Search for real beauty

In The Nature of Order, Alexander writes about more than building and architecture — he writes about philosophy, and metaphysics. He grounds his theories in empirical facts, as he himself sometimes finds his results surprising and hard to believe, because they are at odds with “normal common-sense”.

The practical reason Alexander investigates The Nature of Order

The reason was not intellectual curiosity — but only the practical reason that I wanted to be able to do it myself.

Beauty as an attainable ideal

Alexander criticizes that many of today’s architects have given up making real beauty and even given it up as an attainable ideal.

This strikes me as similar to the programmers who designed early computer systems in the 1960-80s, when programmer and user were the same person. We have now split into experts and non-experts, and non-experts no longer have the power to create what experts can create.

#book/The Nature of Order/1 The Phenomenon of Life/Prologue#

Notes mentioning this note

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.

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