #1833205
#31. 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

Christopher Alexander Quotes #1864024

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