Multiplicity of living patterns

Christopher Alexander on the multiplicity of living patterns:

The more living patterns there are in a thing - a room, a building, or a town - the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has this self-maintaining fire, which is the quality without a name. —Chapter 7 “The multiplicity of living patterns”, The timeless way of building

When one pattern is alive, it resolves its own forces, it is self-sustaining, self-creating, and its internal forces continuously support themselves…. the patterns in a town or building help to sustain each other, in which pattern which is alive, itself spreads out its life…. The “bad” patterns are unable to contain the forces which occur in them…. In the end, the whole system must collapse…. The individual configuration of any one pattern requires other patterns to keep itself alive…. And finally the quality without a name appears, not when an isolated pattern lives, but when an entire system of patterns, interdependent at many levels, it all stable and alive. —Chapter 7 “The multiplicity of living patterns”, The timeless way of building