Architecture can be understood as a sequence of local symmetry-creation in which each new symmetry intensifies the feeling of the whole.

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

• The core of architecture is that whatever is made is always the simplest thing consistent with its necessities of feeling and continuous attention to feeling while it evolves into form.claim0.822
  Opening declaration of the chapter, synthesizing the essence of living architecture.
• When architectural structure is an unfolded one — created by repeated application of living processes — then what comes from it is a world where people are able to feel happy, free, and themselves.claim0.812
  Main thesis linking living structure to human happiness.
• The process of adding local symmetries in a structure-preserving way intensifies the feeling, and when carried out fully leads to the emergence of the archetype.claim0.808
• "Taking architecture seriously leads us to the proper treatment of tiny details, to an understanding of the unfolding whole, and to an understanding – mystical in part – of the entity that underpins that wholeness. The path of architecture thus leads inexorably towards a renewed understanding of God."concept0.804
  Alexander's late-life conclusion articulating architecture as path to God; Steenson uses this to ground her disagreement with his empirical universalism.
• The structure which is created by a feeling for centers and by a conscious and deliberate aim towards the feeling of the whole, will often turn out to be an efficient structure.claim0.796
  Reiterated empirical observation from twenty years of practice.
• It is the space which comes to life. All that we do, as architects, is then to arrange and rearrange this living space, in such a way as to intensify its life.claim0.793
  Synthetic statement that architecture is the art of awakening space.
• Architecture cannot be good so long as we try to do it within a mechanical conception of matter.claim0.792
  The impossibility of good architecture under mechanistic cosmology.
• IN A BUILDING WHICH HAS LIFE, WHATEVER IS MADE IS ALWAYS THE SIMPLEST THING CONSISTENT WITH ITS NECESSITIES OF FEELING AND WITH THE CLOSE AND CONTINUOUS ATTENTION TO FEELING WHILE IT EVOLVES INTO FORM. THIS, I THINK, IS THE CLOSEST I CAN COME TO DESCRIBING THE CORE OF ARCHITECTURE.quote0.791
  The opening manifesto of the chapter, encapsulating the essence.