The Natue of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and The Nature of the Universe, Book 3: A Vision of A Living World, Christopher Alexander
Автор: Christopher Alexander Название: The Natue of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and The Nature of the Universe, Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life ISBN: 1735078107 ISBN-13(EAN): 9781735078106 Издательство: Mare Nostrum (Eurospan) Рейтинг: Цена: 23100.00 T Наличие на складе: Невозможна поставка. Описание: Christopher Alexander’s series of ground-breaking books – including A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building – have pointed to fundamental truths of the way we build, revealing what gives life and beauty and true functionality to our buildings and towns. Now, in The Nature of Order, Alexander explores the properties of life itself, highlighting a set of well-defined structures present in all order – and in all life – from micro-organisms and mountain ranges to good houses and vibrant communities.
In The Phenomenon of Life, the first volume in this four volume masterwork, Alexander proposes a scientific view of the world in which all space-matter has perceptible degrees of life and sets this understanding of order as an intellectual basis for a new architecture. With this view as a foundation, we can ask precise questions about what must be done to create more life in our world – whether in a room…a humble doorknob…a neighbourhood…or even in a vast region.
He introduces the concept of living structure, basing it upon his theories of centers and of wholeness, and defines the fifteen properties from which, according t his observations, all wholeness is built. Alexander argues that living structure is at once both personal and structural.
Taken as a whole, the four books create a sweeping new conception of the nature of things which is both objective and structural (hence part of science) – and also personal (in that it shows how and why things have the power to touch the human heart). A step has been taken, through which these two domains – the domain of geometrical structure and the feeling it creates – kept separate during four centuries of scientific though from 1600 to 2000, have finally been united.
Автор: Christopher Alexander Название: The Natue of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and The Nature of the Universe, Book 2: The Process of Creating Life ISBN: 1735078115 ISBN-13(EAN): 9781735078113 Издательство: Mare Nostrum (Eurospan) Рейтинг: Цена: 23100.00 T Наличие на складе: Невозможна поставка. Описание: Scientifically, this is perhaps the most exciting of the four books. How do beautiful creations come into being? Nature can make an infinite number of human faces, each one unique, each one beautiful. The same is true for daffodils, streams, and stars. But man-made creations – especially the towns and buildings of the 20th century – have only occasionally been really good, more often mediocre, and in the last 50 years have most often been deadly.
What is the reason for the difference? It hinges on the deep nature of the processes we use.
Merely understanding the geometry of beautiful and living form (the topic of Book 1) is not enough to help us create such a living geometry. In the 20th century our society was locked into deadly processes which created our current built environment, process that most people were not really aware of and did not question. Despite their best efforts and intentions, architects and planners working within these processes could not achieve a living built environment.Life and beauty in the built world arise only from processes which allow living structure to unfold. The secret lies in knowing, as nature does, what must happen in what order: what sequence of events allows a living form to unfold successfully?
Here, in Book 2, Alexander puts forward a fully developed theory of living process. He defines conditions for a process to be living: that is, capable of generating living structure. He shows how such processes work, and how they may be created. At the core of the new theory is the theory of structure-preserving transformations. This concept, new in scientific thinking, is based on the concept of wholeness defined in Book 1: A structure-preserving transformation is one which preserves, extends, and enhances the wholeness of a system.
Structure-preserving transformations provide the means for any step-by-step process – social, biological, architectural, or technical – to reach configurations which are most profound, most capable of supporting life. The process of creation – whether in the formation of a single object, or in the piece-meal aggregation of a town – requires this sort of generative process, a careful and deliberate sequence of steps in which each step creates the context for the next one, and each next wholeness is derived from the previous wholeness.
Our billions of beautiful and unique human faces come from one class of sequences. Driven by these sequences, an initial cell differentiates again and again until beautiful and complex human beings emerge, infinitely various, always harmonious.
Making changes in society, so that streets, buildings, rooms, gardens, and towns may be generated by hundreds of such sequences requires massive transformations. This book is the first blueprint of those transformations.
Автор: Christopher Alexander Название: The Natue of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and The Nature of the Universe, Book 4: The Luminous Ground ISBN: 1735078131 ISBN-13(EAN): 9781735078137 Издательство: Mare Nostrum (Eurospan) Рейтинг: Цена: 23100.00 T Наличие на складе: Невозможна поставка. Описание: The foundations of modern scientific thought, four centuries old, are firmly rooted in a conception that the universe is a machinelike entity, a play of baubles, machines, trinkets. To this day, our real daily experience of ourselves has no clear place in science. It is little wonder that a machinelike world-view has supported the deadly architecture of the last century.
This mechanistic thinking and the consequent investment-oriented tracts of houses, condominiums and offices have dehumanized our cities and our lives. How are spirit, soul, emotion, feeling to be introduced into a building, or a street, or a development project, in modern times?
The Luminous Ground, the fourth book of The Nature of Order, contains what is perhaps the deepest revelation in the four-volume work. Here is a geometrical view of space and matter seamlessly connected to our own private, personal experience as sentient and knowing creatures. This is not merely an emotional appendix to the scientific theory of the other books. It is at the core of the entire work, and is rooted in the fact that our two sides – our analytical thinking selves, and our vulnerable emotional personalities as human beings – are coterminous. They must be harnessed at one and the same time if we are ever to really make sense of what is around us, and be able to create a living world.
Alexander breaks away completely from the one-sided mechanical model of buildings or neighborhoods as mere assemblages of technically generated interchangeable parts. He shows us conclusively that a spiritual, emotional, and personal basis must underlie every act of building. His buildings and works of art demonstrate in detail what he means. And then, in the middle of the book, comes the linchpin of the work: a one-hundred page chapter on color, which lavishly illustrates and dramatically conveys the way that consciousness and spirit can make their appearance in the world.
Altogether, present throughout this fourth and final book, is a new cosmology uniting matter and consciousness: consciousness inextricably joined to the substrate of matter, present in all matter, and providing all wholeness with its material, cognitive, and spiritual underpinnings. This view, though radical, conforms to our most ordinary daily intuitions. It may provide a path for those contemporary scientists who are beginning to see consciousness as the underpinning of all matter, and thus as a proper object of scientific study.
And it will change, forever, our conception of what buildings are.
Автор: Henderson Lawrence Joseph Название: The Order of Nature: An Essay ISBN: 0342403397 ISBN-13(EAN): 9780342403394 Издательство: Неизвестно Рейтинг: Цена: 40690.00 T Наличие на складе: Нет в наличии.
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