¹Structura Naturalis Inc., 900 Cornell Street, Lake Oswego, Oregon 97034, USA

Correspondence: Michael W. Mehaffy, E-mail: michael.mehaffy@gmail.com

An interview with Christopher Alexander, author of the seminal planning and architecture texts Notes on the Synthesis of Form, 'A City is Not A Tree', and A Pattern Language. Alexander recently published his longest and most complex work yet, The Nature of Order. Alexander explains the scientific basis of the work, its relation to sustainable practices, and its relation to other planning reforms such as New Urbanism.

I spoke to Christopher Alexander about his four-volume work, The Nature of Order, in the autumn of 2002, shortly before the first volume was published. I wanted to know more about the scientific methodology behind the work and its relationship to other contemporary scientific work – for example, the 'organised complexity' described famously by Jane Jacobs in the last chapter of her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

I also wanted to know, what conclusions did the new work draw about the 'nature' of human settlements, and the reforms needed toward a more ecological kind of settlement today? This, too, was a major emphasis in the books.

Lastly, I was curious to know how Alexander saw his work in relation to other contemporary planning reformers, notably the New Urbanists. Andres Duany, a founder of New Urbanism, has described Alexander as a major influence, and once told this author that Alexander's work is 'the basis for everything that we're doing now'.

In the books, Alexander hints at his view of the scientific import of architecture. He notes that we tend to think of the processes of physics and biology as one kind of structure-creating phenomenon – one kind of order – and the acts of human creation as another. But he argues that this is an artificial distinction, and the phenomenon of order-creation in nature can be understood much more generally – including within the human acts of planning and building – with potential benefits in both spheres: In physics and biology some progress has been made toward understanding the phenomenon of order, and the processes which create order. The creation of living organisms through the morphogenetic process, the creation of matter, the creation of stars and galaxies from nuclear fire, the constant creation of particles by interaction with one another – have all been studied in the last seventy years. In these limited cases we now have a rudimentary idea of the way the order-creation works. It has become clear, too, that the way the order is created in these cases is of essential importance to our understanding of the world. Our knowledge of order-creating processes in physics, chemistry, and biology has molded the modern view of the universe. The art of building has not, so far, had a comparable impact on our understanding of the world. Our modern picture of the universe, what kind of stuff space and matter is made of, has not been influenced by building or by architecture. Yet, I shall argue, the process of building is an order-creating process of no less importance than those of physics and biology. It is vast in its scale and scope. It is almost universal in our experience. It is therefore reasonable to think that the art of building might give us equally essential insights. In what follows I shall try to show that there is a way of understanding order which is general and does do justice to the nature of building and of architecture. It is a view which, I hope, is adequate to understanding the intuitions we have about beauty and the life of buildings. It is a view which tells us what it means for a building to be a great building, and when a building is working properly. It is, I believe, a common-sense and powerful view, with practical results. (The Nature of Order, Book 1, Introduction)

He goes further in describing the artificial disjunction between the spheres of nature and human design. He concludes that it comes from an oversimplification in the conception of material structure. And he promises, in the work that follows, an alternate conception, one with useful advantages for designers: ...I believe that there is, at the root of our trouble in the sphere of art and architecture, a fundamental mistake caused by a certain conception of the nature of matter, the nature of the universe. More precisely, I believe that the mistake and confusion in our picture of the art of building has come from our conception of what matter is. The present conception of matter, and the opposing one which I shall try to put in its place, may both be summarized by the nature of order. Our idea of matter is essentially governed by our idea of order. What matter is, is governed by our idea of how space can be arranged; and that in turn is governed by our idea of how orderly arrangement in space creates matter. So it is the nature of order which lies at the root of the problem in architecture. Hence the title of this book. (The Nature of Order, Book 1, p. 8)

But what is the relation of this new conception of matter to other recent developments in science, particularly complexity science? I asked Alexander for his perspective on this.

Michael Mehaffy: In the book you speak about the Cartesian world view, the mechanistic world view, and how it is, at least for you – and you've made parallels to others – giving way to another world view, a world view of process and of complexity.

Christopher Alexander: The first rule of any scientific effort is observation. You know, you have to see what's going on and tell the truth about it, and not get hoodwinked by preconceptions. And so in that sense of course what I did was very deeply rooted in science, and in my scientific training. And it was the intellectual struggle that I have had to go through over these 25 or 27 years of writing this book, because the things that it seems to me necessary to conclude as one studies what is really true are staggering. I mean, they are completely inconsistent with the scientific world picture that we have believed in certainly the 20th century. And so especially for me, given the fact that I came from a scientific background at Cambridge, I had the most incredible difficulty actually writing this stuff down.

So gradually then, things arose out of that which I suppose people may claim kinship of all sorts.

There are so many major problems, which have reached similar conclusions for parallel reasons. Wholeness in quantum mechanics, for example, or unfolding of geometry in embryology. So you have lots and lots of things which have reached surprisingly similar conclusions, for very different reasons, just because people facing scientific problems in these different fields somehow seem to be coming up against a brick wall. Same one. And that I think is due to the fact that the world picture we've had doesn't support reality very well.

MM: And do you think that those people in those other fields are also changing their world view, in a parallel way to what you have discovered?

CA: I think so, yes, I think that's quite true. And I think that actually very similar problems have arisen in physics. [David] Bohm¹ faced tremendous difficulties – he probably was the person who made the single biggest contribution to understanding of what's really going on in some of the perennial puzzles of quantum mechanics. And Brian Goodwin² for instance, in biology – absolutely on the forefront of this kind of thinking.

I think there are dangers in all this. The ground is so treacherous... If you just take the subject of wholeness, for example – good lord, it is difficult. It's really difficult to get a strong firm grip on the concept, on the structure that it has, even how to talk about it clearly. There are peculiar things like self-reference in the logic of how you have to talk about it, that are very uncomfortable, for somebody who is used to normal scientific thought...

MM: You talk about what is happening to technology today, particularly computers, and the potential to create a more humane kind of technology.

CA: Well, it's positive. You know there's all these kind of one-off assembly lines now. Special purpose, car manufacturer, furniture manufacturer, and so forth.

MM: Cabbage patch dolls, where each doll is different, to take a trivial example?

CA: Yes, that's right. But still, nevertheless it's interesting.

But the trouble is that even the people that I think are the most far-sighted and the most intelligent in dealing with that stuff are completely, I'd say almost 100 percent, trapped in the notion of combinations. Of recombination and recombination of components.

MM: The reductive technology in the early industrial period which still very much grips us? Pulling things apart and putting them together in little pieces instead of trying to create wholes?

CA: Right. And of course what happens in the biological world is that the wholes come about by differentiation, not by assembly. And that's an entirely different class of things.³

MM: That's a crucial point, isn't it?

CA: Yes, very very – absolutely crucial. And it's probably the single most serious issue, because without that you just cannot get there. And yet so much of the definition of an architect, the definition of a contractor and of a subcontractor, and all these things – they're all virtually assumed to be playing some role in the assembly process. And the idea that all these folks might be playing roles in a differentiation process, and that it really and truly was that, is just I think almost out of reach at the moment.

And I think it's one of my biggest aims in The Nature of Order is to show what this means, that it is feasible, to set it up as a model of our profession, what we must do...

MM: How do you think architecture must address the problem of the natural environment today?

CA: I believe that the whole idea about the natural environment has been turned on its head actually in a very strange way. For about a quarter of a century, people have been in effect obsessed with saving the environment – which is of course a very sensible thing to do when it's being ravaged and destroyed.

But the real problem is that we won't be OK, in terms of building or in terms of nature or anything else, until we learn how to make nature.

There's nothing irreverent about saying that. What we think of as nature is a particular kind of structure. We feel tuned to it and we love it, and I think if one has a sort of romantic feeling about it, or a historical feeling about it, or emotional feeling about it, it kind of gets focused on bushes, water, sky, trees, the animal kingdom and so forth. And no one really stops to say, well, what is it about that stuff – why do we love that so? Why are we singling it out in that way?

Now all of what we call nature is marked by the way that the whole system keeps on differentiating itself and unfolding and adapting, so that every piece of it is adapted in some utterly incredible way to the things that are immediately near it or the things that are somewhat further away.

It sounds a bit abstract when I say that. But really that is the crux of the problem. Because in the artifacts that we produce – and I'm not only speaking of buildings here – we have no clue how to do this.

We don't know how to do it actually any longer even on a farm. At one time farmers took it for granted that they knew how to create versions of nature-structure. But the farms that have grown up in the last 50 or 60 years have really abandoned that, and have essentially been commercialized – going to massive production techniques which are very largely damaging. And the key thing again is that even these farmers no longer know how to create this intricately beautiful, infinite adaptive system, which gives us joy, pleasure, comfort, relaxation, wisdom, and so on, even when we rarely come in contact with it.

So, people who built buildings certainly used to know how to do this kind of thing at one time. There really was an era when buildings were very gently inserted into nature, and whether people were making towns, or villages, or fields, or simply looking after the forest or the ocean, they were always making nature.

Today, if you say to somebody, we should be making nature, it has a completely zany kind of ring. Because starting around 1970 there was this – I wouldn't call it a movement, really, it was just an inclination of people, who were so sick of Skidmore Owings and Merrill and things like that, that they started wanting to make organic shapes. And so one started to see hexagonal houses – god knows why people thought that was organic, maybe because of bees or something – Buckminster Fuller domes, hippie buildings, made of earth and sticks, that kind of thing. I think the majority of people didn't really like the products of this kind of thinking. And in fact it never really went anywhere. But when you talk about nature, and trying to make things that are related to nature, that stuff is one of the things that comes to mind.

Making nature is really an incredibly different thing.

At the Monterey Aquarium, there's an artificial beach. It's very very amazing. It's entirely indoors; it's like a cross-section through a beach, it has the water, they have a wave-making thing. And then it has the sand going up and the little dunes and then the big dunes and all that.

The fascinating thing is that all the animals stay there. I mean they actually can escape. But it's so perfectly tuned to the realities of what such a beach is and what it does for its inhabitants and so on, that all of the various creatures – of course they vary across the cross-section – are basically OK, and want to be there, and recognize it and are part of it. I remember when I first saw that thing, I was absolutely staggered that anybody knew enough to do that. And in fact I visited again a few months ago, and I had exactly the same feeling.

But the idea that one has to actually be in the position of those people who made that tiny little beach in Monterey aquarium – I think that penny has really not dropped. But it is beginning to drop among what let's call ecological souls – people who like dealing with water and plants and natural cycle and that sort of thing. And that's becoming quite good, and there's a lot of careful attention to it.

But the thing is, that what has not happened, is that people understand that the same attitude precisely goes, must go, into the making of buildings, or a wall, or a window, or anything else.

And if you say, well that sounds fine, but what does it really mean, how do you actually do that? – the whole of architecture opens up before you.

Now [in an earlier discussion] we talked about the traditional architecture enthusiasts, Classicists and all of that; and I told you then that I was somewhat uncomfortable with that.

The reason is that although I think for the very large part their hearts are in the right place – and so indeed are the New Urbanists, and various other kinds of people, all doing their best to think about better ways of building and so forth....

But the idea that a building when correctly made is going to be given the kind of structure that makes us practically fall on our knees when we see it in a fir tree or in a bit of moss – that has actually not materialized. Because of course the processes needed to do it are so remote from the processes that are currently available, in contracts, and in production of materials, and in – well every aspect, almost, of the way that architecture is done. So that it is a very far reach indeed to reach towards that, very difficult to think about.

But as we now are beginning to have this genuinely scientific theory of what architecture is and what to do, then that will be obvious to us, and that's what we'll be doing. And we won't have to worry about Doric columns, or classically proportioned windows, or any of a very many many other kinds of things that are like that.

Now, the idea that it's actually possible to make a building or parts of a building that really and truly have that sort of resonance, is stunning and fascinating and fabulous. It does require paying attention to absolutely different sorts of structures. It does not require getting into weird kinds of geometry, which is what I alluded to a moment ago – which is what people think of when they start talking about 'well we've got to make buildings like nature'. Because it doesn't mean 'like nature' in some simple-minded geometric way – it has curvy shapes, and therefore we should have curvy buildings, or any of that.

It has to do with the grain of the adaptation. All the different structures.

And I am quite certain that as one learns how to do that, discovers how to do it, discovers what it really means, the so-called 'classical' shapes – and I'm not just talking about the sort of Greco-Roman heritage, I'm talking about all of what we know as traditional shapes – will turn out to be the kinds of things that you have to do to make well-adapted space. So that all of it has to do with nature. All of it has to do with 'being-nature'. Of course once one has that perspective, there's no need to seek union between buildings that is bricks, mortar, concrete, wood, glass, and so on – and on the other hand, chlorophyll, cell structures, flowing sap, hydrology and so on. Because it is actually all governed in the same way.

So really, in a way the answer to your question that I would like to give is, it isn't a question of finding a union. The union will follow automatically, if we get inside from underneath and come up 'inside the glove'. And actually know what it is. Then we'll be doing it. Whether we're doing it, you know, in planting a rose bush outside a window, or in dealing with a patch of grass, or in laying up a certain kind of wall in a completely new and previously unknown technique...

MM: Andres Duany, who you know very well, is also sympathetic to the idea of 'organic' order. And he once told me that something you said to him was the basis for 'everything we're doing now'.⁴ So what's your advice for the New Urbanists?

CA: Right. I think that many of the people who are involved in the CNU actually have not understood the problems that the developer represents, and what has got to be done in order to change that situation. It's very, very serious.

And unfortunately, with the CNU – which I think is fascinating, because this is such a powerful movement, and I'm proud of them, because they've really done something to help change things. But when you say, well, what are the rules that they actually live by? I'm talking about 'live by' when they're shaping something, modeling it, drawing it, planning it, things like that – building it, and so forth. The concepts that they are living by there are not those which I've just been speaking about, having to do with whether you're making part of nature. They're actually something highly artificial. And in fact some of those folks I think pride themselves on being quite deliberate creators of artifice. Because they almost enjoy the fact that the man-made artifice is something in its own right and of wonder and so on – and then they say, well, that's what we are trying to do. We're trying to discover the old rules about that artifice.

But this knowledge about making something so that it is nature, is a much deeper thing than that. And it needs to be understood differently, and it needs to be practiced differently. And once you can do it, you don't make that many mistakes. So I think that if we recognize that it is primarily a morphological issue, and that it is not the morphology that has been traditionally associated with nature by architects – you know, all those examples I gave a minute ago. But it is a morphological awareness that we need to develop, and it could be developed.

MM: One of the criticisms of New Urbanism is that it does not account enough for process. It tends to be designed all-of-a-piece, and as you put it, master planned through the conventional developer process. And that process is the characteristic of the natural morphology you spoke of? That's how it arises – through the process?

CA: Absolutely. Completely, and that is the fundamental aspect of it. And it actually cannot be faked. You cannot produce it any other way.

I remember when I was at Berkeley, sometimes my colleagues would get mad at me because I said I didn't want to come to juries, I didn't like them, and I thought that they were the work of the devil! (Laughs). Of course the reason is that if you believe in what you're seeing or attempting to do in a typical jury and so on, that's completely at odds with those sort of processes, so you will never be able to get it by that form of teaching. So it actually is a very bad thing to do, and a very unfortunate thing that has been inculcated in schools. And yet for instance, they have, you know, all the vocabulary about the parti – and the very terminology there is dead wrong, and supports just the whimsicalities of the Beaux Arts, not that they were terribly bad, but they're certainly not about nature in the sense that we're talking about.

But it is a really massive task to replace those concepts with concepts that are nature-oriented and that are profound.

One of the difficulties, I think, in these last decades, has been that the people who liked ecology or who wanted to take seriously those sort of things, were always in a funny sense on the periphery in architecture schools. And they were always vaguely looked down on by the people who had all this stuff about the Beaux Arts and so forth, because it wasn't sufficiently morphological. Now, you see, it's funny there because actually I think that criticism was correct. But I don't believe that what the Beaux Arts had to offer was correct. But the more general statement that the morphology is the foundation of the whole thing – it has to be.

MM: The result was incorrect. But it so happens that the process that the Beaux Arts people were assuming was also incorrect?

CA: Absolutely. The Beaux Arts people were right in saying, 'look, really, morphology is everything. Don't try to be an architect and not deal with morphology'. As you say they had a very peculiar and very narrow view of morphology. But the problem is that the ecologically minded people of our time, even though one might want to embrace them and say, you're brethren, you're trying to do the same thing I'm trying to do and so on, but actually they are not dealing with morphology sufficiently. Therefore, in a certain sense they're not even allowed into the dialogue very much.

So that if there's a group which is sort of NU based, and then ecologists come along, and say we like you, we like what you're doing and so forth – but actually the ecologically minded person hasn't got the vocabulary of morphs, of shapes and forms and the generation of shapes and forms, just happens to know a great deal about plants and animals and insects and water and so forth. But that isn't far enough to achieve the kind of thing I'm speaking about at all. Because until you can say, no, look, let me hold your hand and show you how to move the pencil here – and this is the kind of thing which is for real, and is actually making nature when one is in the sphere of buildings, this is a different activity. And once that becomes crystal clear, then everything will change...

MM: I would like to relate this idea back to the idea that nature is something much broader than the woods and the foxes and so on. It is the structure of things, in the broadest sense. And we have an understanding of that structure of things that is really revolutionizing the way we've looked at the world in the last 400 years.

CA: Yes.

MM: There has to be that process, that hand that goes through the iterations, goes through the process of creating the structure? Instead of taking an abstract structure – as you put it in 'A City is Not A Tree'⁵ so beautifully – a simple mental structure that you begin with, and you pretty much end with?

CA: If one takes seriously the idea that it all resides in process – and that that's not just an empty phrase, but really, the kind of morphology that we're referring to here as nature, is produced only when certain kinds of processes go forward, they've got definite sequences, they unfold in certain ways, and so on – if you take all that seriously, then you would expect in a sense never again to see an architectural studio where students try to lay out an entire urban design project or a subdivision.

Instead what would be mandatory and natural, is that every student would be struggling with a generative process, the class would be struggling with simulations, where everything is going forward step by step. And the question is whether the regulation of those processes that go forward step by step leads to coherent and beautiful results. And that's a very concrete thing.

Note: Another edited version of this interview appeared in the web journal Katarxis (www.katarxis3.com) in 2004.