The New York Times reports that the architectural theorist
died at 85 on March 17. In his memory . . .
Christopher Alexander in this journal.
Tuesday, March 29, 2022
In Memoriam Christopher Alexander
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Tuesday, April 2, 2019
The Core Experience
"It never occurred to me that someone could so explicitly reject
the core experience of something like Chartres."
— Christopher Alexander to Peter Eisenman, 1982
For a less dramatic core experience , see Hitchcock.
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Plan
"If this weren't a public situation, I'd be tempted to get into this on a
psychiatric level." — Christopher Alexander to Peter Eisenman, 1982
Scene from the sequel to Unbreakable and Split —
Not to mention elevation .
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Monday, February 26, 2018
The Unfolding
From the website of Richard P. Gabriel —
" As part of my studies, I came up with a 'theory of poetry'
based loosely on Christopher Alexander’s 'Nature of Order.' "
[The Alexander link is mine, not Gabriel’s.]
A phrase from this journal a year ago today — "poetic order" —
links to the theory of Gabriel —
From Gabriel's "The Nature of Poetic Order" —
Positive Space
• Positive space is the characteristic of a center
that moves outward from itself, seemingly oozing life
rather than collapsing on itself
• An image that resonates is showing positive space
• A word that has many connotations that fit with the
other centers in the poem is showing positive space
• It is an expansion outward rather than a contraction
inward, and it shows that the poem is unfolding
in front of us and not dying
Related material —
From a post of April 26, 2017 —
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Monday, December 25, 2017
New Kids on a Block:
A Midnight Special for Charles Wallace
Old Kid on Peter Block —
See the remarks today of Harvard philosophy professor Sean D. Kelly
in The New York Times :
Alexander's "15 properties that create the wholeness and aliveness" —
This is the sort of bullshit that seems to go over well at Harvard.
See Christopher Alexander in this journal.
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Wednesday, February 3, 2016
Philosophy and Architecture
An originally French-Canadian professor of mathematics
at Villanova University reportedly died at 91 on Dec. 28, 2015.
See a eulogy from Legacy.com.
See also The French Mathematician and the following image,
related to the architectural philosophy of Christopher Alexander,
from this journal on the above date.
Related material:
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Thursday, October 22, 2015
Objective Quality
Software writer Richard P. Gabriel describes some work of design
philosopher Christopher Alexander in the 1960's at Harvard:
A more interesting account of these 35 structures:
"It is commonly known that there is a bijection between
the 35 unordered triples of a 7-set [i.e., the 35 partitions
of an 8-set into two 4-sets] and the 35 lines of PG(3,2)
such that lines intersect if and only if the corresponding
triples have exactly one element in common."
— "Generalized Polygons and Semipartial Geometries,"
by F. De Clerck, J. A. Thas, and H. Van Maldeghem,
April 1996 minicourse, example 5 on page 6.
For some context, see Eightfold Geometry by Steven H. Cullinane.
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Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Ride
"Why don't you come with me, little girl,
on a magic carpet ride?" — Steppenwolf lyrics
Related material for fans of Christopher Alexander
(see previous post) — "The 'Life' of a Carpet."
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“The Quality Without a Name”
The title phrase, paraphrased without quotes in
the previous post, is from Christopher Alexander's book
The Timeless Way of Building (Oxford University Press, 1979).
A quote from the publisher:
"Now, at last, there is a coherent theory
which describes in modern terms
an architecture as ancient as
human society itself."
Three paragraphs from the book (pp. xiii-xiv):
19. Within this process, every individual act
of building is a process in which space gets
differentiated. It is not a process of addition,
in which preformed parts are combined to
create a whole, but a process of unfolding,
like the evolution of an embryo, in which
the whole precedes the parts, and actualy
gives birth to then, by splitting.
20. The process of unfolding goes step by step,
one pattern at a time. Each step brings just one
pattern to life; and the intensity of the result
depends on the intensity of each one of these
individual steps.
21. From a sequence of these individual patterns,
whole buildings with the character of nature
will form themselves within your thoughts,
as easily as sentences.
Compare to, and contrast with, these illustrations of "Boolean space":
(See also similar illustrations from Berkeley and Purdue.)
Detail of the above image —
Note the "unfolding," as Christopher Alexander would have it.
These "Boolean" spaces of 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 points
are also Galois spaces. See the diamond theorem —
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Sunday, February 8, 2004
Sunday February 8, 2004
The Quality of Diamond
On February 3, 2004, archivist and abstract painter Ward Jackson died at 75. From today’s New York Times:
“Inspired by painters like Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers, Mr. Jackson made austere, hard-edged geometric compositions, typically on diamond-shaped canvases.”
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On a 2003 exhibit by Pablo Helguera that included Mr. Jackson: Parallel Lives recounts and recontextualizes real episodes from the lives of five disparate individuals including Florence Foster Jenkins, arguably the world’s worst opera singer; Giulio Camillo, a Renaissance mystic who aimed to build a memory container for all things; Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of the kindergarten education system, the members of the last existing Shaker community, and Ward Jackson, the lifelong archivist of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Parallel Lives pays homage to Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) and his system of philosophical hermeneutics built through an exploration of historicity, language, and art. This exhibition, which draws its title from the classic work by Plutarch, is a project that explores biography as a medium, drawing from the earlier innovation of the biographical practice in works like Marcel Schwob’s “Imaginary Lives” (1896) and John Aubrey’s “Brief Lives” (1681). Through display means, the project blends the lives of these individuals into one basic story, visually stating the relationship between individualism and society as best summarized by Gadamer’s famous phrase: “we all are others, and we all are a self.” |
On February 3, the day that Jackson died, there were five different log24.net entries:
Parallels with the Helguera exhibit:
Florence Foster Jenkins: Janet Jackson in (2) above.
Giulio Camillo: Myself as compiler of the synchronistic excerpts in (5).
Friedrich Froebel: David Wade in (4).
The last Shakers: Christopher Alexander and his acolytes in (1).
Ward Jackson: On Feb. 3, Jackson became a permanent part of
Some thoughts of Hans-Georg Gadamer
relevant to Jackson’s death:
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by G.T. Karnezis The pleasure it [art] elicits “is the joy of knowledge.” It does not operate as an enchantment but “a transformation into the true.” Art, then, would seem to be an essentializing agent insofar as it reveals what is essential. Gadamer asks us to see reality as a horizon of “still undecided possibilities,” of unfulfilled expectations, of contingency. If, in a particular case, however, “a meaningful whole completes and fulfills itself in reality,” it is like a drama. If someone sees the whole of reality as a closed circle of meaning” he will be able to speak “of the comedy and tragedy of life” (genres becoming ways of conceiving reality). In such cases where reality “is understood as a play, there emerges the reality of what play is, which we call the play of art.” As such, art is a realization: “By means of it everyone recognizes that that is how things are.” Reality, in this viewpoint, is what has not been transformed. Art is defined as “the raising up of this reality to its truth.” |
As noted in entry (3) above
on the day that Jackson died,
“All the world’s a stage.”
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Tuesday, February 3, 2004
Tuesday February 3, 2004
The Quality with No Name
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And what is good, Phædrus,
and what is not good…
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
— Epigraph to
Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance
Brad Appleton discusses a phrase of Christopher Alexander:
“The ‘Quality Without A Name‘ (abbreviated as the acronym QWAN) is the quality that imparts incommunicable beauty and immeasurable value to a structure….
Alexander proposes the existence of an objective quality of aesthetic beauty that is universally recognizable. He claims there are certain timeless attributes and properties which are considered beautiful and aesthetically pleasing to all people in all cultures (not just ‘in the eye of the beholder’). It is these fundamental properties which combine to generate the QWAN….”
See, too, The Alexander-Pirsig Connection.
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