In modern human society, building actions are not guaranteed to be wholeness preserving because they are governed by mental images and schemata.

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• The images or schemata that guide actions may be wholeness preserving or not, and modern architects often paid no attention to existing wholeness.claim0.866
  Moral evaluation of modern architecture.
• In traditional societies, building processes often preserved and extended wholeness by following natural processes closely.claim0.857
  Historical claim about traditional versus modern building.
• Human beings can violate the tendency to preserve wholeness either by acting disrespectfully toward it or by failing to perceive it accurately, which explains why modern buildings often lack living structure.claim0.857
  Alexander's explanation for the 'temperamental' nature of the principle: it can be overridden by human agency
• Modern society has almost lost the ability to sustain an unfolding process like nature due to willful, rule-bound schemata out of touch with real wholeness.claim0.847
  Diagnosis of modernity.
• In nature the principle of unfolding wholeness creates living structure nearly all the time. Human designers, who are not constrained by this unfolding, can violate the wholeness if they wish to, and can therefore create non-living structure as often as they choose.quote0.834
  Encapsulates the distinction between natural and human-made order, central to Alexander's critique of contemporary architecture.
• The existence of structure-destroying transformations as a social norm is linked to a breakdown in the perception of wholeness itself.claim0.820
  Causal link between perception and destruction.
• It is, then, this love of life which is embodied in the conception of a building, in its detail, in its execution - because the wholeness that people paid attention to really was the whole, really was all of life, and people were not ashamed or too frightened to respond to all of it in their actions as builders.claim0.820
  Love as the driving force of living creation.
• In order to make buildings by unfolding - hence by structure-preserving transformations - it is necessary, truly, to pay attention to the wholeness in the world. This 'paying attention to the wholeness' is essentially synonymous with love of life.quote0.814
  Connection between process, attention, and love.