Episode 11 : The Nature of Order : Part 1

Introduction

Hello everyone and welcome back to The Infinite Harmony Podcast. I’m your host Jackie Dragon and today we are embarking on a journey woven of many intricate overlapping ideas that we’ve talked about in this podcast. This might be my boldest attempt yet at sharing someone’s body of work in relationship to the Harmonic Road we are walking together. 

Over the next few podcasts we will be taking a look at Christopher Alexander’s Magnum Opus, the Nature of Order, a volume of work covered in four books that clocks in at just over 2100 pages. Thankfully for me, and sadly for you, many of the pages depict photographs of various examples of the ideas and concepts, through existing architecture, that Alexander is conveying to his readers. I found the dive into his work a deeply affirming journey into the Animistic nature of reality and was blown away at some of his observations, which I’m excited to share.

What drew me to Alexander’s work was one of his earlier works, A Pattern Language. I had heard of this book through various permaculture circles, and by those who spoke of it, I was promised deep insight into the universal patterns of building and planning just about everything, from a bedroom to an entire village. I eventually found a copy and to be honest, I had a pretty hard time understanding what the guy was talking about.. But there was an underlying thread, a heart string that vibrated within me that could feel that the message was there, but the timing for me wasn’t right. Just the title of the book, A Pattern Language, felt like a key to a door I had yet to find. Perhaps I was simply un-initiated to his school of thinking and would have to wait for right time to enter the door. I can’t say I remember how I discovered the existence of The Nature of Order, but I do know that I      order it on Amazon. At the time I could only find and order the books through the publisher following a series of strange links and emails. It felt like an initiatory process to a secret school, which was kinda cool honestly. When they arrived it would be another 3 years before I was able to move beyond book one, because, well frankly, it was still over my head. For those of you that know me personally, I’m no polymath and sometimes it takes me awhile to catch on.

We’ll, I’ve caught on. 

Anyway. 

All this to say that this has been a long time coming and I’m happy to share the work with those of you listening. So here we go…

It is not a leap to say that architecture has lost something vital. Architecture of the medieval era, the renaissance, even the early architecture of some of the older cities of America, such as New York City or Boston, they have a breath of life within them that is distinct, that elicits a feeling. Even in Chicago where I grew up, there is a distinct difference in the buildings erected in the early 1900s and the ones built in the last 20 years. Architecture today has a cookie cutter quality to it that is almost impossible to circumvent unless you are in the 1% and willing to spend substantially on rare and beautiful materials and master craftsmen. 

For quite some time, I have harbored the belief that the rise of the manufactured home signaled the slow death of the neighborhood. In this modern age, we are surrounded by structures built from cheap, easily mass-produced materials—homes that feel as hollow and disposable as the methods used to create them. The marriage of art and function, once central to the craft of building, has been ruthlessly sacrificed at the altar of speed and efficiency.

Consider what went into the enduring marvels of human ingenuity like Notre Dame Cathedral, whose soaring spires and intricate stonework took nearly two centuries to bring into being. The Hagia Sophia, a monument to both spiritual devotion and architectural brilliance, also unfolded across two hundred years of labor and vision. The Basílica de La Sagrada Família, an ever-evolving symphony of stone and sky, has been under construction since the late 1800s and stands unfinished to this day—In each of these buildings, every chisel mark is a testament to patience and reverence for craft of building. Even the Taj Mahal required 22 years to rise, its gleaming domes and delicate inlays speaking of a love so profound it defies time itself. These structures are more than buildings; they are the embodied dreams of entire civilizations and national icons that endure because they were made with the weight of meaning pressed into every stone. Built to last a thousand years.

In stark contrast, most modern houses seem to exist merely to fulfill a function—erected in the briefest window of time and with the leanest of investments. Across the United States, generic apartment complexes and condominiums spring up like weeds, their sterile uniformity draining character from city blocks as though some architectural vampire were at work. These buildings do not invite admiration or contemplation; they stand merely as placeholders, shells of convenience rather than vessels of beauty or belonging.

There’s an old saying among builders that you can build something with two out of three of these characteristics. Cheap, Fast, or well done. It seems that most things are done cheap and fast. This topic is especially pertinent to me because as we speak. I’m building a house. It’s a modest building, at 750 square feet, and aside from the occasionaly help of a few very good friends, I’m building it alone. Fast is a priority for me, as I do not have the luxury of taking 20 years to build a masterpeice, and even taking a reasonable amount of time, the vision of beauty I desire, the materials I yearn to build with are well beyond my means, so I settle often when it comes to the form. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve seen the price of oak these days, or most of the hardwoods, or stone, marble, copper. They are now mostly for the wealthy.

For years one of my favorite past-times for tuning myself to the metaphysical background of my existence was to walk the streets of Chicago with my best friend and find unique and beautiful swaths of architecture throughout the city. The old houses that were built the way I yearn to build. Certain houses, sometimes whole streets, had a feeling to them, an ineffable quality of art and aliveness that made me love the city. Over the years these old building were torn down to make way for more efficient, square foot optimized structures. Watching these new buildings go up in Chicago and change the lived quality of my neighborhood felt akin to the clear-cutting of the Amazon, but in my own backyard.

Sadly, what we have lost is not just aesthetic splendor but a sense of rootedness, of community woven into the stone and wood. A home was once a statement of permanence, of care, and of deep connection to the land and its people. It had the character of those who lived in it. Now, it feels as though we are all merely passing through, transient occupants in structures designed to endure no longer than the trends that shaped them. In our rush to build quickly and cheaply, we have forsaken the slow, deliberate art of creating spaces that nourish the soul and stand as legacies for those yet to come. And in our current paradigm of re-locating, upsizing, downsizing, or the spawn of the dark one himself, flipping houses, it’s a micracle we can ever experience home. I don’t know about you, but most of my friends, and myself included, have had their childhood homes sold so our parents could re-locate to Florida or Arizona or get a condo because, well, why pay the property taxes on three empty rooms… 

There’s much to say about the places we live and the places we call home, how and why they are built, and how they do or don’t give meaning to our lives…

It wasn’t until I opened book one of the Nature of Order : The Phenomenon of Life, that I had language to put to the feelings I’ve been expressing thus far. Alexander sets out almost immediately to empirically prove through observation that the built world around us is in fact, alive.

Now, attempting to explain “The Nature of Order” is pretty ambitious. It is a task humans have set out to accomplish since the dawn of abstract thinking. You could say that humans are order making machines. I’m not talking about my own tendencies to build stick figures out of toothpicks. I’m talking about the deep desire we have as a species to understand how everything works both organize the world both physically and abstractly. If one were to take the time to tune in, we can feel the natural order of things. There is a rhythm to life, to the seasons, the spawning of the salmon, the path of the river, the balance of an ecosystem, the inevitability of a forest fire or the hurricane. The natural order seems neither predictable nor effable, and yet we can feel its existence. A more effable order can be found in physics, as we discovered the rather abstract yet clearly experienced law of thermodynamics, of gravity, of atomic structures. Man made order, on the other hand, comes across more often like an attempt to control, to predict, which in some sense defies the natural order of things. Nevertheless, Alexander attempts to qualify a sense of order that would be useful to architects based on what he feels represents order in the universe. He realizes quickly that the mechanical order of the universe provided by the discipline of physics is not what he is looking for. Humans have done quite well with the mechanical nature of order and have engineer wondrous marvels such as the Eiffel Tower and Cell Phone, but what, he asks, is the order that pervades the leaf of a tree, or the mountain, or the cherry blossoms in the fall. The very order that lends to an unparalleled beauty and belonging, the type of order that suggests that all that exists in this universe… is teeming with aliveness. There is nothing mechanical he says, about a hand made tea bowl that houses tea perfectly, or a Beethoven symphony… instead there is an aliveness to it… a living quality that permeates its existence. How, he asks, do we build architecture that is alive? And why have we strayed so far in the last fifty years?

When I stumbled across Division street and looked upon Cabrini Green in Chicago for the first time, which thankfully no longer exists, I was blown away. Everything about the infamous public housing project felt wrong. It looked like a prison. It stood out from everything else around it and almost pushed the life out of anything that got near it. Even the few trees on the lots seemed void of life and desolate. And when I say it looked like a prison, I mean it. Walkways to apartments were enclosed in chainlink fences, lawns had been paved over. The burnt out apartments were never fixed, only abandoned, until half the building was probably squatters, and somehow people were still trying to live there. The place was a mere shadow of a tenement at the edge of it’s own abyss . And yet at its peak it was home to over 15,000 people and lasted over 40 years. The mechanistic high rises built to maximize capacity and minimize, well just about everything else, was a horrific failure and eventually demolished. Critics will site cheap building methods, tight budgets and sadly a lack of emapthy as the cause of its failure. If you ever wondered what happens when humans place efficiency and cost over the right of a worthy human life, this is it.

At some point this mechanization of all things made for the sake of efficiency, from housing to daily objects, began the formation of a built world which increasingly has less life. You hear it all the time now, that everything is build with planned obsolescence, nothing is built to last. An old home is called a “craftsman” and has a uniqueness to it… a new home looks like every other home built alongside of it. This takes us back to Carse’s difference between the garden and the machine from our earlier podcasts. If you remember, the machine is driven by external forces, whereas the garden is driven by an internal force. For Alexander this internal force, what he calls aliveness, is what he will conjure into being through his architecture. 

But first he asks how did we become so mechanized in our thinking? How did we get to strip malls and high rise condos and manufactured homes?

Alexander offers one suggestion that I’ve heard by many about this overly reductionist and lifeless world we are building.

Descartes. 

The man many believe spun the golden thread of separation from man and nature, The man who unknowingly bled animism from the world. The father of modern science. A man of God. He was the beginning of breaking things down into individual components, which led to a disregard of the whole and the importance of coherence. 

For Alexander, this realization led to two things related to his work. The first was the invalidation of the inner experience as something that can be deemed empirical. Or in other words, the validity of our own personal experiences and feelings, the second being the loss of value intrinsic to the the natual world. How does one place value on a 2000 year old redwood tree and its importance in the eco-system? If one looks solely from a mechanistic point of view, the value is calculated by how many cubic feet of lumber its worth, and frankly, that’s just Fucked.

To Alexander, the quality of a scientific question often falls flat in it’s reductive logic and is void of essence. To Alexander, a better question to ask is one that considers all the living factors of a choice; specifically, considering who it will affect, the qualities of beauty it will impart, the flow and direction of energy, and most importantly, what answer has more or less life. These sound like deeply subjective questions, but Alexander would go on to argue that no, they are not entirely subjective. Humans, especially ones from similar cultures and upbringings, all intuitively know the answers to those questions and will often agree. But regardless, questions about how not only our living and communal spaced are structured, but the structure  of society itself, are meant to be felt together, specifically by those who will live in the space.

After all… don’t you live at home?  

Do you have a living room?

Do you live in a city.

If that’s the case, aren’t these places that are lived in alive in there own right. Or at least built to house life?

Shedding mechanistic thought means that energy efficiency, cost of materials, spanning distances… all of these are just parts of a process of design that should never be the primary concern. To Alexander beauty, belonging, human interaction and relationship to everything non-human… these are the paramount qualities, the first principles. To Alexander, the biggest question is, is the space alive? 

He sets out to do for Architecture to do what Forrest Landry sets out to do for Ethics in the book An Imminent Metaphysics, to bring a new understanding to science.  One that takes in account the subjective qualities of experience and attempts to order them into a universal pattern that we can all agree upon. I’m hearing the threads of this idea spoken elsewhere, that we have to acknowledge that both physicalism and idealism are integral parts of existence. Another way of saying it is that objective reality and subjective experience are both essential to understanding the universe, and both quantifiable. Lex Friedman recently interviewed Adam Frank, an American Physicist, Astronomer and writer. In the interview, Friedman asks what is the most important question we can ask ourselves as humans, and Frank responded just as Alexander did. The most important question is What is Life?

Frank says, and I’m paraphrasing here, he says: Really this question of what is life is the most important philosophical question beyond science? It’s the verb, to be, and asks what is being? This is what Stephen Hawking said when he talked about, “What puts the fire in the equations?” The fire is this presence of life and this is where it touches the sacred, the spiritual. So this question of life, what makes life as a physical system so different is, to me, because this is where being appears. Being doesn’t appear out there. The only place being ever appears to any of us is the experience of self. I can do this kind of projection of myself into this third person, and see outside of myself, but nobody ever truly has the God’s eye view. That’s a story we tell.”

Now the yogis would disagree with that, and they have a point, but in my opinon, they’re also missing the point. But that’s a Golden Thread for another time.      

What Frank is saying here is that our point of view is all we have. So in a sense, science can’t happen without the subjective, and the subjective is crucial to understanding the nature of the universe…

“It’s kind of like pizza. The dough baked in the oven is the universal pattern, but beyond that everything is subjective. Red sauce? White sauce? Pepperoni? Mushrooms? Pesto? We can all agree that throwing stuff on a bunch of dough qualifies as a pizza, but no one in their right mind would attempt to standardize anything else about it. A pizza and what constitutes a good pizza is probably one of the most subjective experiences we can have. But everyone agrees that a good pizza is really good.” 

But back to Architecture. Alexander’s view of order is, “even handed with regard to ornament and function. Order is profoundly functional and profoundly ornamental. We learn to see that while they seem different, they are really only aspects of a single kind of order.”

Dough and toppings man. They’re both profoundly necessary.

Order can be a deeply personal thing, but again, we can all agree that a building is only worth building if it doesn’t fall on us, but aside from that, it can be whatever you want it to be. Ultimately Alexander’s goal as an architect is to design buildings that are alive, and because of that aliveness, the humans inhabiting them also feel alive, their well being flourishes… they feel like they belong. 

We’ll talk more about subject object later in the episode…

 So build something that is alive. Well, what does that even mean? What is it to be alive? An even more existential question than “what is the nature of order”. And yet, it is here that Alexander begins to breathe life into our things, and embues spirit of the animist into architecture to help us feel what I believe we intrinsically all know, that the entities we call objects, that we call things, are in fact alive.

Now in order to arrive at the place of truly understanding the nature of aliveness, we need what Alexander calls a broader and more adequate definition of life, something that involves degrees of aliveness. And how we measure those degrees of aliveness is by a feeling, an awareness. And this is not a static thing. For anyone who’s owned a car for a long time, or a motorcycle, or a leather jacket, the sense of aliveness changes over time. Our relationships to things create a sense of aliveness. Some things are intensely alive. An actual tiger for instance, if seen and felt in the wild, would emit a profound sense of aliveness in just about anyone, and yet a stuffed animal version of that same tiger might feel deeply alive to a young boy who considers the stuffed tiger his best friend.

But consider a piece of Home Depot 2x4 and a well oiled driftwood table you might see, or rough sawn cedar. Okay… I realize I’m building a house right now and maybe three people out ther got that reference, but think of an old victorian house filled with antique furniture versus ikea, or think of the fallen logs you might climb in the forest versus a concrete playground, or as Alexander might actually lay out in one of his example, as yourself which is more alive, that plastic garbage can everyone has in there kitchen nowadays? Or one of thos old metal trashcans, you know, like the one Oscar the Grouch lives in.

Can you feel the quality of aliveness? Can you feel the essence of the thing? Think of the aliveness that nature exudes… Is the wind alive? The sea? The waves crashing upon the shore? All things come from nature, even plastic, and yet there are degrees of aliveness.

Take yourself back to childhood. Think of one of the most alive places you can remember.

A pond.

A Grove of Trees.

An old abandoned house in your neighborhood

Your grandfather’s study.

Your own backyard perhaps. 

A riverbank.

The local candy store…

Now think of a Wall Mart Parking lot. 

Or a suburban strip mall. 

Or mono-cropped cornfield.

Can you get a sense of it? 

The aliveness of things? 

That’s what we’re seeking. The sense of it. The depth of aliveness in any given moment. This is the awareness we need to discover how to step up to what Alexander calls the task of making ordinary life in things. Like mother Gaia herself, we yearn to experience the aliveness of our environment, and in this case, our built world. So let’s follow Christopher Alexander’s golden thread down a wild rabbit hole of newfound awareness and discover the Nature of Order. Today, on the Infinite Harmony Podcast.

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In his first book, Christopher Alexander starts to outline the qualities of what makes something feel alive, and it reminds me of the Japanese term “Wabi Sabi,” which roughly translates to a beauty found in imperfections and impermanence. I’ve always found that creations that endure are ones that are built to age well. 

I mean, what is it about a 1970 Ford truck that ages so well? What is it about a Ferrari Testerrrosa in 2024 that looks so obnoxious? Do you ever see anyone driving an old rusted out Ferrari? No. They are not build to age. Their life is fleeting. Aliveness is a little rough around the edges, has a sense of being lived in. Again, like a well worn pair of jeans, aliveness fits well. It creates a sense of familiarity. It is the well worn faces of our grandparents, it is their rocking chair on the front porch, the tattered edged of your favorite frayed blanket, a worn leather vest, the undying relationship with your dog. Your first guitar. Any appliance built before 1960… Alexander asks us to tune into the truth of these feelings of aliveness, the similarity of ease and welcome these feelings bring. Then is he says, let us build the world in this way, so that everywhere we walk, drive, everywhere we lie our heads, fills us with the same sense of beauty and aliveness we feel at our best.

It is here in book one that Alexander begins his empiracle study of aliveness. He places two different images, side by side, of similar scenes but different in their degree of life. Everything from slums and riverbanks to winding roads. He compares one tattered barn to the next. One image to another. He asks quite frankly, “Which picture feels more alive.”

According to his own experiments, we can mostly agree on what feels more alive. About 80 percent of people could agree on the image. According to Alexander, we have a fundamental power to make these distinctions, and ultimately this measurement of life quality has a scientific method. Thus, Alexander has a hypothesis that he sets out to prove. He says, “What we call “life” is a general condition which exists, to some degree or other, in very part of space: brick, stone, grass, river, painting, building, daffodil, human being, forest, city. And further : The key to this idea is that every part of space - every connected region of space, small or large - has some degree of life, and that this degree of lie is well defined, objectively existing and measurable.”

From here,  Book one : The Phenomeon of life starts to take on a technical tone. The joy of the journey is that this technical point of view really blurs the lines between reductive science and the animist. It is a weaving of golden threads. It reminds me of Kapra and the Tao of Physics, the merging of quantum physics with eastern philosophy. These books are asking us to consider the experiential phenomenons of aliveness and order as something intrinsic to the entire universe.

Alexander introduces the concept of wholeness and the theory of centers. He begins by asking us what is wholeness, and how is it that we define such a thing. In his observation, it is not easy, and our   everything into parts is what can lead to a separation of aliveness if we are not careful. This goes back to Descartes and reductive science. He uses an example of a pond. Its easy to look at a pond and think, “That’s a pond, but what constitutes the whole of pond? Is the saturated mud below the pond part of the whole? Is the reeds growing in the pond part of the whole? The insects flying above it? The tree branch half in the pond and half on the ground? What constitutes the pond? 

The deeper question an animist would ask is where does the pond end and the not-pond begin? The physicist would point out, the boundary we perceive as humans is only a perception. Atomically there is no boundary. We are all pond.

There is no pond… and yet we perceive boundaries, we categorize. We break everything down into parts. So how do we capture wholeness and aliveness on our built world?

To Alexander, it’s through the theory of centers, which is one of the fundamental ideas of his books.

Alexander   looks at wholeness through a system of centers, and it is the centers and their arrangement that give us a sense of the whole. Some centers themselves are a whole and have centers within, depending on where we place our attention.  That which is easy to see, easy to name has strength. Strong centers, he says, control the real behavior of the thing, the life which develops there, the real human events which happen, and the feelings people have about living there. And together, with the people occupying these spaces, the centers make up the whole. When it comes to Architecture, culture of the people becomes a living center of the whole. The degrees of life we experience comes from the wholeness.  Our desire to see this wholeness for what it truly is one of the greatest of golden threads, reaching back into the nature of consciousness and reality. 

So what does he mean by this? This theory of centers.

Well. Take something as simple as a living room.

Imagine a living room built in a way that the strongest center is a coffee table, made of exquisite oak, that sits in the center of the room, surrounded by comfortable chairs and couches, with nothing on but coasters for coffee or tea.

Everyone sits in the living room and talks and drinks coffee and shares cookies. It’s a great living room, with a strong center that brings it to life. Your neighbor comes by once a week for tea and it’s pleasant.

Now, imagine the owner of the living room buys an eighty inch flat screen TV and mounts it on a wall and turns all the chairs toward it, puts some tv guides and controllers on the table…

Is the coffee table still a strong center? Has the TV become a center? What has it done to the whole of the living room? The whole of a house? The whole of the family.

Now every time your neighbor stops by you’re watching a show. Sometimes maybe you don’t even answer the door…

So constructing a home, or a shed, or a public park-let or courtyard begins with creating strong centers. These centers bring the whole to life. Alexander says, “The conjuring trick is something akin to the trick of making Frankenstein. We take dead matter, rooted only in space endowed with the rules governing the interaction of centers, and it can then raise itself to life.”

 His point is that the degree of life we experience very much comes from interaction and cooperation of the centers… that dynamic interactions and mutual benefit of the centers are the drivers of life. 

Cooperation

Interaction

Dynamic interplay.

Coherence

Leads to a greater degree of of experienced aliveness?

Gee, I wonder where we’ve heard that before…

One of his most interesting observations is that centers affect each other. They shape each other and bring each other to life… or in some instances take away from it. I think this has to do with the natural symmetry of life, perhaps the sacred geometrical nature of the our universe, though Alexander doesn’t quite say it like that. 

You know, at one point in my life I thought I might be an illustrator. I made a handful of attempts and drawing life-like portraits of friend or lovers, and I can attest to this idea of the centers shaping each other. It was amazing how an eye being just a millimeter farther apart than the subjects, or the negative space of the brow being not quite the right shape, would make the portrait appear to be an entirely different person. The subtlest corrections of shape and space, and suddenly the subject would appear. The strength and presence of these centers can bring a space to life where life seemed lost.

(Music Break)

Over the course of the ten years Alexander developed fifteen ways in which centers help each other come to life, which became the fifteen fundamental properties. Now this is where the processes become fairly technical and if I were to break down each of these properties I would probably lose 90 percent of you. They are fascinating, but granular in their approach and really only of use to those of you who plan to study this work deeply. But they are worth at least mentioning. So here we go. The Fifteen Fundamental Properties are: Levels of Scale, Strong Centers, Boundaries, Alternating Repetition, Positive Space, Good Shape, Local Symmetrys, Deep interlock and Ambiguity, Contrast, Gradients, Roughness, Echoes, The Voice, Simplicity and Inner Calm, and Not Separateness.

Not Separateness…

The last one is worth expounding upon, and he even says himself that it is the most important property of all. Get this, he says that this property of Not Separateness “states that any center which has deep life is connected, in feeling, to what surrounds it, and is not cut off, isolated, or separated. In a center which is deeply coherent there is a lack of separation — instead a profound connection — between that center and the other centers which surround it, so that the various centers melt into one another and become inseparable. It is that quality which comes about from each center, to the degree it is connected to the whole world.”

Life : Each center expanding out in profound connection with a whole, which in turn becomes a center in profound connection with a greater whole.

As above so below.

Follow the golden thread here to the battle of individualism versus the collective here in the US, and we discover what happens when one center tries to dominate other centers?

Well, in the human body they call that cancer. A group of cells stops doing their job and start spreading uncontrollably attempting to dominate the body’s resources.

I thought we were just talking about Architecture here…

Sorry…

Despite this magnum opus on Architecture, Alexander himself is deeply illustrating the essence of approaching all abstract disciplines from a unified theory of wholeness on the nature of life itself. After a hundred pages of examples of the 15 properties in Architecture and man made spaces, he

spends a modest 50 more pages explaining these exact properties found in nature.

Levels of scale found in the structure of a cell

The strong center of a milk drop splashing

Levels of scale in the cracks of mud

Centers formed by the spirals of an orchid

 A Boundary around the sun

Alternating Structure of a Fern Leave

The positive space of soap bubbles

Symmetries of crystal growth and the beryllium a   m 

The interlocking patterns of a giraffe’s coat

The contrast of a purple emerald butterfly

Gradients in the foothills of the Himalayas

The roughness of a weatherbeaten elder

The eye of the hurricane (the void)

The Not-Separateness at the edge of a pond.

Are we talking about distilling down the fundamental higher-order properties of the formation of the universe? It’s like the Golden Section, you know, the Fibonacci Sequence, only more. How do we build a living structure? Well, Observe the natural world, which no one can argue is not “living,” and replicate its process.

Genius? Or just like, yeah, well, duh.

These 15 properties came from 10 years of observation, a few published books where he was working it all out. Centers were entities in Alexander’s vocabulary for years. And all of this came out of a feeling that the built world was just not nearly as alive as the natural world, and who could argue that?   Alexander that wasn’t always the case, but certainly in the Post Modern Neo-Liberal Capitalist paradigm, we’re movingefficiency toward death.

Alexander is asking us to consider the whole, that is, the entire ecosystem we know as Earth, that our church calls Gaia, as a living system. He points out that to build things that are outside of the laws this living system, is to begin to stray from natural law. 

To build ugly lifeless shit for the sake of money and efficiency is to stray from natural law. Huh, go figure…

Alexander’s concept of wholeness is founded upon the idea that the centers which make up the whole have varying degrees of life. It’s also one way of saying that not all nature has the same degrees of life as observed by the observer. It’s also one way of saying that various aspects of nature have different values. That there is something called value in the universe and that value is relative. 

Humans are the observers of that relativity. Objective science, a system that attempts to level the playing field of value through objectivity and reduction into equal parts, often deems placing value on components or outcomes as becoming partial. But as we’re about to see, Alexander is begging us to become partial in a new way… to become a part of the whole.  (You see that ding he did? Wit da words?) Because it is human beings and human processes that are degenerating the wholeness of the world, because we have attempted to separate ourselves from it.

And here, like many modern thinkers and artists who see that the fundamental bifurcation of the subject and object, of humans and nature as a moment in history where things started going wrong, Alexander asks us once again to unify the arts and sciences, the classical and romantic, or as Phaedrus would say. The observer and the observed. The state of Samadhi or enlightenment is where our meditation and the object of our meditation become one. Alexander writes, “This revelation can lead to a mental world where art, form, order and life unite our feeling with our objective sense of reality, in a synthesis which opens the door to a form of living in which we may be truly human. Above all, this is the threshold of a new kind of objectivity.”

We’re talking about a merging of the abstract and the real. A study of phenomenology through the subject and accounting for, the subject. We talked about this earlier in the episode… let’s dive a little deeper. 

Everyone in high-school at this point has probably heard the most basic explanation of quantum physics, which is that the observer affects the experiment. So why philosophy and science often strive to remove the observer is a mystery to me and is a golden thread that can lead us to a deep and abstract conversation about modern philosophy. But for now, let’s just say that the nature of order, the science of constructing an environment that is alive, requires a subject to weigh in on the results of the experiment, or in this case the qualities of aliveness in all things…

So what does it mean for something to be personal? To Alexander, it’s not our idiosychronicities. We’re not talking vanilla or chocolate, democrat or republican, we’re talking about the feeling nature of our person. How does something make us feel?profound We’re right back in Buhner’s Metaphysical background of the world, the world of the Animist. The personal touches something deep within us… and within others. What makes something personal also becomes a center of power in the wholeness of things. Right away we get a sense that the new kind of objectivity Alexander is referring to, that which touches us personally, is often, but not always, a universal quality. But ultimately, what is personal is deeply connected to human feeling … its connected to wholeness. This wholeness, when experienced, leads to a profound sense of happiness, because our feelings about the world, and the world itself, are all part of wholeness, upending the mechanistic Cartesian view and once again installing the power of the Animist.

We are inextricably a part of the world, including our inner experience. When I witness a flock of birds dancing in formation in the sky, when I come face to face with the majesty of a whale breaching the fjord, it feels like a deeply personal experience, as if nature was speaking to me though her movements, expressing her love for me by demonstrating her majesty, in the same way that Mozart or Matisse poured the personal into their work so that I might feel them. This is life. The feeling of life … IS life.

What Alexander refers to as these centers of power in the whole, are the places that unite objective life and these personal feelings.

These centers of power become portals.

Portals where the space they occupy begins to draw in the personal.

Portals of Synergy

Portals of Emergence

Portals of Aliveness

Weaving us through time and space

Connecting us to all beyond and within

Connecting us to creation, to art

Again, this quality is what Alexander is asking us to imbue in that which we build. The built human world, which takes up far more space, mass and energy than the actual humans. You could say that the built world of humans is far vaster, far bigger, and full more power centers than the humans. That is our power. Matisse did not give the world one drawing. Mozart composed and published over 600 works. A human house in America is roughly a thousand times more mass than a single human that lives in it. Our built world and its aliveness, its wholeness, is part of nature, a reflection of our own aliveness and wholeness. 

It is a mirror of the self. aa

****

So how do we imbue life into the whole of our built world? What exactly is this aliveness in these centers that we speak of? How do we start to create this personal yet objective method of making these choices when we build? Ultimately we are making the judgement calls here.

Well, step one is to enjoy it, deeply, from the heart. 

Obvious, but then again, not obvious. 

I have, at least once in my life, lived in an apartment I didn’t care for. At all. I didn’t like the common areas, the apartment itself, the neighborhood, any of it. Why did I live there you ask? It was all I could afford. I could say the same about clothes I’ve bought or things. Sometimes their functionality and its necessity in my life dictated I buy it, but I didn’t necessarily like the thing. Say you have this picture of a jacket in your head for a costume you’re creating, say it was just purely imagined by the genius you are, or you saw it in Boba Fett and was like, I have to find that. Perhaps you went on amazon or etsy or even some larping websites and saw a few likenesses but they just didn’t touch the essense of what you have in your mind. Or say you’re looking at a car, and its nice, its comfy, it has all the new gizmos, but aesthetically if they would have just pushed the fenders out a little more, or increase the stance a few more inches, or made that curve a little softer…

I have these feelings all the time, in the same way I have a particular feeling when something in the made world is personally perfect. When something touches my heart so deep that there is not an atom I would change in its design. The only painting I ever bought had that quality. I had no objection to a single thing about it. It was as if my mind had reached out and took the artists hands as my own. I’ve had just a few pieces of clothing that fit that description, that fit like they were tailored right on by body, that in every way they represented an expression my being, that they looked like the aliveness that I felt within me. They were me. You ever have that? Think of all the things in the world. How many of them were so precious to you, that in a sense, they were you. 

In contract, think of how many lifeless things you’ve owned, things built purely for function without any lasting durability or aesthetic. Remember Byung Chul Han’s essay Non-Things? He also felt the aliveness of the things that come into our lives. 

Things can be like people in many ways. The more we know someone, the more they become a part of us.

In my own opinion, spending time with some thing, getting to know the parts of it we don’t fully understand, can lead to the same place. We can come to love all of something deeply, allow its personal aspects to become our own. Especially when something is made from the heart. There is a difference between an initial draw or desire and a deep and lasting satisfaction for something.

Alexander makes a distinction from just “liking” something and feeling its aliveness. In fact in some of his pictorial tests we mentioned earlier, questions like “what photo represents the essence of the self, or is more alive” sometimes was not the photo they “liked” Sometimes we like the modern cut angles more than the softer worn edges, but it seems in Alexanders studies when asked, the sense of “aliveness” has a distinct quality that is not always running parallel to what we like.

Now, in these books he gives hundreds of pictorial examples of one “alive” thing over another. I don’t agree with every one, but it’s remarkable how many I do agree with. At least 80%. And its not to say that there isn’t space for avant-garde or experimental. Remember, its all in relation to the whole. And according to Alexander, that’s the empiracle figure of his experiment. 80% of people he interviews, all with different tastes in architecture or design, can all agree on which of two side by side photos are more “alive.”

Try it with a group of friends. Take two similar but unique objects, two different glasses, or cups, or two different shoes even, and ask five different people which one feels more alive. 

Now let the Golden Threads draw us deeper. What if our recognition of beauty, of aliveness, of self, the feeling of belonging is a universal quality that we can all see together? What if this process of building a living world is the very medicine to our differences. That beyond culture, beyond our idiocynracies, our politics, our opinions is a true version of ourselves that, well, looks a lot like the true versions of everyone else, which in turn shares a deep and vastly alive quality with Gaia herself? That truth is found within. The mirror of the self is the observational method in which we measure what we call life. 

Let’s pause and explore that quantum thread we mentioned earlier.

Quantum physics asks us to confront a reality that is fundamentally different from what our senses tell us. It is the study of the minuscule—the subatomic realm where particles do not behave like solid objects but instead seem to exist as waves of probability, on the edge of existence, dancing in harmony to somehow birth reality. It is here, at the foundation of reality, that we encounter an idea that shakes the very roots of how we understand the world: the observer changes the experiment.

This principle arises most famously in the double-slit experiment that began quantum mechanics. When particles such as electrons are fired at a screen through two slits, they produce an interference pattern, as if they were waves passing through both slits simultaneously and interacting with themselves. However, when scientists place a detector at the slits to observe which slit the particle passes through, the interference pattern disappears. The particles behave as though they are solid, definite objects moving through one slit or the other. Observation itself seems to collapse the wave-like behavior of the electrons into a fixed, particle-like state.

This phenomenon, often referred to as "wave function collapse," forces us to reckon with the role of the observer in reality. How can the mere act of observing—of measuring—change the outcome of an experiment? Niels Bohr, a founding figure of quantum mechanics, suggested that the act of observation is not a passive activity; but a participatory one. Observation is not separate from reality; it is a part of reality. This flies in the face of the classical, Cartesian notion of an objective, external universe existing independently of the observer. The quantum realm hints that subjectivity—the act of observing, perceiving, participating—is woven into the very fabric of the cosmos.

Now, I’m not a physicist, but there are striking parallels between this quantum revelation and the mysticism of Eastern traditions such as Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, which have long suggested that reality is not a static, objective construct but a dynamic interplay of relationships, as indefinable and ever-changing, a flow that cannot be grasped by rigid categories. Quantum mechanics, in its dissolution of objective certainty, points to a similiar truth. The world is not a machine; it is a dance of energy and relationships, and we are part of that dance. To observe the world is not to stand apart from it but to participate in its unfolding…

Robert Pirsig’s explores this very idea in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He presents the idea of “Quality” as a kind of ineffable essence that bridges the subjective and the objective. He describes it as the "knife-edge" where perception and reality meet—a phenomenon that is simultaneously within us and out there in the world. Quality is what guides our judgments, our sense of what is good, beautiful, or true. It is the thread that ties together the rational, mechanical understanding of the world with the ineffable, artistic intuition of it.

His concept of Quality, much like the role of the observer in quantum physics, suggests that reality is not a static objective stage upon which we humans are just spectators. Instead, reality is something we co-create. In Pirsig’s view, Quality is the basis of all experience—it is what makes an experience meaningful. And in quantum mechanics, the observer is not merely a passive recorder but an active participant in the very shaping of reality. Both perspectives point to a profound philosophical truth: subjectivity is not a defect in our perception of the world; it is a feature of reality itself.

Phenomenology, the philosophical study of experience as it is lived, also suggests this inseparability of the subjective and the objective. Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponti, in their various ways, argue that we cannot separate the "phenomenon" or what we perceive, from the constructed world.  The world we encounter is always already shaped by the structures of our perception, our intentions, and our consciousness. Yet, this does not mean that the world is purely subjective.

If we take the double-slit experiment as a metaphor, it suggests that reality is fundamentally relational. The electron exists as a wave of possibilities until it interacts with the observer, at which point one possibility crystallizes into actuality. Similarly, Quality, emerges in the interaction between the observer and the observed. It is not a property of the subject or the object but the dynamic relationship between the two.

This relational view of reality challenges the traditional scientific paradigm, which seeks to strip away subjectivity to uncover an objective truth. Then here comes quantum mechanics suggesting that this "truth" cannot be separated from the process of observation. In other words, science itself is a deeply subjective enterprise. The theories we construct, the experiments we design, the interpretations we make—all are shaped by human perception, creativity, and values. Far from undermining the scientific process, this acknowledgment of subjectivity enriches it. It reminds us that science is not merely a mechanical accumulation of facts but a human endeavor driven by curiosity, wonder, and the quest for meaning.

But this doesn’t mean abandoning objectivity… only rethinking it. Objective truths—laws of nature, mathematical equations—are real and powerful, but they are always encountered through subjective experience. Our understanding of them is mediated by language, culture, and perception. The observer, then, is not merely an intruder into the natural world but an integral part of it. 

And both the observer and the observed, ultimately, lead us back to the same mystery: that reality is not something we can stand apart from and analyze in isolation. We are in it, of it, shaped by it, shaping it.

So whether we are conducting a quantum experiment, repairing a motorcycle, or contemplating the afterlife, we are participating in the unfolding of the cosmos. In this participation, we discover not only the nature of reality but also the nature of ourselves. Science, art, philosophy, and spirituality are all ways of exploring this dynamic interplay, this wave-function of existence where observer and observed, self and other, subject and object, are forever entangled. And I’ll be damned if it Ain’t here,  in this relational cuddle puddle, that meaning arises. It is here that Quality lives, and it is here that Alexander would say that, “Quality” and “Aliveness” are of the same kin. And though his book at face value is about architecture, “The Nature of Order” sets out to broaden our spiritual horizons. Consider the questions Alexander poses for his techniques of measuring our relationship to the feeling of two things, and use it to meausre our relationship to the feeling of two ideas, or two choices. Imagine asking yourself this series of questions I’m about to say for any choice you have to make? If you have an important choice to make in your life, hold some of the choices in your heart and see if they are the answers to these sorts of questions : 

Which choice seems to generate a greater feeling of life in me?

Which choice makes me more aware of my own life?

Which choice induces a greater harmony in me, in my body and in my mind.

Which choice makes me feel a great wholesomeness in myself.

Considering myself as a whole that embraces all my dimensions and many internal opposites, I then ask which choice is more like my best self, or which choice seems more like a picture of my eternal self.

Which choice makes me feel devotion, or inspires devotion in me?

Which choice makes me more aware of God, or makes me feel closer to God?

When I try to observe the expanding and contracting of my humanity, choice causes a greater expansion of my humanity

Which choice has more feeling in it?

Which choice makes me experience a deeper feeling of unity in myself?

He likens these questions to the sorts of questions an Aikido practitioner might ask themselves when comparing two actions, or a buddhist practitioner might ask themselves when taking a precise measurement of the quality of their inner state.

He is asking for a world that values self reflection, which he believe will then reflect the outer world. 

Great. So now that we’ve got that all sorted out, the next question is how do these living structures we want to build impact human life? Surely its not hard to conclude that the built world has an impact on us. Its not hard to see that the built world helps us to move freely through the world, to problem solve, to have social opportunity and mobility. Studies have shown that transportation, for instance, is paramount to escaping poverty. While riding a train in Chicago its hard not to study the CTA maps and the traditionally more impoverished South and West Sides have far less train access than the North Side. Prior to the opening of the Orange Line in 1993 and the Pink line in 2006, there was nearly 100 square miles of Chicago that did not have access to trains. There’s no question that access to transportation, health care, better schools all effect the freedom of a citizen. 

Alexander, of course, asks us to look deeper. He wants us to look at the more minute, but impactful stressors of modern architecture, the lack of public spaces in apartment complexes, the stresses of living in high rise building, neighborhoods where it is difficult to walk safely to a corner store, or places where there is no sidewalk to walk at all. There is a difference in stress levels when walking along a sidewalk that buffers the street with trees or grass versus being just a few feet from cars driving over 30 miles an hour. 

In a world built to enhance human life, we experience an ease, a freedom to be ourselves, to engage socially with both humans and nature. Think of the feeling of a room that has but one window looking out onto a street, versus a room that has light from multiple angles and looks out over nature. There is a greater freedom experienced just by how light enters a room, or our vision extends outside of the room. The functionality of the space is equally important as the aesthetic. Functionality is also an aspect of wholeness. And the wholeness of the space, as we’ve demonstrated, is dependent on the interaction of its centers.

Now let’s take a very pragmatic example and study these concepts. Our earlier example of the The Living Room.

I had never considered the true function of a living room. A good living room is a space where a family meets, spends time together and just lives. We’ve all probably been in a dozen if not a hundred different living rooms. Some just beg to be lived in. To be enjoyed with the company of others or by ourselves. Some invite us to take a nap, or read a book, and some are completely uninviting. Maybe they’re not centrally located or easy to get to, maybe the plastic over the couches repels anyone from sitting on them. 

To get an idea of these centers we’ve been talking about, Alexander gives us some examples. For instance, a living room (emphasize on living here) has a core resting place, a place that invites rest, with comfortable chairs or couches that is not touched by the through traffic of the room. We must pay attention to the position of the entrances and paths, which can be considered one or more centers. If there is constant through traffic in this living room, this can disrupt the desire to live in it, and cause stress. The spacial volume of the room must also be a center itself, where an unusually high or low spacial volume can impact the room. The smaller the room the less stuff, or positive space it should have. The most obvious center might be a focal point of attention. In most modern homes this might be a television, but imagine also a fireplace, or a bay window. Or that epic oak coffee table we used as an example could be such a center. The view is also a center. What is immediately outside the windows? How does it impact the desire to be in the room, the sanctity of the room? Interior lighting is a center, not too bright, not to dim, perhaps coming from different places an angles as opposed to one great overhead light. The shadows created by the light in the evening must be complementary to the room and light must reach and illuminate all the other centers when appropriate. 

When the centers are in harmony, they are less noticed. What is noticed is the flow of energy, the feeling of the room, the aliveness of the room, the feeling freedom and relaxation within ourselves. And yet, these centers become a spark of life in the fabric of space. These centers are a place where space and matter come to life, that the animism of the built world comes into being. Alexander calls this the awakening of space. In books 2 and 3 Alexander dives deeper into the study of life, how to define and measure it in a way that allows us build a living world, and in the last book, book 4, Alexander draws us out of our mechanistic minds, out of rationality as we know it, into the mythic, the unseen, the felt living world, where the awakening of space is a catalyst for our own awakening and the awakening of all things. He helps us to see that space as we know it, is something far beyond the emptiness we’ve come to know it as.

That’s all for today folks. I know that was a mouthful of esoteric philisophical shenannigans, but trust me, it’s worth the mental gymnastics. Chapters of the upcoming books include titles like “Encouraging Freedom, Form, Language and Style, The Uniqueness of Individual Worlds, Our Belonging to the World, and my personal favorite, making wholeness heals the world.

I’m excited to present more, but please, let me know if this stuff interests you, if I should keep going or move on. I’ve got lots of ideas in the queue. Let me know! Today’s show featured edited music from Ahzira and Kaioyte, the song, Infinite Colors by Tony Moss, the song Inside of me by Dustin Valentine, the song Alive and Well, by Jhene Aiko,  The song “Living World” by Spacecraft, exerpts from the Matrix (There is no spoon)

As always, feel free to ask questions or offer feedback in our forum at infiniteharmony.org , which will include the transcripts of each episode for quotes and references.

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