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book:a-vision-of-a-living-worldA Vision of a Living World
Volume 3 of The Nature of Order, subtitled A Vision of a Living World, presenting Christopher Alexander's final major work on architecture and living process.
Extracted from this book
Claims (13)
- A system of hulls of public space will inevitably be created by the unfolding of a living process, if it is truly living and truly allowed to unfold.The inevitability of hulls as the outcome of living process.
- After years of trying to make it work, it is after all necessary to have some kind of plan to create the large-scale order of a city.Conclusion that piecemeal growth alone is insufficient; a guiding plan is necessary.
- All parts of the unfolded public space are shaped, fashioned, treated, as if each were a kind of larger living room.Description of the human quality of unfolded public spaces.
- Even a street becomes a living room in an unfolded world.Radical transformation of the street from traffic channel to public living room.
- Outdoor space is positive when it is shaped, just as a room is shaped.Fundamental definition of positive space as room-like enclosure.
- Pure piecemeal growth just does not work well enough to create the structure of the larger wholeness needed in a city.Rejection of purely unplanned organic growth for achieving large-scale urban order.
- Rules, laws, restrictions, are too exact, too restrictive to create living space; a shared vision is needed instead.Argument that abstract codes cannot guarantee the emergence of shaped space with deep feeling.
- The main job the buildings have is to form the space.Key principle that buildings are instruments to create positive outdoor space, not objects in themselves.
- The success of the Eishin campus is entirely given by the beauty of the hulls, the public hulls we identified and built.Alexander's assessment of the Eishin campus.
- Transportation engineers must make their work on cars subsidiary to the work which defines the pedestrian hulls as places which people can use, and own.Societal priority shift needed for living urban space.
- Using real-place simulation, one can reliably determine the optimal dimensions and orientations of urban spaces.Assertion that the Oakland experiments show the method's reliability.
- What is needed to support individual acts of construction is a three-dimensional diagram of the actual shape of the needed space, more physical even than a model.The core proposal for a new form of urban plan to guide piecemeal construction.
- When living processes are applied systematically to the public space in a human community, they will generate a system of articulated, useful, coherent, and mainly pedestrian spaces.Core claim about the generative power of living process on public space.
Findings (5)
- Adding a secondary system of narrow connecting streets and paths made every bit of space more animated (Parkstadt model)Working with the model of space alone at Parkstadt, introducing smaller passages connecting courtyards into a coherent secondary grid increased life and spatial animation throughout.
- Families were deeply moved by identifying the wholeness of the common land (Back of the Moon)When the latent structure of the land was pointed out to the families, they reported being deeply moved and that seeing these natural centers completely altered their relation to the land.
- Minor street optimal width 9 meters, widening to 11 meters at the mouth (Oakland simulation)The minor street intersecting the main 18m street should be no more than 9m wide, with a slight widening to about 11m at the mouth to form a good T-junction.
- Optimal main street width determined to be 18 meters in Oakland simulation for Frankfurt projectThrough real-place simulation in Oakland, California, for the Frankfurt Parkstadt project, a width of 18 meters felt right (20m too wide, 16m too narrow) for an east-west main street with 3-4 story buildings.
- Wide sidewalk should be on the south side of an east-west street for visual comfort (Oakland simulation)Standing on the north side looking south into the sun was uncomfortable, while the south side looking north at sunlit buildings was comfortable; therefore the wide sidewalk was placed on the south.
Hypotheses (3)
- If the community has formed a collective vision that identifies naturally required generic centers, then these generic centers might induce, from within the culture, a natural pressure towards the creation of hulls.Conditional statement about how culture can drive spatial formation.
- The effect of the hulls, when they emerge from living process, is rather like CIRCULATION REALMS: a system of partly closed precincts opening off one another, arranged so that everything important opens off one of them.Prediction that hulls will form a connected precinct system, matching the pattern from A Pattern Language.
- When the fundamental process is working properly, the hulls will turn out to be made of pieces of space, each piece a place where it is pleasant to be.Predicted morphological outcome of the fundamental process.
Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count
Chapters (10)
chapter
- The working unit chapter that presents Alexander's method for generating large public buildings through living process, illustrated by six major projects.
- How Living Process Lays The Groundwork For Coherence Of A City Through The Hulls Of Public Spacechapter_ofChapter 3 of A Vision of a Living World, introducing the concept of hulls of public space as positive, living spaces shaped by structure-preserving transformations in urban design.
- Chapter 9: The Way That Living Processes Can Guide The Reconstruction Of An Urban Neighborhoodchapter_ofThe working unit that describes the four-fold pattern process for transforming blighted neighborhoods into living structures.
- The working unit being extracted; covers dynamic neighborhood generation, structure-preserving transformations, and case studies in Colombia, Venezuela, Israel, and San Francisco.
- The chapter from which all other entities are extracted; it explains how living process, applied repeatedly in exterior space, generates the distinct morphology of gardens.
- Chapter 12 of A Vision of a Living World, presenting examples and principles showing how living processes create unique, personal environments.
- The chapter being extracted, presenting the Shiratori and Chikusadai plans.
- The current chapter, arguing that ornament arises naturally from the living process of unfolding a field of centers.
- Chapter 20: Summation: The Morphology Of Living Architecture: What We May Call Archetypal Formchapter_ofFinal chapter of Vol. 3, synthesizing the morphology of living architecture, introducing archetypal forms, and distilling the core invariant structure.
- Chapter 16: How Living Process Should Inspire — Continuous Invention of New Materials and Techniqueschapter_ofThe working unit under analysis; Alexander argues for inventing new construction techniques that support living process and adaptation.
Thinkers (1)
thinker
- Christopher Alexanderauthored
Concepts (1)
concept
- The Nature of Orderassociated_withFour-volume work by Christopher Alexander providing foundational results for harmony-seeking computation, including the concept of wholeness and the fifteen properties.