Key concepts in The Nature of Order

A list of key concepts in _The Nature of Order_, in order of appearance in the four books.

You might want to start with these helpful foundational ideas.

Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life

• Prologue
  • Search for real beauty
  • Building is an essential order-creation process
  • Human feeling is 90% the same across people
  • About the nature of the universe
• Preface
  • Authentic architecture with deep feeling has become almost impossible
  • Arrangement in space is fundamental to how we understand our world
  • Mechanical-rationalist world view
  • Order is difficult to describe
  • Mechanism vs. harmony
  • Consequences of the mechanistic view
  • Pluralist view of value
  • Function vs. ornament
• Part 1: The Phenomenon of Life
  • Order
  • Life and living structure
  • Wholeness
  • Center
  • 15 fundamental properties
• Part 2: The Personal Nature of Order
  • Feeling
    • What does it mean for something to be personal?
    • Feeling as the inward aspect of life
    • Wholeness and feeling
    • Can we talk about “feeling”…?
  • Mirror of the self
    • Wholeness and real liking
    • The mirror of the self
    • An empirical test for comparing the degree of life of different centers
    • Liking something from the heart
  • Life as a universal value
    • A more general class of tests for life
    • Emergence of this new form of observation from precedents in modern science
    • The core of the new method of observation
    • The relation to Descartes
    • The appeal to shared experience
    • Techniques of measurement
    • The expanding and contracting of our humanity
    • Comparisons
    • Judgement and the pursuit of architecture
  • 10 The impact of living structure on human life
    • How does the world have its effect on us?
    • Freedom of the spirit
    • Freedom and loss of freedom
    • The stress reservoir
    • Separation from reality
    • A world which enhances human life
    • Andre Kertesz’s Paris
    • The mirror of the self
    • Experiments in our time
    • Ordinary reality
  • 11 The awakening of space
    • Ornament and function
    • How a chisel works
    • How a living room works
    • How centers work together
    • The unity of ornament and function
    • Function arising out of ornament
    • Life as an attribute of space and matter
    • The hypothesis of Denis Diderot
    • Space itself carries the attribute of life
    • Throw out all functional explanations in your mind except the life of centers
    • The recursive character of life
    • The awakening of space
  • Conclusion: A foundation for all of architecture

Book 2: The Process of Creating Life

• Part 1: Structure-preserving Transformations
  • …
• Part 2: Living Processes
  • [[ Sequence ]]
  • The fundamental process
  • [[ Living process ]]
  • [[ Word picture ]]
  • [[ Pattern]] and [[Pattern language ]]
• Part 3: A New Paradigm for Process in Society
  • …

Book 3: A Vision of a Living World

Book 3 is about implementation of living processes. With many examples of his own projects, Alexander paints a picture of what can happen if living processes are used pervasively in our time and the environment this can create, with a focus on the impact on the whole — what is likely to happen in the large.

• Part 1: Belonging
  • …
• Part 2: Public spaces
  • Mechanization in architecture and software
    • -> perhaps top-level, book 1 preface?

Book 4: The Luminous Ground

I’m currently in the process of reading book 4. Follow my raw Book 4 cliff notes as I take them.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Conclusion to the four books