My work has proven this to me: There is available to us, a form of transformation which, each time it is applied, extends and enhances the wholeness of the land, and the act of using this process of transforming puts us in touch with ourselves. This means that it makes the land of the Earth become more and more deeply connected to our selves. An environment, when made in this way, may even be regarded as a vision of our inner selves.

— Christopher Alexander

The next issue of The Side View Journal is inspired by Christopher Alexander.

This is a call for essays that engage with Alexander’s work through practical applications in the field of architecture and design, philosophical engagement in the realm of ideas, or both.

Essays will appear online and in print.

Thinking with Environments

Alexander has been influential in architecture, computer science, and design. While his work emphasizes building, he is very much a philosopher’s architect, a person marked by deep intuitions about the world and our place in it. Indeed, his thought is relevant to questions of human perception, action, psychology, planning, technology, society, religion, and more.

As Alexander’s work is concerned with human–environment relations, and especially with how the one actively shapes the other, we welcome exchanges between Alexander’s thought and that of other thinkers in related areas, such as James and Eleanor Gibson (ecological psychology), Marshall McLuhan (media ecology), Lewis Mumford (the city in history), Léon Krier (the architecture of community), Kevin Laland (niche construction), Evan Thompson (the embodied mind), and the many other advocates of an expanded and extended sense of human being.

We offer the following commentary on Alexander’s writings to inspire discussion for the issue, organized into three interconnected categories: design and the feeling for form, cosmology and the order of nature, and contemplation and holy experience.

Design and the Feeling for Form

Alexander’s early work, Notes on the Synthesis of Form, opens with an epigraph from Plato’s Phaedrus. The passage reads, “First, the taking in of scattered particulars under one Idea, so that everyone understands what is being talked about . . . Second, the separation of the Idea into parts, by dividing it at the joints, as nature directs, not breaking any limb in half as a bad carver might.” Notes is largely an elaboration on this excerpt.

Primarily, his concern is with the idea of form and with the idea of form-making and form-making processes. “The ultimate object of design is form,” Alexander tells us. But what is form? Form is organization and pattern—a mode of order persisting within a field of forces. Form is the shape we give to materials when brought under an organizing idea, an idea that shapes form in response to a problem set within a context, within a constraint. To be concerned with form, then, is to be concerned with an ecology that includes form and context, in other words, with pattern languages. These pattern languages exist across scales, from the very small to the very large, from the natural world, to the house, the town, the city, and the region.

Good design is the fit between form and context. Form-making on this view is a synthesis of geometry, material, purpose, and feeling, not as the subjective appraisal of arbitrary tastes, but as the skilled apprehension of real qualities and values. Form-making processes of this kind are expressed in traditional and indigenous building practices the planet over, and can be found in the digital world of software design and computer science alike.

Cosmology and the Nature of Order

This feeling for form matures in Alexander’s later works, published in the Nature of Order series, where form becomes the whole, or the center, the building block of artists and architects. Moreover, while wholes and centers are important in design, they are also crucial aspects of a coherent and living cosmology, and it is this cosmology that grounds his design philosophy.

Here Alexander’s earlier ideas find renewed expression. If the old work is grounded in set theory and evolution, the new material draws from cosmology, especially in relation to connecting science with human experience. Marshalling the work of Alfred North Whitehead, Alexander escapes the two-world system of modernism—the system of impersonal mathematics and mechanism, on the one hand, and subjective personal projection, on the other—in favor of a new form of scientific observation. What Alexander calls “the weakness of the present world-picture” is a result of this bifurcation, and the Nature of Order is in large part the formulation of an alternative that extends beyond architecture and into religion, theology, and metaphysics.

Contemplation and Holy Experience

For people familiar with his background, these themes are not surprising. Alexander, a Roman Catholic, is known to have drawn from a cosmopolitan array of Christian mystics, Sufi saints, Buddhist, Taoist, and Zen practitioners, and many other groups who articulate a view that centers the sacredness of the physical world, a view that feeds back into our own human transformation, and then back out once more into the world that we design, shape, and build.

To generate such feelings, we need places of contemplation, places designed in ways that impart a sense of holiness. “We believe,” Alexander and his co-authors write, “that every community, regardless of its particular faith, regardless of whether it even has a faith in any organized sense, needs some place where this feeling of slow, progressive access . . . to a holy center may be experienced.” Contemplation is in this sense a fundamental right of humanity, and it is a crucial aspect of Alexander’s own development, a development mirrored in his design metaphysics.

Dates and Themes

We think with and through our environments, alongside their geometric arrangement and affordances for feeling, and our design practices ought to recover this fundamental fact. This recovery, it can be argued, involves developing practices of perception that revive the feeling for form, ground this feeling in an adequate cosmology of nature and human design, and create places that cultivate the contemplative activity needed to keep thought fresh and alive.

Considering this full scope of Alexander’s vision, we invite discussion on the following themes:

— Media ecology
— Pattern languages
— Complexity
— Wholeness
— Form-making
— Rural & urban architecture
— Cosmopolitanism
— Niche construction
— Indigenous perspectives
— Religious & contemplative practice
— Cosmology
— Science & perception
— Affordances

Please submit your idea by Friday, July 2, including your name, a title, and a short description of your essay (300–600 words) to adam@thesideview.co.

Accepted proposals will receive additional instructions about style, length, and format for official publication.