The complex and curved forms of natural organisms arise naturally from the wholeness of a natural site.

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• Good shape arises in many natural systems such as leaves, bones, and Chladni patterns, where a strong center is intensified by minor centers.claim0.815
• 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.quote0.812
  Central thesis statement of the chapter, encapsulating the core idea that living structure arises effortlessly from structure-preserving transformations.
• The humanity of the environment comes about only when the processes are morphogenetic, are whole-seeking, are placed in a context that gradually allows people to work towards a living whole.claim0.806
• The more austere forms of buildings also arise from the wholeness that comes from buildings that are near rectangular, to make positive space.claim0.806
• The beauty and force of any building arises always, and in its entirety, from the deep functional nature of the centers that have been created.claim0.801
  Core principle tying beauty directly to deeply functional centers.
• Life comes directly from the wholeness; the degree of life arises from the way centers in the wholeness cohere to form a unity.claim0.799
  The fundamental thesis of the book: life is an emergent property of the structure of centers.
• Nature always produces living structure because it follows a process of unfolding wholeness; human designers can create non-living structure by violating this process.claim0.799
  Core distinction between natural and designed configurations, explaining why properties are ubiquitous in nature but rare in bad design.
• Life and living structure will appear in the world inevitably because the mathematical way space gives rise to structure necessarily reinforces wholeness as part of its most normal evolution.claim0.796
  Alexander's strongest ontological claim: living structure is not probabilistically improbable but mathematically necessary given the principle of unfolding wholeness