Postmodern architectural centers suffer from four defects: lack of smaller centers, image-like copies, failure to emerge from wholeness, and failure to help form larger centers.

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

• The great majority of modern buildings are awkward assemblies of unrelated components, lacking the coherence necessary to be living designs.claim0.804
  Aesthetic judgment on modern buildings.
• The postmodern Gwathmey house has very few centers and therefore has little life.claim0.790
  Counterexample showing the deadness resulting from absence of centers.
• The intricate and beautiful structure of living centers comes about naturally, and most of the time without effort, as a result of the repeated application of structure-preserving transformations to the wholeness which exists.claim0.777
  Central interpretive claim of the chapter, asserting that living structure is an effortless natural outcome of structure-preserving transformations.
• My claim in Book 2 is that the intricate and beautiful structure of living centers comes about naturally, and most of the time without effort, as a result of the repeated application of structure-preserving transformations to the wholeness which exists.quote0.774
  Central thesis statement of the chapter, encapsulating the core idea that living structure arises effortlessly from structure-preserving transformations.
• In modern architecture, neither design nor construction typically works step by step; instead there is a fixed end-state produced without realistic feedback.claim0.771
  Contrast between living process and current architectural practice.
• 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.claim0.765
  Historical/diagnostic claim linking bad architecture to failure of empirical comparison.
• 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.claim0.761
  Alexander's explanation for the 'temperamental' nature of the principle: it can be overridden by human agency
• Often the conceptual picture a person has of a place is an invented convention at odds with the wholeness that exists, and it is even difficult for modern people to see the wholeness.claim0.760
  Epistemological/phenomenological claim about perception.