In all his many books and designs, American architect Christopher Alexander’s focus is wholeness, life, and spirited place making. He explains that “In any environment we build—building, room, garden, neighborhood—always, what matters most is that each part of this environment intensifies life.”[1] His aim, he writes, is “trying to find forms for buildings in which people may feel themselves at home.”[2] In his search for an architecture of at-homeness, wellbeing, and animation, Alexander has designed and fabricated several significant buildings as well as generated a remarkable theory of understanding, envisioning, and building that he has variously described as “pattern language,” “the timeless way of building,” “the quality without a name,” “the nature of order,” and “wholeness-extending transformations.”

In this article, I highlight Alexander’s concept of “center,” which offers one way to identify the crux of his work, whether thinking or designing. Most broadly, a center is any spatial concentration or organized focus of more intense pattern or activity—for example, an intricate carpet pattern, an elegant entryway, a handsome arcade, a gracious building, or an animated plaza full of users finding pleasure in the place. Whatever its specific nature and scale, a center is a region of concentrated physical and experiential order that provides for an intense spatial and lived relatedness among things, people, situations, and events. A center is “an organized zone of space . . . which, because of its internal coherence, and because of its relation to context . . . forms a local zone of relative centeredness with respect to the other parts of space.”[3] A pivotal question for Alexander is how an understanding of centers might help architects to conceive of and actualize vigorous places and environments that sustain thriving human life.

Collecting and Studying Turkish Carpets

Though first introduced in Alexander’s A New Theory of Urban Design (1987), the concept of centers is most thoroughly explicated in his A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of Early Turkish Carpets (1993), a topic that, at first glance, might seem considerably removed from architecture—Turkish village carpets of the 14th–17th centuries. Starting in the early 1970s, Alexander collected these carpets and, at one point, owned an internationally admired collection.[4] Alexander surmised that the weavers of these early carpets were probably Sufis—Islamic holy men and women who sought to encounter God through mystical rapture. Alexander suggested that each carpet expressed “the ultimate oneness of everything” and “a pattern which is the infinite domain.”[5]

Alexander admired these carpets because of their compelling presence and spirit, which, when he began his collection, he could only understand dimly. He studied the carpets intensively, intuiting that, if he paid careful, extended attention, they might instruct him in authentic wholeness and genuine order:

I began to realize that carpets had an immense lesson to teach me: that as organized examples of wholeness or oneness in space, they reach levels which are only very rarely reached in buildings. I realized, in short, that the makers of carpets knew something which, if I could master it, would teach me an enormous amount about my own art.[6]

Foreshadowing presents the lessons he learned from 74 of these carpets, all illustrated in color photographs at approximately one-tenth scale (see the two examples below). At the start, Alexander emphasized that the carpets’ power and wholeness is not a matter of personal preference or taste but, rather, “a definite, tangible, and objective quality which really does exist to a greater or lesser degree in any given carpet.”[7] The heart of this quality, he concluded, relates to the colors and, especially, the geometry of the carpets. “It is the geometry,” he wrote, “the interlock of the shapes, the very striking boldness of the geometric shapes, and the way that figure and ground reverse, and the many, many levels of scale, which bring the softly shining color to fruition.”[8]

In Foreshadowing, Alexander developed a method for looking at the carpets that might offer consensus as to each carpet’s relative degree of presence and beauty: “To study wholeness, we must have an empirical way of distinguishing it from preference.”[9] In this sense (though he would not phrase it this way himself), he developed an implicit phenomenology of carpet geometry, drawing on personal discoveries made after studying the carpets for “1000s of hours.”[10] He emphasized that an accurate judgement of a carpet’s relative beauty and wholeness is not easy but requires prolonged experience and extended periods of disciplined looking and seeing. He concluded, however, that newcomers can begin to sense the relative power of carpets if they can bypass personal preferences and look at the carpets in a broader, more open way. This relative strength of a carpet is partly related to its “staying power”: “if you had to look at the thing over and over . . . which one stays the longer?”[11]

Understanding and Seeing Centers

For Alexander, the crux of powerful carpet geometry is centers—smaller or larger gatherings of pattern seen as units or wholes. Centers are “local configurations that appear whole in the design” or, again, “a psychological entity which is perceived as a whole, and which creates the feeling of a center in the visual field.”[12] Typically (but not always), the centers of a carpet are bounded units that the eye reads as a larger or smaller visual whole. The drawing, below left, illustrates the most obvious kind of center: a mandalalike pattern that looks like a flower blossom. To the right of this example is a less regular center—an archlike pattern with projecting “arms” and “lily” at the top.

As can be seen in these two examples, a crucial characteristic of a center is that it is composed of other centers and, in turn, may be an element of some larger center or centers. In the blossom fragment, for example, the flower form, as a whole, is a center, but so are the five small white hexagons, the four small squares, the central eight-pointed star, the eight surrounding dark octagons, and so forth. In turn, this blossom is but a small part of a much larger carpet pattern. This nesting possibility leads to a first important feature of a strong center: It does not get its power from its shape or elements alone but, also, from the gathering of other centers that it contains or of which it is a part. There is, in other words, a potential synergy among centers that in the best carpets supports a density of pattern and connection:

every carpet contains hundreds, in many cases even thousands of centers, strewn, packed, and interlocked, throughout its structure. . . . The degree of wholeness which a carpet achieves is directly correlated to the number of centers which it contains. The more centers it has in it, the more powerful and deep its degree of wholeness.[13]

In clarifying the power of the Turkish carpets in greater detail, Alexander identified four qualities that contribute to the relative strength of a carpet and its centers: (1) symmetry; (2) positive and negative space; (3) levels of scale; and (4) distinctiveness. He claimed that, by far, most centers in carpets are symmetrical, with at least one bilateral symmetry (for example, the carpet patterns illustrated above). There are some centers, however, that are not symmetrical, though, crucially, these centers, first, are almost always composed of smaller symmetrical centers; and, second, almost always contribute toward forming a larger symmetrical center. Alexander pointed out that another common aspect of powerful centers is a strong use of positive and negative space so that every part of the carpet, from small to large, contributes to geometric pattern and interconnection. Particularly important is whether the ground space supporting a figure has its own sense of form and thus generates its own sense of center around the center that the figure itself makes:

In a really good carpet, there is no distinction between figure and ground; every single piece of space, or almost every single piece, is a center; and the resulting density of centers is enormous, since there are centers everywhere, intertwining, interlocking, overlapping, and side by side. . . . It is an almost infallible rule that the presence of beautifully organized centers in the “negative” space is the clue to the beauty of a carpet. When the negative space is powerful, well-organized, we almost always have a design of power and beauty. When the negative space is poorly organized, shapeless, and lacks centers, we almost never have a carpet of any artistic value.[14]

At the same time, however, Alexander emphasized that local symmetries and good figure-ground relationships do not necessarily guarantee a powerful carpet. For example, an infinite chessboard of black and white squares has many symmetries and a strong sense of figure-ground yet poorly bears repeated viewings and quickly becomes uninteresting. This fact leads to a third central quality of strong centers—that they contain a range of scale, in other words, “a cascade of levels or steps in size”:[15]

the real depth of any center comes from the fact that it exists, and works, at many levels simultaneously. In such a center symmetries and positive space do not occur only at a single level, but at many different levels, each one nested in the one above it, each being detailed, or ‘having children’ in the ones below it.[16]

But what about the amount of change these steps in level best incorporate to be most effective? Based on his thorough study of the carpets, Alexander concluded that each center must be roughly one-third to one-half the size of the next largest center. In this way, the range of levels provides a set of parts that are, at each scale, readily legible yet also comprise a larger network that has its own cohesion and pattern. The result is an “ambiguous web where large and small are united to form a complete and seamless unity.”[17]

Alexander concluded that the fourth aspect of a powerful carpet relates to its centers being distinct: that each center is distinguishable and, therefore, set apart from the other centers around it. A design does not work, Alexander argued, unless it is made “of a number of distinct, identifiable entities, each with its own identity.”[18] Ways whereby the weavers created a strong distinctiveness include boldness of shape, contrast with adjacent centers, and strong color differences.

The Byzantine-Timurid Prototype

Having sketched out Alexander’s argument broadly, I want to illustrate it with a specific example drawn from a pattern that he calls the Byzantine-Timurid prototype, a small portion of which is illustrated, below right.[19] In looking at this pattern, one notices how the pattern shifts. At first, the black shapes seem to be the “substance” of the pattern, but then one notices that the white shapes offer “substance” also. Negative and positive spaces reverse visually. No space is wasted in the sense that every part contributes to the pattern seen.

Also notice the several different centers of various scales, packed together to create a sense of density. The smallest are the white diamonds that, together, make up the eight-pointed star in the upper left. On the right side of the star are black squares above and below as well as the black lines separating the diamonds that make up the star. In turn, these black centers combine to make a larger center running horizontally from the white star to create an arrowlike structure with black spirals turned inward at the arrow’s base. In turn, these black spirals intermingle with larger white spirals that shape diagonally a large black “flower” upside down with a black diamond at the base of its “stem” next to the white star.

In short, one finds several differently sized centers in this portion of carpet pattern, all inter­locked so that positive and negative spaces readily reverse. This rich geometric concentration Alexander identified as density—an inseparable thickness of spatial pattern and relationship. What is striking is that this small carpet portion is part of a larger design much more laden with centers (see drawing below).

 

A 21st-Century Art

In Foreshadowing, Alexander asked why Sufi weavers could create such dense patterns of centers in their carpets. His answer related to the weavers’ seeking to use craft to find “union with God.”[20] In this sense, the most important value of the carpets was not their beauty but, rather, their power to penetrate more deeply “into the human soul than other carpets do . . . their special worth is spiritual and religious—not only aesthetic.”[21] At the same time, Alexander suggested that we modern Western people are typically oblivious to the power of centers because of a Renaissance-inspired, anthropocentric view of the world that reduces its contents and situations to what human beings can know and control. In relation to understanding the Turkish carpets, this people-centered perspective produces an emphasis on things and parts rather than interlinkages and wholes:

Since [human beings] became elevated as the center of things [at the time of the European Renaissance], a sharp focus of attention on figure without ground became more and more common, while the unifying spiritual vision of the Middle Ages and of the Islamic world, in which every point of space was a spirit-carrying center, became forgotten.[22]

Alexander suggested that 21st-century art and architecture might incorporate a return to a density of centers, since this is what the best and most beautiful carpets (or for that matter, any well-designed thing) possess. In all his work, the aim is to understand the nature of density and to use that understanding for design and building. He explained that such understanding in architecture is not easy:

There, too, in making a building, one is searching for just such a center or pattern of centers—which contains within itself the full range of the relationships . . . —dense and self-sufficient. It may sometimes take weeks, months to find the necessary structure of a particular center. It is hard work . . . —not at all the kind of thing where shapes merely drop off the pencil—instead, it is hard wrought structure, found with pain and difficulty.[23]

Other than this comment, Alexander said little in Foreshadowing about how practically an understanding of carpet geometry might contribute to better architectural design. In fact, in A New Theory of Urban Design, published six years before Foreshadowing, he and colleagues had already applied the theme of centers directly to the design of energized city neighborhoods. There, his description of the most beautiful towns and cities closely parallels the qualities of the Turkish carpets:

Each [town and city] . . . grew as a whole, under its own laws of wholeness . . . and we can feel this wholeness, not only on the large scale, but in every detail: in the restaurants, in the sidewalks, in the houses, shops, markets, roads, parks, gardens and walls. Even in the balconies and ornaments.[24]

In A New Theory, Alexander drew on the concept of centers to revitalize urban neighborhoods and districts by requiring that any new element in the urban-design process—be it building, open space, street furniture, or something else—“must be a ‘center’ in itself, and must also produce a system of centers around it.”[25] In New Theory, he presented a conceptual approach that might facilitate a rich fabric of urban centers, thus grounding the notion as it can have practical meaning for the making of buildings and places, including robust urban environments.

A Theory of Centers

In his four-volume masterwork, The Nature of Order, Alexander provided the most comprehensive set of directives for facilitating centers, density, and wholeness, whether in art, decorative objects, buildings, or entire places.[26] In that work, Alexander’s means for understanding and making wholeness are twofold: first, a set of fifteen structural properties that he claimed reoccur in all things, buildings, places, and situations that evoke wholeness and life; second, a step-by-step method of making whereby each stage in the design of a particular project becomes a pointer for what is to come next through the recognition, guided in part by the fifteen principles, of creating more and more density, order, and life.

In Nature of Order, centers remain the most prominent of the fifteen structural properties, absolutely essential for intensifying the life and wholeness of the thing made, whether artwork, decorative object, building, or landscape. Alexander discussed centers most thoroughly in the first volume’s third chapter, “Wholeness and the Theory of Centers,” where he explained that, when one thinks of things in the world as separate entities, one focuses on their boundedness and isolation. In contrast, when one understands these things as centers, one becomes more aware of their relatedness and pictures them as “focal points in a larger, unbroken whole.[27] One sees “the world whole.”[28] In a note to this chapter, Alexander explained how, for years, he “struggled with the idea that everything—all form—was made of entities.”[29] His confusion finally dissipated when he realized that

all these troublesome entities . . . were not truly entities but were in fact non-bounded centers: Centers of influence, centers of action, centers of other centers—centers of some kind, appearing in the seething mass of wholeness . . . I finally realized that this way of looking at things was logically consistent, solved all the earlier problems of “entities,” and was a solid footing on which a theory of order could be properly built.[30]

When reading Alexander, one remembers the art works, objects, environments, and places that have given happiness, wonder, and joy—some deep quality of presence and grace that makes life worth living. In the Turkish carpets, this quality is “a feeling of an archaic soul produced in the shape alone.”[31] For the built environment, this feeling is much the same—a sense of relationship and rightness that makes one feel more present, whole, and alive. The obligation, says Alexander, is that the thing built must work “to create a continu­ous structure of wholes around itself.”[32] The potential result is a dynamic weave of centers, dense in their interrelationships and alive in the vibrancy of human life they propel. As Alexander persuasively explained:

Wholeness is made of centers. Centers appear in space. When the wholeness becomes profound, we experience it as life, in buildings and other artifacts, in nature, even in actions. The life is able to be more profound or less profound because the centers themselves have different degrees of life, and the life of any one center depends on the life of other centers. The life of a building thus comes about as a recursive phenomenon in which different centers prop each other up and intensify their life cooperatively. [This spatial coordination] is responsible for the functional life in a building (the way it works) and for the geometric life (its beauty). These are one and the same thing.[33]

Notes

[1] Christopher Alexander, Hans Joahchim Neis, and Maggie Moore Alexander, Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 115.

[2] Christopher Alexander, A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 7.

[3] Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Vol. 1: The Phenomenon of Life (Berkeley, CA: Center for Environmental Structure, 2002), 84.

[4] Christopher Alexander, “A New Way of Looking,” Hali 13, no. 2 (April 1991): 114–125. Hali is “an international magazine for fine carpets and rugs”; this article discussed Alexander’s exhibit of early Turkish rugs held in fall, 1990, at San Francisco’s DeYoung Museum in conjunction with the sixth International Conference on Oriental Rugs. Alexander asked the question, “What makes these carpets great?”, which he answered by saying that “A great carpet—when I stand before it—makes me feel the force of my own life.” He related this force to any creative act, including architecture, and contended that “the main task is to make things that intensify our lives, buildings that make us feel our life and our existence more vividly, more intensely” (p. 125). A critical review of Foreshadowing is Murray L. Eiland, Jr., “A Foreshadowing of 21^st Century Art,” Oriental Rug Review 15, no. 1 (1994): 42–46.

[5] Alexander, Foreshadowing, 21.

[6] Ibid., 15.

[7] Ibid., 26.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., 27.

[10] Ibid., 17. On Alexander’s relationship with phenomenology, see David Seamon, Life Takes Place: Phenomenology, Lifeworlds, and Place Making (London: Routledge, 2018), 161–163.

[11] Ibid., p. 30.

[12] Ibid., 32.

[13] Ibid., 36.

[14] Ibid., 53, 55.

[15] Ibid., 61.

[16] Ibid., 62.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid., 63.

[19] Ibid., 56–57; 130–137; 351; drawings on 56.

[20] Ibid., 89.

[21] Ibid., 90.

[22] Ibid., 274.

[23] Ibid., 70.

[24] Christopher Alexander, Hajo Neis, Artemis Anninou, and Ingrid King. A New Theory of Urban Design, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 2.

[25] Ibid., 92

[26] These volumes, all published by the Center for Environmental Structure, Berkeley, California, are: The Nature of Order, Vol. 1: The Phenomenon of Life (2002); The Nature of Order, Vol. 2: The Process of Creating Life (2002); The Nature of Order, Vol. 3: A Vision of a Living World (2005); and The Nature of Order, Vol. 4: The Luminous Ground (2004). A summary of the four volumes is Christopher Alexander, “Empirical Findings from The Nature of Order,” Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, Vol. 18, No. 1 (winter 2007), 11–19.

[27] Alexander, Nature of Order, Vol. 1, 85.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid., p.107, note 12.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Ibid., 92.

[32] Alexander, New Theory of Urban Design, 22.

[33] Alexander, Nature of Order, Vol. 1, 314.