On March 17, 2022, at 85 years of age, Christopher Alexander passed away peacefully in his home in West Sussex, England. This post celebrates his life, and for me, personally, the sheer magnitude his work has had on the course of my life, including Making Permaculture Stronger as a project. If any of you have been touched by this project, then you have been indirectly impacted by Alexander’s life-long quest toward life, beauty and wholeness. Find out about who Alexander was here and here and here and here. Learn about Alexander’s direct influence on my (Dan Palmer’s) work, and on this very project here and here. A Poem Thank you to Ann Medlock, a past client (and hence collaborator) of Alexander’s, for permission to share these photos and this poem here: Alexander sculpts a building out of air and wisdom waving his hands squinting his eyes to see what only he and God can see in this clearing on the bluff. Listening to something we cannot hear, he brings into being a house so solid, silent and calm, so embracing, consoling and inevitable, that it draws in and restores every open soul that finds its way here. And many do. Pilgrims who have heard, who’ve seen a photograph, who sense that here there is something mysterious, rare, perhaps even inspired. On a clear blue afternoon we sit at a long table in the sun, the house embracing this garden and all of us who bask here amid the calendulas and ferns. Feasting on tabouli and cold birds, we talk of poetry and paintings, of terraces in Tuscany and homemade wine, of our work, our passions, our quests. We are friends, gathered here by the grace that emanates from this holy place. At Christmas, the clan assembles. The tree, dressed in familiar ornaments, touches the coffered ceiling and sends the scent of balsam to mingle with fire, roast and cakes. Thick walls hold out the cold, the wind, and every danger of the world we know. Comets cut across the high windows as we are drawn in and held fast, together, blessed by the house that Alexander made, while listening to God. Three Examples of Directly Alexander-Inspired Design Processes https://vimeo.com/456075580/0e4846f331 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2k35m_Q9xg&ab_channel=MakingPermacultureStronger https://youtu.be/l8lffVxj7DI Some Quotes Here I share a selection of some of my favourite quotes from Alexander’s many books. The Timeless Way of Building (1979) You are alive when you are wholehearted, true to yourself, true to your own inner forces, and able to act freely according to the nature of the situations you are in. […] To be happy, and to be alive, in this sense, are almost the same. Of course, if you are alive, you are not always happy in the sense of feeling pleasant; experiences of joy are balanced by experiences of sorrow. But the experiences are all deeply felt; and above all, you are whole; and conscious of being real. To be alive, in this sense, is not a matter of suppressing some forces or tendencies, at the expense of others; it is a state of being in which all forces which arise in you can find expression; you live in balance among the forces which arise in you; you are unique as the pattern of forces which arises is unique; you are at peace, since there are no disturbances created by underground forces which have no outlet, at one with yourself and your surroundings. This state cannot be reached merely by inner work. There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that you need do only inner work, in order to be alive like this; that you are entirely responsible for your problems; and that to cure yourself, you need only change yourself. This teaching has some value, since it is so easy to imagine that your problems are caused by “others.” But it is a one-sided and mistaken view which also maintains the arrogance of the belief that the individual is self-sufficient, and not dependent in any essential way on their surroundings. The fact is, you are so far formed by your surroundings, that your state of harmony depends entirely on your harmony with your surroundings. Some kinds of physical and social circumstances help you come to life. Others make it very difficult. (pp. 105-106, edited by me from third into second person voice) Building designed by Alexander within Eishen Campus in Japan This next quote changed my whole approach to design: This [approach to design] is a differentiating process. It views design as a sequence of acts of complexification; structure is injected into the whole by operating on the whole and crinkling it, not by adding little parts to one another. In the process of differentiation, the whole gives birth to its parts: the parts appear as folds in a cloth of three dimensional space which is gradually crinkled. The form of the whole, and the parts, come into being simultaneously. The image of the differentiating process is the growth of an embryo. It starts as a single cell. The cell grows into a ball of cells. Then, through a series of differentiations, each building on the last, the structure becomes more and more complex, until a finished human being is formed. The first thing that happens is that this ball gets an inside, a middle layer, and an outside: the endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm, which will later turn into skeleton, flesh, and skin, respectively. Then this ball of cells with three layers gets an axis. The axis is laid down in the endoderm, and will become the spine of the finished person. Then this ball, with an axis, gets a head at one end. Later, the secondary structures, eyes, limbs, develop in relation to the spinal axis and the head. And so on. At every stage of development, new structure is laid down, on the basis of the structure which has been laid down so far. The process of development is, in essence, a sequence of operations, each one of which differentiates the structure which has been laid down by the previous operations. … In nature a thing is always born, and developed, as a whole. A baby starts, from the first day of its conception, as a whole, and is a whole, as an embryo, every day until it is born. It is not a sequence of adding parts together, but a whole, which expands, crinkles, differentiates itself. (pp. 368-383) Get rid of the ideas which come into your mind. Get rid of pictures you have seen in magazines, friends’ houses …. Insist on the pattern, and nothing else. The pattern, and the real situation, together, will create the proper form, within your mind, without your trying to do it, if you will allow it to happen. This is the power of the language, and the reason why the language is creative. Your mind is a medium within which the creative spark that jumps between the pattern and the world can happen. You yourself are only the medium for this creative spark , not its originator.” (p. 397) The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe: Book Two: The Process of Creating Life Our current view of architecture rests on too little awareness of becoming as the most essential feature of the building process. Architects are too little concerned with the design of the world (its static structure), and not yet concerned enough with the design of the generative processes that create the world (its dynamic structure) (p. 4) In our profession of architecture there is no conception, yet, of process itself as a budding, as a flowering, as an unpredictable, unquenchable unfolding through which the future grows from the present in a way that is dominated by the goodness of the moment (p. 12) In a living system what is to be always grows out of what is, supports it, extends its structure smoothly and continuously, elaborates new form — sometimes startlingly new form — but without ever violating the structure which exists. When this rule is violated, as it was, far too often, in 20th-century development, chaos emerges. A kind of cancer occurs. Harm is done. All in modern society succeeded, in the last century, in creating an ethos where where buildings, plans, objects…are judged only by themselves, and not by the extent to which they enhance and support the world. This means that nature has been damaged, because it is ignored and trampled upon. It means that ancient parts of towns and cities have been trampled, because the modernist view saw no need to respect them, to protect them. But even more fundamental, it came about because the idea of creativity which became the norm assumed that it is creative to make things that are unrelated (sometimes disoriented and disconnected just in order to be new), and that this is valuable–where in fact it is merely stupid, and represents a misunderstanding, a deep misapprehension of how things are. Creativity comes about when we discover the new within a structure already latent within the present. It is our respect for what is that leads us to the most beautiful discoveries. In art as well as in architecture, our most wonderful creations come about, when we draw them out as extensions and enhancements of what exists already. The denial of this point of view, is the chief way in which 20th-century development destroyed the surface of the earth (p. 136) At each stage in its evolution the process — when a living one — always starts from the wholeness as it currently exists at that moment. The work is complete in some respects, in some respects incomplete. At the next moment, we take a new step — introducing one new bit of structure… into the whole. The new structure we introduce may be large, medium, or tiny… But the point is that at every stage of every life-creating process, the new bit of structure which is injected to transform and further differentiate the previously existing wholeness, will always extend, enhance, intensify the structure of the previous wholeness… (p. 216) The enigma is that something new, unique,
