Resources
Welcome to the Resource Center. In this room we share our stories and reflections related to our own experiences of making places, as well as those of living in places that are worth remembering and passing on as good lessons for the future. We are now able to share course lectures with you as well.
You are most welcome to get in touch with staff if you have stories you would like to share.
The Nature of Order Webinar: Field Reports In a Pandemic Time May 2020
In May 2020, our Building Beauty webinar students paused to think about how their experiences with the four volumes of The Nature of Order by Christopher Alexander relate to their experiences with the world-wide pandemic. Thanks to Ross Chapin and Kate Ledogar for their work on this video, which summarizes the conversation, and to our webinar participants from Austria, Germany, India, Israel, and the United States, who were willing to share their thoughts.
View the video here.
The Side View Podcast with Susan Ingham and Chris Andrews
Adam Robbert of The Side View interviews Building Beauty co-founders Susan Ingham and Christopher Robin Andrews about their experiences as students with Christopher Alexander, and as faculty with the Building Beauty program.
Susan is a licensed architect practicing in Seattle, Washington. Her firm, KASA Architecture, was founded in 2004 and specializes in residential design. The main focus of her work is to try to create environments with beauty where each building site is improved, and her clients can feel a deep sense of belonging in their homes. Susan obtained both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied and worked intensively with Christopher Alexander and his colleagues.
Chris is a licensed architect in the State of California. He serves on Oakland's Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board, and is an adjunct instructor at the University of San Francisco's Architecture & Community Design Program as well as a founding member of the Building Beauty faculty. With over 25 years of experience as an architect and urban designer, he brings an understanding of sustainable and culturally competent practice to the full range of environmental design, from the design of carpets and furniture, and architecture at all levels of scale, with a special focus on historic preservation and town planning.
Listen to the podcast here.
The Medlock-Graham House
The Medlock-Graham House on Whidbey Island, Washington, USA, photo by Jim Givens
Ann Medlock participates in Building Beauty’s The Nature of Order seminar, and, as we all expressed our thanks for the opportunity to learn together another year, she offered a poem that she wrote years ago about the process of working with Christopher Alexander on the design and construction of her home. For more on Ann’s experience with this, see her Building with Christopher Alexander — An Illustrated Memoir.
Alexander sculpts a building
out of air and wisdom,
waving his hands,
squinting his eyes
to see what only he and God can see
in this clearing on the bluff.
Listening to something
we cannot hear, he brings into being
a house so solid, silent and calm,
so embracing, consoling and inevitable,
that it draws in and restores
every open soul that finds its way here.
And many do.
Pilgrims who have heard,
who’ve seen a photograph,
who sense that here there is something
mysterious, rare, perhaps even inspired.
On a clear blue afternoon
we sit at a long table in the sun,
the house embracing this garden
and all of us who bask here
amid the calendulas and ferns.
Feasting on tabouli and cold birds,
we talk of poetry and paintings,
of terraces in Tuscany and homemade wine,
of our work, our passions, our quests.
We are friends, gathered here
by the grace that emanates from this holy place.
At Christmas, the clan assembles.
The tree, dressed in familiar ornaments,
touches the coffered ceiling
and sends the scent of balsam to mingle
with fire, roast and cakes.
Thick walls hold out the cold, the wind,
and every danger of the world we know.
Comets cut across the high windows
as we are drawn in and held fast, together,
blessed by the house that Alexander made,
while listening to God.
Special Issue "New Applications and Development of Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order"
Bin Jiang, Faculty of Engineering and Sustainable Development, Division of GIScience, University of Gävle, Sweden; and Nikos Salingaros, Department of Mathematics, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, USA, served as guest editors with Urban Science Journal to present this special issue on Christopher Alexander’s work.
The work of Alexander has proven enormously influential, if sometimes controversial, spanning from his early work on Notes on the Synthesis of Form, through his seminal paper “A City is Not a Tree”, to later books A Pattern Language and A New Theory of Urban Design. His ideas have found remarkable applications in software engineering, communications, management theory, and many other fields. Among the spinoff innovations are design patterns (also known as “pattern languages of programming”), popular software programs like “The Sims”, platforms like wikis (and Wikipedia), and new methodologies like Agile, Scrum and others.
Later in his career, Alexander devoted over 27 years to his most ambitious work of all: The four-volume magnum opus, The Nature of Order: An essay on the art of building and the nature of the universe (Alexander 2002–2005). In this far-ranging book, Alexander presents an intriguing account of the fundamental phenomenon of order, the processes of creating order, and even a new cosmology—as he describes it, a deeper conception of how the physical universe is put together. The book argues that order in nature is essentially the same as that in what we build or make, and underlying order-creating processes of building or making of architecture and design are no less important than those of physics and biology. The book presents an argument for a new kind of beauty—structural beauty—that exists in fine structure of space and matter, and subsequently it argues for a new basis of doing architecture for creating more beautiful and more sustainable buildings, gardens, streets and cities.
The editors invited submissions on Alexander’s work and its potential applications and development, with a focus on The Nature of Order but also addressing other aspects of his contributions related to urban science including both understanding and making of better built environments. The purpose of this Special Issue is not only to debate Alexander’s legacy, but also to try to assess previously-unrecognized potential applications of this later work. The papers were then peer reviewed.
The issue has six published papers that can be found here.
Building Beauty Partnership with Greha in India: Habitat Design Course
We have been working with our colleagues Munishwar Nath Ashish Ganju, Narendra Dengle, and Greha in India, to establish the Building Beauty Star four-year undergraduate program in Architecture there. The program is based on the Building Beauty principles and the four themes of The Discovery of Architecture.
This video is an introduction to the program.
If you are interested in developing a course with Building Beauty based on your local culture, please contact us at hello@buildingbeauty.org to explore its potential with us.
Architecture in the Making: Intelligence-based Design
Nikos Salingaros and Kenneth Masden contributed this chapter to the book In Pursuit of a Living Architecture: Continuing Christopher Alexander’s Quest for a Humane and Sustainable Building Culture (Pontikis and Rofè, 2016).
“Humans depend on complex organized information in their surroundings to inform their existence. Architecture as a material practice can change the way we perceive, and thus conceive, the human-bult environment. for nearly a century architects have been prompted, if not compelled, to envision the built world through an industrial model that is both unnatural and inhuman. In an industrial paradigm, information is reduced to extend the economy of standardization. This purposefully minimizes the degree of structured information. In contrast, pre-industrial buildings typically carry within their designs the degree and type of information needed to effectively sponsor a greater sense of wellbeing by engaging human intelligence. Complex organized information is necessary in a human-based and naturally sustainable architecture. The modern education of students of architecture continues to suffer from a reductive way of thinking. Science provides insights on how to re-situate the pursuit of architecture as something made better by way of human intelligence.”
Nikos Salingaros and Kenneth Masden
Read the full chapter here.
Building Beauty - a new program teaching students to help heal the world
Building the pergola in the Sant’Anna garden.
The beauty of buildings and places is not a luxury, it is a necessity if buildings are to be cared for over generations and therefore sustainable in the long term. Building Beauty is a new one year post-graduate program teaching an integrated process of design and making. Its ultimate goal is learning to create wholeness, beauty and life in the world. This program, based on Christopher Alexander’s theoretical and practical work, explores the new convergence of sciences and the arts in the direct practice of making.
This new paper describes Building Beauty’s roots and intentions. It also invites the participation of those who are in sympathy with our goals and aims.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/q3vg3vlcqtqld74/BB%20paper%20for%20WREC-WREN_v2.pdf?dl=0
Duo Dickinson's Podcast on BEAUTY Home
“Beauty” can be a four letter word for fine arts sensibilities of any sort. The intellectualization of aesthetic innovation is particularly daunting when it comes to our essentials: preciously artisanal food, bizarre high fashion clothing, and the ambience and design of our homes. In the last few years, science has begun to understand that “beauty” is not a learned value of a civilization, but a hard-wired essential element in heredity. Some in the world of aesthetics see a direct connection to how we design with how humans perceive “beauty”: and when it comes to architectural design the elemental simplicity of what deeply moves all humans should not be ignored as nostalgia or pandering, but rather that baseline truth needs to be used in the creation of where we live or we fail our humanity.
Home has 3 thought leaders in the New World of Beauty, a world that lived before the Academy, and a human reality that exists independent of abstract construction or rationalization. That is is not always what designers can control, or reveal: it may be that “beauty” is a reality that is revealed to designers through the eyes, hearts and minds of those who use their designs.
Join HOME PAGE for an hour of finding Beauty where we have always lived: https://savedbydesign.wordpress.com/2019/02/17/beauty-home/
God and the Architect, by Duo Dickinson
This article first appeared in The Living Church, in February 2019.
The Legacy of Christopher Alexander: Form Language, Pattern Language, and Complexity by Nikos Salingaros
Nikos Salingaros' essay appears in Common Edge
and was adapted from a lecture given to the Building Beauty Master’s Program in April 2018.
Form Language consists of a set of definitions and vocabulary of building and design components that can be combined coherently. These comprise specific geometries, shape and size of pieces, particular materials, etc.
To most people, this is what characterizes architectural “style.” Evolved form languages always adapt to locality, culture, and use—in fact, they’re an essential part of cultural identity. Design geometry may be freely invented within those constraints. Yet, the remarkable thing is that most form languages also satisfy general geometrical constraints known as Alexander’s “15 Fundamental Properties...”
Nikos Salingaros: The Legacy of Christopher Alexander and a New Conception of the Universe
WEST DEAN COLLEGE GARDENS VISITOR'S CENTRE, West Sussex, United Kingdom
by Christopher Alexander (1994-6)
Here is Nikos Salingaros' lecture on the ideas of Christopher Alexander from the last chapters of The Luminous Ground: The Nature of Order Volume 4, given at the Building Beauty Master’s Program, on April 23, 2018. The Legacy of Christopher Alexander and a New Conception of the Universe
Nikos Salingaros: Design Patterns and Living Architecture
A promised new era of unprecedented design innovation has as its goal to generate a humane, healing environment for the user. This booklet aims to educate practicing architects, students, and the general public about design patterns, while discrediting image-based design. The pattern method establishes practical guidelines for creating life in the built environment. Design patterns are a remarkably prescient methodology that is only now finding its most profound expression. Patterns contain the seeds of a new yet timeless, adaptive approach to architecture. Design Patterns and Living Architecture by Nikos Salingaros is available online here.
Nikos Salingaros: The Patterns of Architecture
Pattern theory has not as yet transformed architectural practice—despite the acclaim for A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander’s book, which introduced and substantiated the theory. However, it has generated a great amount of far-ranging, supportive scholarship. In this essay Nikos Salingaros expands the scope of the pattern types under consideration, and explicates some of the mathematical, scientific and humanistic justification for the pattern approach. The author also argues for the manifest superiority of the pattern approach to design over modernist and contemporary theories of the last one hundred years.
To a great extent Dr. Salingaros’s conviction rests on the process and goals of the pattern language method which have as their basis the fundamental realities of the natural world: the mathematics of nature (many that have been studied since the beginning of human history); the process of organic development; and the ideal structural environment for human activity. For Salingaros, Alexander, et al., aesthetics in Architecture derive from these principles rather than from notions of style or artistic inspiration.
Download The Patterns of Architecture-T3xture
Originally published in Lynda Burke, Randy Sovich, and Craig Purcell, Editors: T3XTURE No. 3, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016, pages 7-24
Michelangelo’s Lesson: Specialization in Architecture is Not The Only Way
Duo Dickinson shares his reactions to a recent exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum in New York, Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman & Designer.
Tiles in Architecture
From a lecture for Building Beauty by Chris Andrews
Download the slides: Tiles in Architecture: A Taste of the Tremendous Potential of Color & Ornament in Buildings (10mb PDF file)
Pattern and Project Languages
From a lecture by Chris Andrews for Building Beauty
December 21, 2017
What are patterns? What is a pattern language? How are pattern languages helpful in building projects?
Download the slides: Patterns and Project Languages (10mb PDF file)
Playing With Bits of Light
From a lecture for Building Beauty by Chris Andrews
What do classical carpets have to do with architecture?
Download the slides: Playing With Bits of Light (Interlaces and Fractals) (21mb PDF file)
The Ethical Pattern Maker
From a lecture by Chris Andrews for Building Beauty
How can we better understand and make arts and design that learn the process of craft from traditional methods, while applying innovation in a relevant contemporary context?
Download the slides: The Ethical Pattern Maker: Cultural Production & Social Transformation (10mb PDF file)
The Dutchman’s Pipe: Fifteen Geometric Properties of Wholeness
Recently, Narendra Dengle, one of our staff members here at Building Beauty, noticed a flower in the yard next door to his home. He became fascinated by it because it so clearly evidences the 15 geometric properties of wholeness that Christopher Alexander describes in The Nature of Order. After a bit of investigating, Narendra found this is an Aristolochia, or Dutchman’s Pipe. He drew some sketches to study the structure of the flower.
When considered from a Euclidean point of view, the markings are chaotic or irregular. Yet, there is profound wholeness, a natural beauty and order to it. The extent to which a configuration has life, or unity within itself, is caused by the geometrical connections among its elements, and by its relation to its immediate surroundings. These properties generate wholeness.
The fifteen properties are found everywhere in nature. They can certainly be observed in the examples of the flower below.
Strong Center. A center is a distinct physical system that has special marked coherence. Centers can be strengthened by any combination of the other properties.
Thick Boundary. A thick boundary around, or partly around, the zone occupied by a center, helps to make that center more coherent.
Levels of Scale. Centers can be embellished with smaller centers typically one-half to one-third their diameter, created within the original center, or in the space adjacent to it.
Alternating Repetition. The repetition of centers form a local array. This may happen in one, two, or three dimensions.
Local Symmetries. One or more local symmetries – smaller, symmetrical centers within the whole – strengthen the center.
Positive Space. Empty spaces within the center can enhance the center. The “positiveness” of the empty space comes from a combination of good shape, local symmetries, boundedness, and above all, the appropriateness of the space for human purposes.
Roughness. In the course of unfolding, as the different properties push and shove to make various things happen, very often something does not quite fit neatly. Adaptation is more important than Cartesian regularity.
Gradient. Gradients point toward or away from a given center – gradients of size, of contrast, spacing, or orientation.
Contrast. The coherence of a center is enhanced by contrast of color, of material, gradient, or density, which enables it to stand out more strongly from the field.
Deep Interlock and Ambiguity.This is an interface between two adjacent centers, creating a zone, usually an ambiguous zone, that forms a third center between the original two.
Echoes. Predominant angles, curves, ratios, or proportions in the shapes that have been created, give the whole system of centers a family resemblance shared by many of the centers.
Good Shape. If some rough outline of a shape has been generated, examine the overall convex pieces of the shape, and try to strengthen or emphasize those pieces to make the overall shape more distinct, more recognizable.
Inner Calm. A clean-up tool, working along the lines of Occam’s razor, it simplifies the configuration.
The Void. At the core of any center, there is always some undisturbed and perfectly peaceful area.
Not Separateness. The purpose is to overcome any separation that is caused between the configuration and its environment, or between any individual center and its immediate environment.
Think about these for a while, then take a walk in a park, or a beautiful landscape, you will see the properties everywhere. When first thinking about working with them, it is tempting to see these qualities as elements, or ingredients to be assembled and combined in a work. But of course, this raises the crucial distinction between mechanism and organism. A flower is not assembled. It grows. If we are to achieve beauty on the level of a simple flower, assembly is an obstacle rather than an aid, and this runs counter to many deeply engrained preconceptions.
The most daunting, yet exciting prospect that these observations present, is that, in order to use these qualities to their full potential, we step beyond the mechanistic worldview that has been so pervasive for the past 500 years and seek to understand their significance in our potential to make wholeness.
How To Build an Earthquake-Proof Structure
How To Build An Earthquake-Proof Structure from Building Beauty on Vimeo.
A three-minute video explaining traditional, earthquake-proof structural design techniques utilized in the Forbidden City in China.