Alexander the great.

THE NATURE OF ORDER: AN ESSAY ON THE ART OF BUILDING AND THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE--VOL III: A VISION OF A LIVING WORLD

By Christopher Alexander. Berkeley: The Center for Environmental Structure, distributed by Routledge. 2005. [pounds sterling]42.50 (four volumes [pounds sterling]150)

This monumental work is the long awaited outcome of Christopher Alexander's reflections since the 1970s. No recent writer, I think, has viewed architecture so broadly, setting it in the context of all human making and living, and even of biology, cosmology, and particle physics. I was intrigued by Stephen Grabow's account of the 1977 draft in his 1983 biography of the author, but I find that the final version falls short of its ambitious aim: to explore the fundamental nature, not only of architecture, but of the universe. Alexander has a wonderful eye for the work of vernacular builders and anonymous artists; the best things in the book are colour reproductions of Anatolian rugs, Tibetan monasteries, peasant villages, Korean ceramics, Japanese textiles and Persian miniatures. On the other hand, he is blind to almost all twentieth-century design (apart from its obvious defects, which he castigates endlessly) and to most modern art except the work of Matisse, whom he idolises, and a few other painters. Unfortunately, the work of Alexander and his team of associates, which he illustrates copiously as the answer to the shortcomings of Modernism, appears clumsy, slipshod and crude. It is one thing to appreciate the beautiful 'naturalness' of traditional craftwork, quite another to reproduce its vital quality, which cannot be retrieved without the strict conventions and traditions that sustain it.

The greatest letdown, however, is Alexander's inability to substantiate convincingly his basic thesis: that modern architecture fails because architects have absorbed what he condemns as the false 'mechanist-rationalist' scientific picture of the universe. It is not just a question of reforming architecture, but of renewing science itself through insights discovered through a 'life-sustaining' architecture. Alexander states this creed most succinctly as follows: the wholeness, defined as the pattern of centres in some part of space, is not only the underlying causative structure in matters of architecture and art--but even the behaviour of sub-atomic particles, electrons, is also governed by this wholeness.

In volume IV, The Luminous Ground, he finally reveals that his vision is essentially religious, not scientific. Alexander attributes his earlier reluctance to make this clear to awareness that it 'rests on academically unmentionable foundations', but I find his theory more persuasive as religion than as science. We learn at last that the quality he calls wholeness, 'when it appears in thing, people, kin, a moment, in an event, is God. It is not an indication of God living behind all things, but is actually God itself. This is spirit made manifest'.