In the late 20th century, architectural judgment had been turned on its head by prevailing dogma, requiring a formal observational method as antidote

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• After 1900, a variety of modern building processes came into use that are not structure-preserving—some accidentally structure-destroying, others actively promoting ugliness for profit.claim0.781
  Historical shift.
• Virtually all shocking blunders of modern and postmodern architecture turned out bad because they were unexamined experimentally—proposals were not compared by feeling to find the step with the deepest life.claim0.781
  Historical/diagnostic claim linking bad architecture to failure of empirical comparison.
• Professional architecture of the 20th century has paid too little attention to the complex, subtle structure that only living processes create, leading to environments that rob millions of common sense.claim0.778
  Critique of mainstream architectural practice as detrimental to human wholeness.
• I revere Descartes... he not only invented the method of observation which in effect we have continued to use unchanged for several hundred years, but he also saw clearly what it would bring.quote0.775
  Alexander's generous framing of Descartes before presenting the second method as extension rather than rejection
• In the 20th century, images became divorced from reality; photographs of buildings in magazines became more important than the actual buildings themselves.claim0.769
  Role of media images.
• In modern architecture, neither design nor construction typically works step by step; instead there is a fixed end-state produced without realistic feedback.claim0.769
  Contrast between living process and current architectural practice.
• Buildings of recent decades (1940-90) are noticeably missing in these fifteen properties, and this is intentional due to 20th-century architectural theoriesclaim0.764
  Historical-critical claim that modern architecture consciously abandoned understanding and use of the fifteen properties, making contemporary buildings poor illustrations of living structure
• The observations presented throughout these four books are based on a method of observation which is entirely different from the Cartesian method.claim0.758
  Alexander claims his method is a genuine alternative to Cartesian observation.