The Nature of Order

The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe () is a four-volume work by the architect Christopher Alexander published in 2003–2004. In his earlier work, Alexander attempted to formulate the principles that lead to a good built environment as patterns, or recurring design solutions. However, he has come to believe that patterns themselves are not enough, and that one needs a "morphogenetic" understanding of the formation of the built environment.

Volume 1 attempts to define "life" in the built environment and determine why one built environment may have more life than another. Important to this idea is his notion of centers:

The first volume contains an exposition of what the author calls the fundamental properties, which are those that are possessed by environments which have more life. He argues that processes that lead to a good built environment are those that tend to increase one or more of these properties. He identifies fifteen geometric properties which tend to accompany the presence of life in nature, and also in the buildings and cities we make. These properties are seen over and over in nature, and in cities and streets of the past, but have all but disappeared in the developments and buildings of the last one hundred years. The book shows that living structure depends on features which make a close connection with the human self, and that living structure has the capacity to support human well-being.

The second book describes the process of creating "life", which is an evolutionary process. Complex systems do not spring into existence fully formed, but rather through a series of small, incremental changes. The process begins with a simple system and incrementally changes that system such that each change preserves the structure of the previous step. Alexander calls these increments "structure-preserving transformations," and they are essential to his process.

Where book one introduces the reader to 15 geometric properties that make up living systems, Alexander reframes those geometric properties as structure-preserving transformations in and of themselves rather than being the results of other transformations. For example, Alexander claims that Levels of Scale will arise naturally as a result of structure-preserving transformations, but he notes that Levels of Scale can also be viewed as a transformation that introduces level of scale into a given structure. A skilled designer would use this transformation to add depth to a particular part of the system that was being built.

...
Wikipedia