Christopher Alexander on the quality itself

Christopher Alexander on the quality itself:¹

And when a building has this fire, then it becomes a part of nature. Like ocean waves, or blades of grass, its parts are govenrned by the endless play of repetition and variety, created in the presence of the fact that all things pass. This is the quality itself.

For when a town or building lives, we can always recognize its life - not only in the obvious happiness which happens there, not only in its freedom and relaxedness - but in its purely physical appearance too. It always has a certain geometric character…. This is the character of nature. “The character of nature” is no mere poetic metaphor. It is a specific morphological character, a geometric character, which happens to be common to all those things in the world which are not man-made. To make this character of nature clear, let me contrast it with the character of the buildings being built today. One of the most pervasive features of these buildings is the fact that they are “modular.” They are full of identical concrete blocks, identical rooms, identical houses, identical apartments in identical apartment buildings. The idea that a building can - and ought - to be made of modular units is one of the most pervasive assumptions of twentieth-century architecture. Nature is never modular.

There is always repetition of the patterns…. But there is always variation and uniqueness in the way the patterns manifest themselves…. In short, there is a character in natural things which is created by the fact that they are reconciled, exactly, to their inner forces.

So finally the face is, that to come to this, to make a thing which has the character of nature, and to be true to all the forces in it, to remove yourself, to let it be, without interference from your image-making self-all this requires that we become aware that all of it is transitory; that all of it is going to pass. Of course nature itself is also always transitory. The trees, the river, the humming insects-they are all short-lived; they will all pass. Yet we never feel sad in the presence of these things. No matter how transitory they are, they make us feel happy, joyful. But when we make our own attempt to create nature in the world around us, and succeed, we cannot escape the fact that we are going to die. This quality, when it is reached, in human things, is always sad; it makes us sad; and we can even say that any place where a man tries to make the quality, and be like nature, cannot be true, unless we can feel the slight presence of this haunting sadness there, because we know at the same time we enjoy it, that it is going to pass.

Footnotes

1. Chapter 8 “The quality itself”, The timeless way of building ↩