alternative to Modernism through discovery of past knowledge

Alexander's approach of discovering concretely what pre-modern artisans knew, rather than merely returning to past styles.

Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count

Claims (1)

claim

The alternative to Modernism in the arts does not consist merely of returning to the past for inspiration but in discovering 'concretely and with a clear mind' what carpet-weavers, artists and builders of the past knew that we do not.
about
Claim about the nature of a genuine alternative to Modernism.

Concepts (1)

concept

Modernism
associated_with
A 20th-century architectural movement whose form languages are considered too crude to create living structure.

Artifacts (1)

artifact

Inside the Visitor Centre
mentions
Article by Alan Powers about Christopher Alexander's West Dean Visitor Centre, published in Perspectives, August/September 1996.

Related by similarity (8)

cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edge

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

Modernism (Architecture)concept0.761
Architectural movement that Alexander positions his work against, seeking alternatives grounded in deeper understanding of past knowledge systems.
direct reference to the pastconcept0.732
The ability in Elephant to refer to past events and states without explicit data structures.
Postmodernismconcept0.732
A late 20th-century architectural style that mixes historical references but fails to produce living structure.
Progress in theory and practice requires a novel conception of 'machines as they could be,' based on the profound lessons of biology at all scales.claim0.731
The paper's overarching constructive goal, paralleling Langton's 'life as it could be'
Consciousness as Freedom From Pasthypothesis0.726
Speculative hypothesis: consciousness may be the subjective experience of continuous self-construction freed from commitment to prior interpretations.
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.claim0.726
Critique of modern worldview's blindness to objective life.
For the first time in modern history, ways of thinking are available that make the criteria for 'living' potentially sharable and actually shared.claim0.725
Asserts that the theoretical foundation laid out in the four books provides a public quality standard for sequences.
The old forms of mysticism that we know as religious cannot provide us with this 'something'; it is too late.claim0.724
A clear rejection of simply reviving traditional religion; the modern mind cannot inhabit it authentically.