Modern society created an ethos where buildings are judged only by themselves, not by their enhancement of the world, leading to damage to nature and ancient towns.

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

• The existence of this fact is missing from our general way of understanding the world, and modern society has been built on conceptions at odds with it.claim0.811
  Critique of modern worldview's blindness to objective life.
• 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.claim0.805
  Alexander's explanation for the 'temperamental' nature of the principle: it can be overridden by human agency
• Modern society, as it has been organized during the past sixty years or so, was inherently unable to create life in the environment.claim0.804
• The modern world we build, because its construction is driven by our attitudes about money, production, design, building, and planning, breaks from smooth unfolding at almost every stage.claim0.803
  Critique of contemporary building processes.
• The forms of environment we have learned to create in modern times have caused us to lose the sense of true connection to ourselves and our society.claim0.802
  Directly blames the design of modern space for severing self- and social connection
• In modern human society, building actions are not guaranteed to be wholeness preserving because they are governed by mental images and schemata.claim0.799
  Central premise of the chapter.
• 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.claim0.795
  Historical shift.
• Buildings made with an eye to the past will most often fail to have living structure, because the process of historical reproduction somehow turns vivid, living structure sour.claim0.795
  Argues that copying historical forms does not produce living structure.