News from Building Beauty
The Nature of Order Series: Book 4, 18 June 2020
The lecture series continues with Savyasaachi on the theme “About Yourself.” He will share "some lessons I have imbibed in the course of working with forest dwellers, architects, crafts persons and students at the National Institute of Design and the department of Sociology Jamia MIllia Islamia are:
- it is necessary to work hard to not let your life be out-sourced,
-it is important to learn to spend time with one's own self and be available to others and,
-it is important to discern what is worthy of forgetting and what is worth of remembering because to forget everything and to remember everything undermines reverence for life".
Dr Savyasaachi is Professor at the department of sociology Jamia Millia Islamia. He has worked in the fields of political ecology, indigenous people, development, social movements, and conservation architecture. He has taught social anthropology to students of ‘conservation architecture, at the School of Planning and Architecture Delhi. At National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, he has taught weeklong SLA courses on Indian Society and culture, has been sharing with textile students ways of doing field work and Craft Documentation and has taught to a course of ‘visual language’. At NIRMA University Ahmedabad he has taught a course on :History of Objects’ to students of industrial design He has been in country faculty as well travelling Anthropology faculty for the International Honors Program.
The Nature of Order Lecture Series, Book 4, 11 June 2020
In today’s session we will have two speakers: Kathryn Langstaff and Alfred Bay. Kathryn and Alfred both studied for their Masters in Architecture with Alexander in the 1990's and as Graduate Student Instructors participated in teaching this material to undergraduate students. Kathryn is a practicing architect and activist, now based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, and Alfred is a contractor and builder in the San Francisco Bay Area.
They have both contributed essays to In Pursuit of Living Architecture, which was edited by Kyriakos Pontikis and myself. Kathryn will discuss chapter 22 of The Nature of Order, Book 4 - Making wholeness heals he maker: A generative design experiment for personal healing and ecosystem restoration. Alfred will discuss chapter 23 - The resolution of forces.
You can read essays from In Pursuit of Living Architecture here:
As always people who'd like a link to the session are invited to contact natureoforder@buildingbeauty.org.
The Nature of Order Lecture Series, Book 4, 4 June 2020
Christopher Robin Andrews, architect, town planner, carpet maker, and ornamenteur, will speak on Chapters Six and Seven of Book Four, The Luminous Ground, of The Nature of Order by Christopher Alexander: "The Blazing One" and "Color and Inner Light".
"When I see the beautiful tile, or walk into the beautiful building, it is as if I just lift up the corner of the flap and temporarily see into the blazing "one". It looks like heaven. The idea, then, is that every part of our physical world is shadowed by this parallel domain of I-stuff, and that each part of our ordinary world, if it is given the right structure, will lift the flap or open the door, and give us a glimpse into that domain." (Alexander)
"Reality as we experience it is full of color, saturated by color, dominated by color at every turn, in every point, in every line, in every shadow." (Alexander)
This week’s webinar is on Thursday, 4 June, at 15:00 UTC time.
If you would like to attend the webinar series, please send an email to natureoforder@buildingbeauty.org and ask to be included.
The Nature of Order Lecture Series, Book 4, 28 May 2020
TO BE OR NOT TO BE, with Jaap Dawson
We can build a world of living beings. If we haven’t learned not to, we build that world automatically.
Let’s look at how we’ve always built. Let’s look at what moved us, what drove us, to build living beings. Let’s look at examples of how we can still build living beings.
We build a world of living beings when we’re in touch with the living source of our own lives.
Jaap is an architect in Delft, The Netherlands, where he taught architectural design at the Technische Universiteit.
This week’s webinar is on Thursday, 28 May, at 16:00 UK time.
If you would like to attend the webinar series, please send an email to natureoforder@buildingbeauty.org and ask to be included.
The Nature of Order Lecture Series, Book 4, 21 May 2020
Beauty and the Nature of Matter: The Legacy of Christopher Alexander, with Nikos Salingaros
Is beauty an intrinsic part of how the universe works? In the first 50 pages of his book The Nature of Order, Book 4: The Luminous Ground, Christopher Alexander describes the connective process that leads to life’s greatest experiences, which are also felt from great architecture. Yet architectural culture and education avoid this intimate connection, ignoring the tools necessary to achieve living structure, which come from the humanistic and religious mind-sets in past societies. Part of the blame goes to the mechanistic model used in science to derive useful results, but which has now supplanted reality. A strictly mechanistic worldview allows no place for an architecture that connects with our deepest self, thereby reducing the complexity of existence and life.
This week’s webinar is on Thursday, 16:00 UK time.
If you would like to attend the webinar series, please send an email to natureoforder@buildingbeauty.org and ask to be included.
