영원의 건축

크리스토퍼 알렉산더 연작 중 하나.

On reading this book

What lies in this book is perhaps more important as a whole than in its details. If you only have an hour to spend on it, it makes much more sense to read the whole book roughly in that hour, than to read only the first two chapters in detail. For this reason, I have arranged each chapter in such a way that you can read the whole chapter in a couple of minutes, simply by reading the headlines which are in italics. If you read the beginning and end of every chapter, and the italic headlines that lie between them, turning the pages almost as fast as you can, you will be able to get the overall structure of the book in less than an hour. Then, if you want to go into detail, you will know where to go, but always in the context of the whole.

The timeless way

A building or a town will only be alive to the extent that it is governed by the timeless way.

Chapter 1. The timeless way

It is a process which brings order out of nothing but ourselves; it cannot be attained, but it will happen of its own accord, if we will only let it.

The quality

To seek the timeless way we must first know the Quality without a name.

Chapter 2. The quality without a name

There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.

Chapter 3. Being alive

The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person, and the crux of any individual person’s story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive. (See also Christopher Alexander on being alive)

Chapter 4. Patterns of events

In order to define this quality in buildings and in towns, we must begin by understanding that every place is given its character by certain patterns of events that keep on happening there. See also (Christopher Alexander on patterns of events)

Chapter 5. Patterns of space

These patterns of events are always interlocked with certain geometric patterns in the space. Indeed, as we shall see, each building and each town is ultimately made out of these patterns in the space, and out of nothing else; they are the atoms and the molecules from which a building or a town is made. (See also Christopher Alexander on patterns of space)

Chapter 6. Patterns which are alive

The specific patterns out of which a building or a town is made may be alive or dead. To the extent they are alive, they let our inner forces loose, and set us free; but when they are dead, they keep us locked in inner conflict. (See also patterns which are alive and dead)

Chapter 7. The multiplicity of living patterns

The more living patterns there are in a place - a room, a building, or a town - the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self-maintaining fire which is the quality without a name. (See also the multiplicity of living patterns)

Chapter 8. The quality itself

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

The gate

To reach the quality without a name we must then build a living pattern language as a gate.

Chapter 9. The flower and the seed

This quality in buildings and in towns cannot be made, but only generated, indirectly, by the ordinary actions of the people, just as a flower cannot be made, but only generated from the seed.See also generative sequence

Chapter 10. Our pattern languages

The people can shape buildings for themselves, and have done it for centuries, by using languages which I call pattern languages. A pattern language gives each person who uses it the power to create an infinite variety of new and unique buildings, just as his ordinary language gives him the power to create an infinite variety of sentences.

Chapter 11. Our pattern languages (cont.)

These pattern languages are not confined to villages and farm society. All acts of building are governed by a pattern language of some sort, and the patterns in the world are there, entirely because they are created by the pattern languages which people use.

Chapter 12. The creative power of language

And, beyond that, it is not just the shape of towns and buildings which comes from pattern languages—it is their quality as well. Even the life and beauty of the most awe-inspiring great religious buildings came from the languages their builders used.

Chapter 13. The breakdown of language

But in our time the languages have broken down. Since they are no longer shared, the processes which keep them deep have broken down; and it is therefore virtually impossible for anybody, in our time, to make a building live.

Chapter 14. Patterns which can be shared

To work our way towards a shared and living language once again, we must first learn how to discover patterns which are deep, and capable of generating life.

Chapter 15. The reality of patterns

We may then gradually improve these patterns which we share, by testing them against experience: we can determine, very simply, whether these patterns make our surroundings live, or not, by recognizing how they make us feel.

Chapter 16. The structure of language

Once we have understood how to discover individual patterns which are alive, we may then make a language for ourselves for any building task we face. The structure of the language is created by the network of connections among individual patterns: and the language lives, or not, as a totality, to the degree these patterns form a whole.

Chapter 17. The evolution of a common language for a town

Then finally, from separate languages for different building tasks, we can create a larger structure still, a structure of structures, evolving constantly, which is the common language for a town. This is the gate.

The way

Once we have built the gate, we can pass through it to the practice of the timeless way.

Chapter 18. The generic power of language

Now we shall begin to see in detail how the rich and complex order of a town can grow from thousands of creative acts. For once we have a common pattern language in our town, we shall all have the power to make our streets and buildings live, through our most ordinary acts. The language, like a seed, is the genetic system which gives our millions of small acts the power to form a whole.

Chapter 19. Differentiating space

Within this process, every individual act of building is a process in which space gets differentiated. It is not a process of addition, in which preformed parts are combined to create a whole, but a process of unfolding, like the evolution of an embryo, in which the whole precedes the parts, and actually gives birth to them, by splitting.

Chapter 20. One pattern at a time

The process of unfolding goes step by step, one pattern at a time. Each step brings just one pattern to life; and the intensity of the result depends on the intensity of each one of these individual steps.

Chapter 21. Shaping one building

From a sequence of these individual patterns, whole buildings with the character of nature will form themselves within your thoughts, as easily as sentences.

Chapter 22. Shaping a group of buildings

Chapter 23. The process of construction

Once the buildings are conceived like this, they can be built, directly, from a few simple marks made in the ground—again within a common language, but directly, and without the use of drawings.

Chapter 24. The process of repair

Next, several acts of building, each one done to repair and magnify the product of the previous acts, will slowly generate a larger and more complex whole than any single act can generate.

Chapter 25. The slow emergence of a town

Finally, within the framework of a common language, millions of individual acts of building will together generate a town which is alive, and whole, and unpredictable, without control. This is the slow emergence of the quality without a name, as if from nothing.

Chapter 26. Its ageless character

And as the whole emerges, we shall see it take that ageless character which gives the timeless way its name. This character is a specific, morphological character, sharp and precise, which must come into being any time a building or a town becomes alive: it is the physical embodiment, in buildings, of the quality without a name.

The kernel of the way

And yet the timeless way is not complete, and will not fully generate the quality without a name, until we leave the gate behind.

Chapter 27. The kernel of the way

Indeed this ageless character has nothing, in the end, to do with languages. The language, and the processes which stem from it, merely release the fundamental order which is native to us. They do not teach us, they only remind us of what we know already, and of what we shall discover time and time again, when we give up our ideas and opinions, and do exactly what emerges from ourselves.